Monday 22nd September: Day Sixteen in Rwanda

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.

A complete waste of a day. We got up at the crack of dawn and were all decked out in our workclothes for our first official meeting with the Director of Ecucation (Francois) and the Chargé (Alexis). The meeting was fine, though Alexis’ French was a bit of a challenge and the statistics and information they gave us were a bit depressing, especially as regards budgets and the lack of them). We also outlined our intentions and hopes for our placement as well as we could at this stage. Francois left saying we would be meeting the mayor later that day.

And that was it. No mayor, no phone call, no information, nothing. A gang of people turned up to have lunch in “our” sitting-room (eating freshly made cassava bread which has to be smelled to be believed – think uncleaned drains), Alexis dropped in eventually and seemed surprised we had heard nothing. Meanwhile, we read, tried to study French and Kinyarwandan and generally wondered what the hell we were doing here. If we were actually on holiday, we would have gone off and done something INTERESTING but we are supposed to be at work, so we didn’t. We kind of needed to do some shopping in Butare but it is RWF4000 for a round trip on a motorbike (our daily wage is RWF5000). So in the end we sent Ephraim off with RWF600 to get us 6 eggs and he came back with seven so we had a nice omelette for dinner with tomatoes and onions in it. Then, that night there was a massive thunderstorm which was exciting and we spent about an hour teaching Ephraim numbers in English – he pretty much got from 1 to 100 OK but cannot say thye ‘th’ sound for anything – it obviously doesn’t exist in Rwandan and Tina says it is a really difficult sound even for kids in England and Ireland. Also, there are no vowel digraphs in Kinyarwandan so ‘eight’ was a nightmare for him. Nice kid and really keen to learn.

Francois rang and said he would see us at nine tomorrow. We’ll see.

Thank you very much to all those who have supported my ongoing fundraising effort. I will be continuing my fundraising for VSO for a few more months so, if you would like to contribute, please go to www.mycharity.ie/event/ruairi.