Wednesday 31st December: Day One Hundred and 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.

Some pictures from Christmas in Gasarenda to start with

Ok - the uploader has decided to stop working so the rest will have to wait for another time, I'm afraid!

Wednesday started off spectacularly: I had a quick breakfast and headed to work, only to find about five hundred people gathered right outside mu house! They are building a roof for the market so it has temporarily relocated to RIGHT in front of my house! I wended my way through the crowd, got to work bright and early and Francois presented me with a whole load of Excel spreadsheets which he needed checked, corrected and reformatted. He must have been working his arse off for the last two days – it is a redeployment schedule covering all 65 schools in the district, the idea being to create a surplus of staff in schools by doubling up classes and then transferring these surplus staff to the new 7th class that is being created in 15 schools. The problem is, the number of pupils in school is climbing anyway so the surplus created is being swallowed up by the natural increase and ...... anyway! What is fascinating is that term is supposed to be starting on the 5th January and there is only today and Friday left as working days before then and someone has to tell these teachers where they are actually teaching next year!!

I worked on that but it took a while. Then I realised the place had gone very silent – oh-oh, it was after 1000 and everyone had gone for the mayor’s end-of-year speech and presentation which was taking place in a local secondary school. Off I headed – I met Francois on the way who was heading back to the office to collect stuff (I actually met quite a few people doing this – not sure how many actually turned up at the mayor’s thing later!!). I got to the secondary school – no sign of anyone. I rang Alexis and he told me I had to walk through the school until I found the hall. Still no luck. Then I tried the two primary schools beside the secondary, a thiord one up the road and the local convent hall. I did find:

a) a Pentacostalist choir group practising for New Year’s Day service
b) a Catholic prayer group
c) some sort of women’s co-operative – not sure exactly what they were doing

but no sign of my guys. Every time I asked a question, everyone assured me they knew EXACTLY where they were and directed me off in a completely different direction.

Eventually I just gave up and went home and spent the next three hours finishing the stuff Francois gave me – probably a more productive use of my time. About half an hour after I got home, the heavens opened and all the seamstresses and tailors with their sewing machines decided to take refuge in the porch of my house where they could continue working (Alfred: when it rains here it pours and people are pretty much allowed to take shelter wherever they can, as Ruairí himself has often done also!). Alexandré, my guard, got really annoyed because he was going to have to clean up after them all. He was also concerned about security because of the large number of people wandering around the place – he gave me a long impassioned lecture about something-or-other, all in Kinyarwandan, but I think it was ‘Keep everything locked at all times!’.

It was actually a bit strange sitting in my sitting/dining room and listening to thirty or forty people right on the other side of my front door, about three feet away from me. Anyway, finished my work and then Deo called round at 1400 to bring me into Butare and I could get ready for my New Year’s Eve party!!

First I called down to see Suzanne, Berthe and Suleiman and wish them a Happy New Year. Berthe had been thinking about coming up to Kibuye with me but a) I wasn’t able to go in the end and b) she was feeling kind of wrecked. We had a long and very funny chat in French about our different experiences of the Rwandan education system to date and I said I would call around for lunch tomorrow.

The New Year’s Eve Party for Preganant Rape Victims of the Genocide turned out to be nothing of the sort (thank God, I suppose). It was just a party and not a very successfully advertised one by the look of the numbers who turned up. By 2300 there were about twenty people there in all but it was a pleasant enough evening, though I did spend rather more of it than I cared for umpiring a heated (but friendly) discussion between two guys on political control of the banking system (Claude works for Ecobank, Adolphe is a political science student in the university). It was actually after midnight before anyone noticed it was the New Year – no Auld Lang’s Synge (Alfred: that can’t be how you spell it?) or anything like that. Staggered off to bed around 0100, pausing only to fire off a batch of Facebook messages and a few texts via the Meteor website (Alfred: all of you who thought Ruairi was being so amazingly generous to send texts from Rwanda, he actually gets to send them free from his Meteor account!!!).

So, Friday morning Francois and I will have to hit the ground running and then we have a meeting with the mayor Friday afternoon to discuss the ongoing problem with the English classes, which has become a bit of a quagmire to be honest. I am going to suggest I pick up a set of the British Council textbooks if the District is willing to pay for them (RWF100,000 – Francois thinks it should be OK) because without a textbook they are all a bit lost. Then it is off to Kigali to mind Marion’s cats for a few days! Ta-ra for now and a Happy New Year to you all!