Monday 16th to Wednesday 18th February 2009: Days One Hundred and Sixty Three to One Hundred and Sixty Five 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.


Nothing too special about Monday and Tuesday so – taking Alfred’s advice – I’ll spare you the unnecessary details. On the way to work on Monday morning, I had rather a surreal experience. I was passed on the road by a primary school student who had tucked under his arm what seemed to be a coloured model of the human brain. Given the lack of even the most basic resources here, I was astonished to see something so sophisticated. A closer look, however, showed it to be an old and largely deflated football that had been drawn on with markers or some such. Ah well!

Monday night I decided to treat myself to a nice dinner! Vegetable pasta sauce with penne and parmesan – chopped onions, peppers and tomatoes, tomato paste, oregano, salt, pepper, garlic salt and two small Maggi stock cubes in water. Turned out very nice indeed (though I had forgotten what a crushing disappointment parmesan in a tube is compared to the real thing – need to put out a request for some shrink-wrapped stuff to be sent out!). All it needed to be perfect was a glass of red wine but, hey, count your blessings!

Work was quiet enough – I thought we were going to visit some schools but François isn’t feeling very well, though he is still at work. There was a team of inspectors arriving Wednesday so we are to head out with them on the day (more of that anon). Spent Monday and Tuesday finalising some drafts of training days (which may never happen but if I get the opportunity at least the stuff is prepared). Joe Walk very kindly sent me a fantastic PowerPoint he has prepared for Strategic Planning training which has all the technical French vocabulary I need. My problem is that I am unlikely to have electricity, never mind a projector, when I do the training so I need to come up with a low-tech alternative (photocopier has been out for ages now so even that isn’t necessarily an option).

On Monday I also (finally) got my cheque for RWF100,000 which I have been waiting for for ages – it’s the refund for the textbooks I bought for the District so it’s actually my own money but it’s still nice to get it. But the bureaucracy involved!! Once they found my cheque, it was attached to nine pieces of paper – Francois’s application for payment, my application, the receipt, a photocopy of the receipt countersigned by Francois and me, a letter from the Executive Secretary to the Finance Department authorising the payment, a photocopy of a letter from the Finance Department to the Executive Secretary acknowledging this, the cheque, a photocopy of the cheque and some other form detailing the payment. All of these have to be signed and stamped by the Mayor’s office and each one can only be completed once the previous one has been finalised. No wonder everything takes so long here!!

Tuesday was English examination day for my class and virtually everyone turned up. They took it really seriously and two people who were working that day had sent messages apologising and asking if they could sit it tomorrow before anyone got their results back!

WEDNESDAY
Much more interesting day! Today we are off to visit schools with the MINEDUC inspectors. So, on with the good suit (thank God I now have a belt for it – imagine my trousers falling down while inspecting a primary school class - Alfred: don’t think it couldn’t happen as followers of this blog will remember from earlier!) and the black shoes. No computer to work today as I don’t fancy lugging it around the southern Rwandan landscape so I will mark the exam papers from yesterday and also bring along some Kinyarwanda and French material in case I have time to do a bit of study.

The morning was the usual chaos of no-one really knowing who was going where. Eventually I ended up in a car with Alexis and a guy from MINEDUC called Emile – a really nice and interesting guy from whom I learned a lot and who gave me some good contact numbers in MINEDUC for people working on the new EMIS (Educational Management Information System) that is being developed. We also had a driver, thank God, because nothing I had seen so far had prepared me for the roads we were about to travel on. We were heading south-east towards the Burundi border to visit four schools (ended up only seeing three as it took so long to get there) – GS Joma, GS Mugombwa and ESI Muganza (GS is Groupe Scolaire, combined primary and lower secondary, ESI is Ecole Secondaire Inferieure, lower secondary only). We headed for Mugombwa and within half a kilometre of leaving Gisagara had hit what looked like lunar terrain but was actually a road. It took us an hour and a half to travel about 15km and when we got there (GS Mugombwa) the director wasn’t there. Mugombwa is a big primary school (1400+ students) and now has the first year of lower secondary attached (equivalent to our 1st Year), two classes of about 35. However, there is only one teacher as they are still awaiting a second one. I’m not sure how this works as the curriculum is Maths, Science (Physics, Chemistry and Biology), English, Entrepreneurship, Political Science, History, Geography, Social Studies, French and Agricultural Science (though the last two are supposed to be optional against each other so I’m not sure what they are up to here) – is the one teacher teaching all of this?

We did call back here later and found the director back from a meeting in the local sector office. He took us around the entire school. The buildings are in reasonably good condition but only have shutters for windows and, for some reason, although it was a very cloudy and dull day, the shutters were half-closed on almost every classroom, making them very dark and gloomy. We visited the P1 class – 73 children crammed into a room which was a reasonable size but had nothing like enough desks and benches, so about 15 of the children take it in turn to stand, while the rest squash into the benches available. Ages range from 6 to 13; most did have copybooks and pens, a few still using slates. The teacher took us through some English word games and songs – quite impressive really even though (like so many Rwandans) her version of the English alphabet goes .... H I J K R M N O P Q L S T U ...

The director then showed us the latrine block – seven very basic latrines (some with no doors) for 1500+ students (boys and girls together). Nearby the ground had subsided and when Alexis looked at it, he could see a hole about two foot across leading into a huge empty space, right on the route to the latrines. Apparently it has been there for a while but no-one has done anything about it! It was rather pointedly stressed to the director that this needed to be addressed immediately!

GS Joma is right on the border with Burundi – there is a vast river plain which looks extremely fertile and the river itself (whose name I forget) marks the boundary between the two countries. Joma has had some new classrooms built recently – a wonderful contrast with the usual ones (of which they have some) – big wide windows that let in loads of light, high ceilings, spacious rooms. They have four of these (and a small staff room attached) but the rest are the old-style low, small-windowed cramped rooms that you see in most places. We visited the first class (like Mugombwa, Joma is a primary school that now has two 1st Year secondary classes attached to it). As we arrived it started raining and I for the first time realised something that Bruce had written about in his blogs: all these schools have tin roofs and to save money they usually don’t build ceilings under them, so when it rains heavily it is utterly impossible to hear anything no matter how hard you might shout. So we just stood there for about twenty minutes waiting for the rain to die down.

I took the opportunity to have a chat with the class teacher. He had been about to start a Geography class when I came in (‘La Géographie’ was written on the board in large letters, even though ALL teaching at secondary level is now supposed to be in English). I asked him how the transition to teaching in English was going and he replied – much more frankly than I expected – that they were basically still teaching in French because none of the materials in English had arrived yet and there was no point in trying to teach in English without them. Again, the director was absent – this time at the sector office in Musha which is far enough away that she wasn’t going to be back that day.

Our third stop was ESI Muganza but school here finished at 1400 so everyone was gone by the time we arrived. It is a fine-looking school – the buildings are brand new (well, three years old) and I am looking forward to coming back and seeing it in operation. And then we headed back to the District Office.

But the roads! Even in a 4x4 and an experienced driver we had a few hair-raising experiences and got completely stuck at one stage on a muddy hill. We all had to get out and then the driver basically allowed the vehicle to slide backwards down the hill until it hit solid ground. Then he backed up about 100m, floored the accelerator and zoomed through the muck to the hard ground on the other side (we had all been warned to shelter behind a large tree!). Even if I were to get my own motor-bike, it’ll be a long time before I would venture out on these roads. No wonder some of these schools never get inspected!

Arrived back at the District Office to find my class anxiously awaiting their examination results. I also had Alexis and Théoneste waiting to do the actual paper. I gave them fresh ones and returned the completed papers to the others, who proceeded to form a committee and go through each and every question together making sure I had given everyone exactly the same marks for everything!! Every tiniest discrepancy was queried and clarified until they were happy that they had got what they deserved!!

Then straight home (it was 1700 by now) and I had had no lunch – I was actually quite light-headed at this stage. So a giant omelette (which actually ended up as scrambled eggs as a) it cooks faster and b) I have no way of getting an omelette out of a wok without breaking it up) and a HUGE pot of tea – there are times when only tea will do and the tea here is so good. I noticed someone has set up an ‘I love tea’ group on Facebook – I must sign up!

Quick trawl through Facebook and Gmail (more howls of anguish from students recovering from their mock exams and a few 5th Years quite happy to wait another year!) and then off to bed. Busy day, but good. Have new ideas on providing English language resources for schools (following on some ideas Bruce posted in his blog) and for IT training for District staff to make sure they are ready for MINEDUC's new EMIS system. Murabeho!