FRIDAY – SUNDAY
(Alfred: Oi – what happened to Thursday?) OK, Thursday and Friday were busy but uneventful if you can understand me – hectic in the office as we dealt with the aftermath of the Section examination results and I talked to various school directors about visiting their schools over the next two weeks. One big problem is that there are so many meetings at the moment it is very hard to find days when people are actually going to be in their own schools! Otherwise uneventful apart from some domestic stuff I will detail later.
Saturday morning I head to the market to do some food shopping – Alexandré does it midweek because I am working and I am usually gone Saturdays but I prefer to do it myself when I can, even if it means I end up paying over the odds a bit. It’s nice to have been here long enough that I am pretty much completely ignored as I walk around, though people are still interested when I actually buy something to see how much I am paying. I buy onions (paid RWF150 a bunch rather than the usual RWF100 but they were really nice, big onions), peppers, carrots and two large ears of corn – the only other things available are cabbage and tomatoes and I already have plenty of both in the house.
Déo rang me yesterday to explain that he would be at church all day Saturday and would send another moto driver to collect me at 1100 (he must be a Seventh-Day Adventist of which there are many around here). Sure enough Eric turns up bang on 1100 and we head into Butare. Tina Payne had said she was coming down to Butare for the day and I haven’t seen here since December (apart from a few minutes at Charlotte’s party in Kigali. Do my shopping (candles, matches, washing sponges, mango vodka (Alfred: that’s a funny story – Ruairí had mentioned to Hassan and Tariq that they always seemed to run out of the Pineapple Waragi and Mango Vodka but had tons of other flavours left over that no-one wants to buy. Today there are two entire SHELVES of pineapple and mango! Ruairí better get drinking!) . Then to the bank to get a statement and I run into John and Sheila who are VSO volunteers up in Cyanuka (no idea how to spell that) about an hour’s walk from Gikongoro (as John describes it). John really likes the school he is working in but it is a horrendous trek to and from work every day – half an hour on a moto each way on really bad roads and his back isn’t the better for it. Again, you wonder how much checking went into the placement before it was finalised (Alfred: and out comes the violin again ....).
Drop my stuff down in Tiga’s and she and I head up to see Gerrit and Tina’s new house, which is absolutely fabulous!! Then into town for a beer at the Faucon. The idea had been to watch Chelsea-Coventry but there has been no power all day, not just here but in the entire Southern Province (Alfred: which was really tough on poor John and Sheila who had come down to Butare for the night specifically to enjoy hot water and the ability to recharge things!!) so I had to content myself with beer. John and Sheila turned up as did Gerrit and Tina and then we were joined by Suzanne who gave us the startling news that she was returning to Montreal at the end of the month. Suzanne has been working in Gatagara School which is specifically for disabled children but the economic downturn means she can no longer afford to stay in Rwanda. Meanwhile I had phoned Tina in Gitarama and she said between one thing and another she wasn’t going to make it to Butare and would see me in Gahini the following weekend.
I headed back to Tiga’s, by which stage Andy had arrived and we went off to the Chineese for dinner, and – to my amazement – Tiga joined us. It was well after dark and Tiga usually starts to fall asleep as soon as the sun sets, so it was really late for her to be out. Nice meal though it was quite cold and rained really heavily for a while. Long chats about politics and books and other such stuff – the three of us share a huge range of common interests and it’s really nice not to be always talking about work and Rwanda for a change!
Sunday was (Alfred: thankfully for the patient reader) uneventful, apart from the awful news from Northern Ireland about the attack on the army base in Antrim. Boy, did that bring back a lot of memories that I had hoped were well and truly buried for good. It’s been almost the same length of time since the Troubles ended in Northern Ireland as since the end of the genocide – I remember Rwandans telling me of the fear they felt when trouble erupted in Kenya last year that it might signal a return to the ‘bad old days’ – well, let’s hope that’s not where we are headed back at home.
The one big event was my second visit to the St Philippe Neri English club for their inaugural debate: ‘Polygamy is better than monogamy’. The crowd was small as we clashed with the big volleyball match between the school team and the local sector team which was going on right outside the room we were holding the debate in! It was a good debate – polygamy is against the law here but quite common for all that. A lot of the debate concerned a frank discussion of a man’s ability to sexually satisfy a number of wives, the advantage of being able to pick wives for their different abilities – with three wives you could have a good cook, a good tiller of the soil and a third who is good in bed – and various other aspects that would have reduced Irish school students to giggling hysterics but here were simply another part of the argument (paying school fees, conflict between wives, economic considerations and various other points were raised). I did ask how, if many men became polygamous, the rest were to find wives but for some reason this didn’t seem to weigh significantly as a point with either side!
In favour of the motion 'Polygamy is better than monogamy'
Opposing the motion
The audience
Point of information from the floor
What we were competing against!
MONDAY – WEDNESDAY
Meetings, meetings, meetings – how does any actual work ever get done when people are in meetings all the time discussing what work needs to be done? Every time I have tried to visit a school recently the director has been called away unexpectedly (and these are people who really want me to visit them, they are not making excuses). The regular Monday morning meeting goes on for two-and-a-half hours instead of the usual one, all day Tuesday is a sports planning meeting so Alexis and Francois are gone all day (I stayed in the office but didn’t have a huge amount to do, to be honest). And I spent almost all day Monday .... printing! Some IT genius overhauled all the computers with the result that none of them work properly and none of them can recognise the printer. So the only way the directors could print out copies of the new curriculum was to load all the files on my laptop, plug in the printer and print them off. That’s 550 pages one at a time on a laser printer and there’s no way I’m allowing anyone else here to touch my computer so that was my work for the day. However, I did see a brand new photocopier in its wrapping down the hall in the Health Unit so that will be a major blessing.
On Wednesday we have two big events: Alexis will be coming back down from Kigali with all our textbooks (we are about two/three weeks away from the end of the first term) – he was told to hire a lorry and come up early Wednesday morning. Logistically this could be interesting: we have 65 primary schools with about 60,000 students and 18 secondary schools with 8,000 (at least we did last year – the number in secondary will be a lot higher this year). They claim there are textbooks for all students in all subjects and that the books will be in English. Hmmm. But even if there are only three textbooks per student in whatever subjects, that will be 210,000 textbooks. I’ll be interested to see the lorry, let alone where in our office we are meant to store all this stuff so it doesn’t get nicked (Alfred: see later item on THEFT IN RWANDA) . Mugombwa primary school has 1500 students and when I visited it in a 4x4 the trip took two hours and we got stuck three times. How is the director supposed to bring thousands of textbooks out there? Report to follow (Alfred: and pictures I hope!).
Also on Wednesday we are having an anti-corruption demonstration – no-one knows exactly when or where or for how long. My Education Manager, Charlotte, is supposed to be coming down to see my director about a possible placement for a Primary Methodology trainer in September and Francois has promised to be around for her so I hope it all works out!
So here I am in the office on Wednesday morning – the fact that I have had time to write all this tells you how busy today has been. No one in the district has been able to make any telephone calls since yesterday afternoon because of some problem with the network. Alexis is in Kigali with the lorry (Alfred: in the words of Band-Aid, thank God it’s him instead of you!), Francois hasn’t appeared, I spent half an hour persuading the maintenance staff to turn on the generator so I could use my computer, so I guess I’ll prepare more stuff for my English classes and maybe learn a little Kinyarwandan! Oh, and here are a few idle musings I jotted down at various stages over the last few weeks.
MY HELPFUL GUARD
Alexandré is now getting a little TOO helpful! On Monday, having spent all day printing and missing lunch, I arrived home at 1600 absolutely ravenous and cooked myself an enormous cabbage and carrot stir-fry. Just as I finished, Alexandré appeared with the two ears of corn I had bought at the market – he had roasted them for me and plonked them down on the table just as I had decided I simply could not force down another forkful of cabbage, lovely though it was. I managed to eat most of one (they were huge ears) but I really don’t like roasted corn and this didn’t taste particularly good. He also washes anything he can lay his hands on – towels, shoes, coats, hats. I daren’t leave anything lying casually around!!
ATTIC NOISES MYSTERY SOLVED
It’s bloody birds!! Unless rats squawk when they fight!! I think it’s those crow/magpie thingies you see everywhere, they must have a way of getting in at night. At least it’s not rats (Alfred: maybe the rats are just quieter than you thought!)
POISON
Everyone here is obsessed with being poisoned. I knew there was a rule about always opening things at the table (bottles of beer, water etc) so people can see they haven’t been tampered with. When I mentioned this the other day in the bar, I got deluged with stories of alleged poisonings and how careful you have to be. Everyone there said they would never go away from an open drink for fear of someone putting something in it. If you had to, you would dispose of the drink and get a new one rather than chance someone having put something in it!!
LEOPARD IN BUTARE
It was all the talk of the pub on Sunday when I went for a drink after the debate – someone driving through Butare the previous night had run over an killed a leopard on the street. Apparently they come into town fairly often – not that I’ve seen one so far!
THEFT IN RWANDA
You really do have to watch your stuff here. I thought I might be targeted as being someone who is visibly probably richer than others but it happens to everyone. Since I got here four of my colleagues have had their phones stolen at work, usually while they left them recharging somewhere, and loads of other things have gone missing. I’ve been lucky (and careful) so far but you really need to have your wits about you. One day I had put my bag down in the corridor while I helped someone carry something into our office. I must have left it there all of ten seconds but Alexis grabbed it and brought it in, saying:’ Obviously you are not used to our ways yet!’
FISH AND POTATOES
I keep on running into things that remind me of Ireland here. Poorer Rwandan families can’t afford much meat or fish. If they have a piece of fish, it sits in the centre of the meal and people rub their carbohydrates on it (cassava, potatoes, plantain or whatever) to share the flavour. (Alfred: probably not potatoes, though – they are a luxury here compared to the others mentioned)
PRISON, VENUSTE, FRANCOIS AND TANZANIAN ALBINOS
I keep on meeting more and more people who were unjustly in prison. My boss told me the other night (as I may have said) that when he was appointed an accusation was made against him by someone whose friend hadn’t got the job. On Sunday after the debate I met Venuste who used to be Deputy Head of the secondary school. In late 2006 he was accused of complicity in the genocide and put in prison. After two years and four months he was released when the charges were found to be without foundation (he was released the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, which he sees as significant). It seems to have been part of a long-running feud between two families and nothing to do with the genocide at all. At the moment, in an attempt to halt the ritual killing of albinos for body parts used in witchcraft, the Tanzanian government is asking people to hold secret ballots all over the country and denounce those who are involved in the trade. It’s good to see the government trying to tackle the problem but I can see a lot of local scores being settled this way.
PHYSICS?
Why is the standard of Physics so bad in my schools? Of the six that offer it, two have a fail grade as their average and even the best of them is pretty bad – one to be looked into.
DEAD CHILD – ALMOST
I’ve never actually seen someone getting killed but today was the closest I have come to it so far. On the way back from the anti-corruption demonstration we passed a man cutting down some tall trees to make way for the electricity pylons. The tree fell towards the road instead of away from it but, as we scattered, it became clear it wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the road. However, the man’s two-year old kid was playing on the ground nearer the tree and it fell right on top of her. Luckily it was the leafy top of the tree and when Enock and I ran over, she was OK if rather shocked and scared. The people further up the road were sure she had been killed and were ready to attack the tree-cutter but Enock assured them the kid was OK. I can still see the look on her face as she turned her head and saw this huge thing falling down on her ...
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