Ruairí and Alfred

A DAY ON THE ROAD

Today I was to visit two schools in Mugombwa sector, down on the Rwanda-Burundi border and about as far from my house as it is possible to travel in this district. I had booked the moto driver to come at 0800 but he said 0730 would be better as it would take us a long time to get there. I got up at 0600 (I had set the alarm for 0530 but somehow managed to fall asleep again!), had a very cold wash in a bucket of water, then breakfasted on tea, bread and two hard-boiled eggs which I had cooked a few days ago. Wasn’t too sure about the smell of the second one but thought ‘What the hell’ and ate it anyway (Alfred: to avoid the suspense, it was fine – you don’t have to worry about later and unnecessarily detailed accounts of dashing behind bushes in the Rwandan countryside. That is always an interesting experience as there is no such thing as a deserted spot here and you get used to people standing close by watching you pee .. or whatever). The weather was lovely when I got up but by 0700 it was very cloudy and at 0715 the heavens opened. I rang Alexis and told him to hold off for the moment and we would go if the rain stopped and if he thought the roads would be OK.

By 0730 the house was enveloped in cloud, through which it was still relentlessly raining but it cleared around 0815 and I rang Alexis to come. Packed my bag – inspection forms (only one), copies of my recent analysis of the examination results, poncho, clipboard, pens … and a wodge of toilet paper just in case. On with my wellies and then off we went around 0830. It was still raining but not too heavily. Alexis said that it had not been raining at all in the adjoining sector where he had come from so he hoped the roads would be OK.

It was a nice wish but unfortunately didn’t come true. We ploughed on for about an hour, stopping to ask directions as we went. The school is called Mushongi but the final ‘gi’ is pronounced in a very peculiar way, so Alexis was usually greeted with blank stares when he asked, until he tried every possible combination of sounds that might approximate to ‘gi’. All of them sounded exactly the same to me but eventually one of them clicked and the people all said ‘Ah, Mushongi!’ It never fails to amaze me the way in which people here cannot recognise a word unless you pronounce it exactly correctly. After all, we were only about ten kilometres from the school at this stage!

As we got near, the road got really bad – I got off and walked while Alexis paddled the moto up or down slopes with his legs – but eventually it got so bad we abandoned the moto and set off on foot. I presumed that this meant we were really close to the school (Alfred: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER use the words ‘presume’ or ‘assume’ in this country … NEVER). Forty-five minutes later of tramping through mud the consistency of regurgitated superglue in wellington boots one size too small for me (Alfred: just as well or they would have been sucked right off his feet), in drizzle strong enough to make me keep my poncho on beneath which I was sweating probably harder than it was raining, we finally reached the school.

This Groupe Scolaire has about 850 students, six classes of primary and two of senior level. They are building eight new classrooms but work has stopped completely as they have run out of materials and have no money to buy more. Three of the semi-built classrooms have students in them – typically, they have put the 1st and 2nd Year primary in here and the senior students are in the older, intact classrooms. They also have not had any new latrines built – the last time I visited the school the latrines were the main issue – six horrible decrepit crumbling …. I can’t say ‘rooms’, whatever, for (at the time) seven hundred or so students. They are planning to build 20 new ones and have got as far as digging out the holes for the foundations but that’s it.

So I spent the next three and a half hours working with the director and visiting the classes (brief visits, just to say ‘Hello’ and not to actually inspect the classes). The director is a young, enthusiastic man who is in his second year as director and keen to change and improve the school. It is the best school in the sector, but the sector is the worst in the district so there is still enormous scope for improvement.

Anyway, we worked through my checklist and focussed on a few main areas: timetabling, teacher attendance (one class we visited had no teacher there and no-one seemed to have any idea where he was), strategic planning (there is no strategic plan but he had put together a project proposal on equipping the school with solar panels so all the classrooms would be able to use electrical equipment – more on that anon), peer evaluation and training, data collection and analysis and a few other things.

In the middle we toured the classrooms as he wanted me to visit all the teachers and students before the morning shift broke up at 1140. The school is clean and reasonably well equipped with furniture etc – I did see some desks with five or six pupils crammed into them but there were usually desks with only one or two in the same room, so it is more a question of classroom management for the teacher than lack of resources. One or two classes were around fifty but most were in the 30-40 range. Quite a few of the classes had some basic teaching aids or posters to be seen and the kids were bright and alert, even at the end of their school day.

However, the level of English was abysmal. Not one class could answer even the simplest question I asked them (‘What subject are you doing?’, ‘Do you like English?’ and so on). Only two of the teachers could talk to me in English – and neither of them were among the three who actually teach English in the school. And a lot of the material written on the boards was so inaccurate you wondered where it had been copied down from. I did learn in P4 Science that the ‘testicules’ are shaped like ‘two uggs’ and the penis need to be ‘elected’ before intercourse can take place. I had a vivid of images of all these penises standing to attention and hoping to garner enough votes to be elected and get their chance at continuing their genetic inheritance into the next generation. (Alfred: Interesting – the phrase ‘electing penises’ brought to my mind vivid images of most of the leading politicians of the last twenty years……)

Later, as I worked through the analysis of the school’s 2009 results with the director to see what they could tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the school (I don’t go with this coy ‘areas for improvement’ business I’m afraid), it became clear that there was one, single, overriding problem – English. They have no Science textbooks at all for P5 or P6 and no Mathematics textbooks for P6 – just one teacher’s book in each subject. The teachers seemed well-prepared, in good spirits and (as far as I could tell on a brief visit) hard-working but teaching in a completely foreign language. Every class I visited had textbooks in it and in half the classes the students were actually using them as part of the class – if that seems like a really obvious thing to you, it isn’t!!! In most schools the books are locked up and from the layers of dust on them have been so since they arrived – but not here. He commented when I said this that he has a horror of books lying unused and has endlessly nagged/encouraged his teachers to use them. He even lets the children bring them home from time to time to read and use for homework – only the second time I have come across this and something you are really not supposed to do but I wish directors would do more often!

Since my last visit the school had built twenty rabbit hutches and I was introduced to their occupants, munching away on a haphazard collection of plants and weeds. When they are mature, they are given to the poorer students to take home and sell so they can buy pens, copybooks etc. When I asked him how they decide who will get the rabbits, he told me the children decide. They know very well who is in the most need so they draw up a list of who should get them. Other than a quick check by the director to ensure no obvious unworthy candidates are there, all the input comes from the pupils.

The same applies to the Parents’ Committee which has two teacher and two pupil representatives. The students first of all vote for a President, then a Vice-President. The first vote is completely open; then, if a boy is elected President, only girls can stand for Vice-President and vice versa.

One thing I always check is what clubs the school has: they usually have antiHIV/AIDS (ü), sports (X), antigenocide (X - but starting later this year for the seniors), and sometimes environment (ü) and dance (X). (Alfred: Maybe not the most suitable topic for a joke but when Ruairí ran the spellcheck, it wanted to replace ‘antigenocide’ with ‘ant genocide’!). When I asked him if there were any others, he said they had a School Attendance Club. ‘A what?’ I asked, wondering if I had heard correctly. He explained that every month all the students meet in geographical groups depending on where in the sector they live. They then pool their knowledge to draw up lists of children they know in their area who are not attending school. These lists, with parents’ names and as specific a geographical location as they can manage, are given to the Director. The schoolchildren then speak to the non-attending children to encourage them to come while the director, along with the Executive Secretary of the cell (the smallest local government unit) speak directly to the parents. Amazing idea!!!

I then asked him how come they had no sports club. Easy one – no equipment whatsoever and no space. He showed me the football ‘field’ – a smallish piece of ground covered in long grass, far too small for anything except a disorganised kickabout, which is what eight boys were doing with a punctured football that may well have been used in the original 1930 World Cup final in Uruguay. They do have a boys and a girls football team but have to play all their matches away. If they could raise RWF300,000 – 400,000 they could buy the adjoining field but with half-completed classrooms, no proper latrines and all the other current problems, extra land for sports is not a priority for anyone! The volleyball area was a piece of ground – the director explained that the net and posts had been stored away as they had no ball to play with! So I promised him that the next time I saw him I would have a football and a volleyball for him (and thanks to all of you back at home who have been sending me various sums, small and large, with which to do this kind of thing!).

There were a few specific areas where there was ‘room for improvement’. This school has the largest disparity between girls’ and boys’ performance of any in the sector and in Kinyarwanda, where girls usually perform as well as boys or close to it, it has the largest gender performance gap in the entire District. I also counselled him to get on to the sector directly about providing additional support for English training for the teachers (Alfred: given that this is the best school in the sector, Ruairí is going to be saying this to ALL the schools in the sector – the Sector Executive Secretary is going to LOVE him by this time next week!). I also agreed to look over his project proposal for installing solar panels in the school – a good idea but the actual document was a shambles. The budget had been drawn up by a friend who knew about electrical things – maybe so but he sure had no concept of either Mathematics or common sense. One item had been costed at RWF2,400,000 (€3,000) instead of RWF240,000, there was an estimate of 50 plugs and 180 lights for a school of nineteen rooms and so on and so on. But, and this is very important, the director had done this on his own initiative and was going to approach a range of NGOs and foreign government agencies like DfID, SNV and VVOB to seek funding himself, rather than doing what most people seem to – draw up wildly optimistic documents with grandiose plans and then think that somehow that is enough in itself!

Alexis and I headed off around 1500 – I would have waited longer but the director said he thought rain was approaching. Sure enough, when I left the office and looked over the roof towards Burundi, there were big black thunderclouds coming towards us, growling, like a small pack of black mastiffs that hadn’t actually seen me yet but were definitely feeling out of sorts with the world in general. So I hopped on the bike and was going to tell Alexis to get us home ASAP but that proved completely unnecessary as we zoomed off down the hill which, luckily, had pretty thoroughly dried out in the afternoon sun.

The thunderclouds, rather than coming straight at us, seemed to think they needed some kind of visa to enter Rwanda and moved along parallel to us just on the Burundi side of the border, so we were able to get back to the villagedry and in one piece by 1600 or so, about half the time it had taken us to make the morning trip. A quick lunch of roasted corn on the cob (it is market day and the gaurd always buys extra corn and roasts it for us (Alfred: no he doesn’t! Sarah told you he buys it already roasted from the little old ladies who roast it across the road!)) and cheese and crackers and coffee (a new brand called MIG Highland coffee, not as nice as my favourite brand Kinunu but pretty good all the same).

This evening ( once I have finished this and making and eating dinner – lentil, tomato and carrot curry with rice) I write up my report on the visit and then get ready for Lynley’s visit tomorrow. She is coming down from the Program Office to interview focus groups of teachers in a primary and a secondary school in my district for a report VSO are doing on teachers’ working conditions. Then it is off to Kigali for the Friday Education Management meeting and, hopefully, to Gikongoro for weekend rugby!