John and Mukesh live near the main prison in Gikongoro – on Saturday morning it was umuganda (voluntary communal labour) and the area around the house was covered with pink-clad prisoners digging, tidying or whatever (Alfred: The word ‘voluntary’ mightn’t be the most appropriate in this specific context). I still get a slight shock when I see the pink uniforms – I am used to the idea of seeing prisoners out and about working, I am used to the fact that they are all convicted genocidaires – it’s the PINK! It is SO pink! If you were going to design a pair of (admittedly slightly butch) women’s pyjamas, this is the shade you would pick. And when you see them from afar, sprinkled lavishly across the landscape, it is as if someone had scattered a load of Remembrance Day poppies across the Rwandan hills last November and then left them to bleach in the sun until you got this soft pink.
Then, when I left Sunday to head for the bus back to Butare, as I got near the prison, I heard this immense roaring sound coming from inside the walls – people shouting and chanting like crazy. ‘Oh-oh’ I said to myself (Alfred: 'arsa mise i m’aigne féin' as we used to teach the students to write in Irish class) ‘sounds like a riot.’ I wondered whether to take a detour but had no idea where to go. Moreover the other passers-by didn’t seem too concerned. Then when I listened more closely I could distinguish the words Imana and Yezu – ah ha, Sunday Mass. I should have guessed, if you hear a lot of people getting excited here, it is usually religion (Alfred: Em, methinks the fact that it was Sunday should have given our erstwhile scribe a clue, n’est pas?).
When I got to Butare (the Sotra and Volcano men having had a barging and pushing match over which of their buses I was getting on!) I met up with Christine Mack, a new VSO volunteer who I had always thought was Australian but turns out to be French. (Alfred: Eh, France, Australia, two countries with so much in common they are easy to confuse. A special prize for the first reader who can actually suggest ANYTHING those two countries have in common!) She came out to Gisagara with me as we were planning to head out together today to do school inspections and (Alfred: for some strange reason) she thought she might learn something from watching me work.
However, getting from Butare to Gisagara on Sunday night was the tricky bit. Christine caught the 1430 from Kigali which, in theory, should have got her in before 1700 when there was a bus to Gisagara but I figured it was more prudent to get tickets for the last bus at 1800 just in case. So she arrived at 1645, her bus from Kigali having broken the Rwandan land speed record en route, and we went for a beer. Then my friend Jean de la Croix rang – I had completely forgotten I was also supposed to be meeting him so lucky I didn’t get the earlier tickets, eh? I won’t go into all of Jean’s stories at this stage (Alfred: They will certainly serve to liven up the blog the next time it gets too serious) but suffice to say I had to more or less prise him from my person with a metaphorical crowbar to get on the bus!
The bus. Anyone who has been in Rwanda even a few weeks, let alone eighteen months, will have their quota of dodgy, funny, terrifying, boring, smelly, boring bus stories. But this was the worst bus journey I have had so far in Rwanda. OK, we didn’t break down, the passengers didn’t have to get out in the mud and push the bus that had gotten stuck in it, it didn’t crash, it didn’t puncture, it didn’t turn out to be going in the opposite direction to the one were told for an hour before we realised, no one urinated on us, no one was carrying a pig or a chicken or a sack of fermenting cassava (Alfred: cassava, that’s the worst, no question), no one was spitting constantly on the ground near or on our feet, no one got sick out of a window further up the bus only for it to fly back in through a window open beside us, the back door didn’t fall off and deposit all the contents of the boot (Alfred: that’s ‘trunk’ for those of you reading this in the US of A) on the road, no one was begging for money or lecturing us on how as ex-colonialists or just plain peau blancs everything that was wrong with Rwanda, Africa and the world was our fault, no one asked us for a dictionary or the money to buy one, no one spent the entire trip asking us to marry them, convert to their religion or take their baby away to Europe/USA with us, no one beside us was carrying a large rolled up ancient-and-never-washed-despite-the-incontinence-of-previous-users mattress that filled the entire width of the bus where we were sitting, no one asked us for our phone numbers, and no one tried to hold a conversation with us in English for the entire trip using only the alternating phrases ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’.
So, by Rwandan standards it wasn’t anything as bad as it could have been. But the bus was ancient, it had no suspension to speak of, it was absolutely packed, some of the windows were being held in by having the black runner lining that should have been between the windows and the frame of the bus tied across them to stop them falling into the bus, it was bucketing rain and the windscreen wipers weren’t working properly necessitating the driver to drive incredibly slowly, the engine was pumping a steady stream of carbon monoxide into the bus, all of whose functioning windows were tightly closed (only the broken ones saved us from asphyxiation). The roof above the back seats was cracked, admitting a steady heavy trickle of cold water down the backs of those of us unlucky enough to be sitting on the back seats, the rear door was not closed so every time we hit a bump it flew up and then whacked against the back of our seats.
Once we set off, we first had to negotiate the steep hill down out of Butare which is a good road but VERY slippery in wet weather. Then we hit the wet muddy bits – because we had no suspension the bus driver had to negotiate these spots very slowly in case he hit something unexpected. However, this either led to the bus getting stuck and frantically trying to reverse out of the mud or else stalling. Every time the driver tried to restart, you could hear the absence of people breathing as everyone held their breath wondering if it was going to start. Each time, after ten to fifteen seconds of what sounded like an aged asthmatic horse being dragged unwillingly into an abattoir, the bus would start up and lurch forward and off we would set again.
Anyway, what usually takes twenty minutes took almost an hour and, when we pulled up in the centre of Gisagara, everyone just stayed in their seats for a couple of seconds as if unaware, or in disbelief, that we had actually arrived successfully at our destination.
The next day, after a hearty breakfast, Christine and I set off on our visits. It was a good but (as usual) frustrating day. In both the schools we visited the directors had received phone calls that morning calling them away to meetings in the sector office. We were able to do the inspections after a fashion but hurriedly and without anything like enough time to go through all the stuff we wanted to. In particular, I had wanted to go through the new statistical analysis I had prepared for each school to see how much they could grasp, how interested they were and so on to give me an idea of how I need to tailor them to people’s level of understanding and interest. Anyway, it was OK if rather shorter than I had planned it to be. I did think of visiting a third school en route but figured the director would probably also be away and anyway my moto driver said rain was coming and the road back was very treacherous in parts.
Before we did the visits, however, we stopped at Groupe Scolaire Rwamiko. This is the school that was hit by a tornado some months ago which ripped the roof off a three-room classroom block. To my surprise there had been no repair work done yet so I called in. I also found (not to my surprise) that the six new classrooms for the Senior Two Year were also not ready but was flabbergasted when the teachers (the director was also at the sector office) told me that all the students were in school, distributed among the other classes. I then visited … wait for this one … a First Year Maths class with 120 students in it (Alfred: is this a record?). They were using a big room that had been used for storing building materials – they had filled it with desks and stuck two blackboards up at one end. And the class seemed to be going fine – all the students were attentive and focussed when we called in – but 120?!! The other rooms all had classes of 70 or 80 each.
Once we returned to the house we had lunch, debriefed a bit and exchanged ideas and observations on how the visits had gone and then I accompanied Christine into Butare to do a few chores. First I went to the Post Office to collect a parcel for a friend in Gisagara who uses my post-box. They wouldn’t let me collect it because it had his name on it and it was a registered parcel. Fair enough I suppose except they have never done that before! Then to the bank to take out RWF200,000 because I am going to have a lot of travelling and photocopying expense coming up. Again fine, except they had run out of RWF5,000 bills and gave it all to me in RWF2,000 and RWF1,000 bills: 95 banknotes in total. And finally some shopping, mostly for luxury items: olive oil and vinegar (for the avocados, our single most important food item along with cabbage), Nido (milk powder), coffee, sardines, cheese, tomato paste and bread. That last went without a hitch.
Then, it being 1557, I dashed for the 1600 bus. Got my ticket in the Sotra office and was told it was a big bus, not one of the little ones. I came out to see the bus heading off. I figured, heck I would just wait for the 1700 but the girl who had sold me the ticket ran out of the office onto the street, stopped a moto and told him to catch that bus! Which he did! So, the bus stops unexpectedly, the door opens and this muzungu gets on. Now, we are all used to various reactions when we get on buses – cries of welcome in three different languages, excited comments, children screaming or whatever, though in Butare, where there are lots of abazungu (to use the correct plural form) it rarely excited much comment. But when I got on this bus there was a stunned silence, which continued for the ten seconds or so it took me to get to one of the flip-down seats in the aisle. Then people began muttering under their breaths to each other and darting quick looks at me.
It took a while before I realised – this was not the ordinary Gisagara bus. This bus was heading for a much more remote part of the District called Mugombwa but would be passing through Gisagara on the way back. There is one bus out of Mugombwa in the morning at 0700 and then it comes back at 1600, so all these people had come in to Butare for the day. People in Gisagara are used to me and Sarah by now (I’ve been there for eighteen months after all) but there has never ever, to the best of my knowledge, been a muzungu working or living in Mugombwa, hence the surprise.
It was a real throwback to when I first arrived. After so long, I rarely experience this reaction any more so it was actually kind of nice in a way, especially when the little boy sitting on his father’s lap eventually plucked up the courage to shake my outstretched hand and then examined it carefully all over for any white marks that might have come off – it’s been AGES since that happened to me!
So, big meeting tomorrow with all the District heads and then working with Cathy and Peter to start fleshing out or training days for the directors which will take place on March 24th and 25th. I’ll keep you informed!!
On the left, part of the Maths class with 120 students in it. On the right (I had forgotten about this picture) a tribute to lovers of Casablanca (the film, not the famous chess-player). I took this picture in a director's office. Parents who send their children to the maternelle (nursery school) have to pay RWF300 a month but they can also pay in beans which, at this time of year - it being just after the bean harvest - they often choose to do. The little bowl in front represents RWF300 worth of beans. This is one reason why maternelles start off well and then drop off - once the beans are gone and parents have to come upo with actual cash for the teachers, most of the maternelles end up closing down because parents can't/won't pay. It also means that the teachers get paid in a mixture of cash and beans, depending on the mix of parents' payments that month!
2 comments:
Alfred..... the Australians and the French play pretty good rugby... one thing in common eh... n'est pas??
Hmmm ... good one, Jennifer and Ruairí was swearing no one would get anything!
Post a Comment