Surprise!

Surprise! I’ve moved. I’m sure, as far as family goes, the cats out of the bag and I apologize for not updating sooner but I actually have a life now with an actual workload and reponsibilities! Basically I felt like I was wasting my time in my previous situation. I put up a good front but the reality of the situation was really weighing on me. When I finally made the decision to leave my hours had dwindled to only six per week (mostly due to the over-zealous geography teacher who saw no problem crossing out history and writing in geography on the timetable). Also, the headmaster is still in the hospital which is just awful but without him none of our many issues could be addressed such as the fact that I was keeping my clothes on the floor because we never got shelves, we had to pay for public transportation very often because the driver rarely showed up and school was thirty minutes away, we were taking showers at the foot of our beds because there were no facilities, and the school had essentially gone to hell in the headmasters absence. The headmasters situation is looking very bleak. His entire leg has now been cut off. Apparently he is diabetic and did not really understand the gravity of the situation when he stepped on the nail and thus gangrene set in very rapidly. They are still waiting to see if they caught it before it proceeded beyond his leg because if that’s the case there will be nothing they can do. Which is absolutely terrible and you can imagine my embarrassment at leaving in the middle of all that. Oh well, a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.

So here I am. I have moved to Nyanza, which is about an hour and a half south of Kigali and forty minutes north of Butare. I could not be happier. Everything is great here. I’m teaching at Ecole des Sciences de Louis de Montfort de Nyanza. (Not sure if all those de’s are correct!) My headmaster is honestly the nicest man, although his English is touch and go so who knows how he talks about me in Kinyarwanda. I am teaching English to the Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors as well as Computers to Seventh graders and Sophomores. I have a healthy twenty hours, plus, on Wednesdays, I am teaching a two hour class for the teachers, more on that later.
The students also have very high expectations for the English club I will be starting which is causing me quite a lot of anxiety. One student came up to me and told me if the English club was open to all students then all of them would show up so he “took the liberty” of going to each form and having the chief of the class appoint five students who are allowed to attend. What on earth am I going to teach to someone who says “took the liberty”. Granted his pronunciation was more like liebeartay but either way. Also, the other English teacher at the school has kindly informed me that I really need not bother teaching phonetics or pronunciation since I have an American accent and here they are learning British English. I in turn kindly informed him that my family lives in England and I’m afraid the accent he’s teaching is not British but rather African English. Jerk! I feel like I am constantly defending my accent when it comes to any sort of academia, I can not even count now how many times I have given the “every accent is legitimate” speech.
Since the Senior 5’s and 6’s are still on the French system and will take their exams in French we spend most of our time listening to music, and discussing culture and current events which I absolutely love. They all just about fell out of their chairs when they asked about my rings and I told them the reason my Irish Clauddaugh ring was on upside down was because my heart was open. I’ve figured out that in Rwanda the life expectancy is 45 thus I am middle-aged so it’s cause for great concern that I’m not married or at least about to be. So I rescinded my statement and now the prevailing belief at the school is that my fiancée and I will be married as soon as I return home in December. I’m thinking it is for this reason that my headmaster asked me, with an all-knowing smile, how the visit with my fiancée went after my German friend came to visit me from Butare. Again with the awkwardness!
The Senior 4’s are the first who will take their exams in English since Rwanda made the switch. Kagame is REALLY mad at the French, look up Rose Kibuye if you’re interested. So we do more Grammar and whatnot. All of my classes have at least fifty students so I am kicking myself for thinking it was a great idea to do Vocabulary quizzes once a week. Now I understand what my teachers were talking about when they said they had too much grading to do! 300 Vocab quizzes in that little incomprehensible squiggle is a lot, plus they don’t really do class lists so I just sent around a sign in sheet making the recording of the marking almost as difficult as the original task. So I’ll be looking in to revamping that system.

It has been a little hard to adjust to living alone. Being very afraid of the dark really hasn’t helped matters! The thing I miss most is free-flowing conversation. When I was living in the East most of the population were returned refugees from Uganda so English was the predominant second language. So not only did I have Shira to talk to, but also any public interaction was easy. Here I am teaching at a francophone school and since my French is quite poor I have been speaking a combo Frenglish language, but mostly repeating myself at least three times in three different ways in order to communicate. Thank goodness they are obliged to learn English or I would feel like a right idiot. This holds true any time I go to the market or store.
Although I have been going to the market with my friend Yves who is in his last year at the National University doing Physics but also teaches Computers in Nyanza. His uncle is my headmaster. All of the courses have already switched to English at the University so he and his friend Adrian are my English-speaking buddies. They make me so jealous because, in Yves case, he was born in Congo(his parents were refugees from the 59 genocide) in a Swahili speaking area, went to school in French, moved here when he was 12 so he speaks Kinyarwanda and now is almost fluent in English. So their combo language is WAY cooler than mine because they speak a mixture of all four languages.
I asked Yves and Adrian what I should teach the teachers because it is difficult to pinpoint what is difficult about English when you speak it natively and they told me to ask the teachers. So at our staff meeting yesterday, which started an hour and a half late, coughsoannoyingscough, I broached the subject. To this the headmaster left the room because he had to go to the district and everyone just stared at me. Essentially the headmaster left me in charge of the meeting which was beyond uncomfortable. Every time I asked a question everyone just stared at me. Even my Senior 1’s who are absolutely terrified of me talk more than they were! So finally, after about 20 minutes of extreme awkwardness, I said look I’ve never been to a staff meeting in Rwanda so I’m not really sure how I ended up running one so if someone wants to help me out that would be awesome. Finally someone said we should go home and I was like great ya let’s do that! So we will see how the actual teaching goes once we begin next Wednesday, ugh the thought of two hours of that silence makes me cringe! It’s so funny too because the teachers are SO friendly and talkative during break but apparently in scholarly settings they resent being anything but the facilitator.

Ok and finally about the accommodation. I live in a palace. I have a big sitting room with FOUR couches. Couches! Sometimes I sit on them just for the sake of it. Also a kitchen table with four really nice chairs. To the right of the sitting room is a small bedroom that I closed off. Then to the left is another random room with the kitchen to the left and hallway to the right. By kitchen I mean a room that I decided I would cook in and put my ELECTRIC stove in. This really is so luxurious. Then there is a bathroom with running water! Although the pipes seem to only work between three and six in the morning, also the sink leaks constantly and the repair man is a VERY old VERY drunk man who always insists he will only take ten minutes and I end up kicking him out after three hours. No big deal though brushing my teeth over a sink is so refreshing. So then continuing down the hallway we have another bedroom, then the room I chose for myself then at the end of the hall a door that I have closed off with two big bedrooms. So basically if anyone wants to come visit, I have PLENTY of room.

Added note from Mom. Claire says this is just the beginning of blogs from Nyanaza-much more to come!

Amputation

After a great weekend in Butare, Shira and I were reminded of how much we love it down there and looked to our return here with a sense of dread. Ugh, the campsite, we thought. In Butare our friends have showers and toilets! Such luxury. A few notes on my time in Butare:

-Children in Rwanda seem to have a universal love of adrenaline. My anxiety levels were at an all time high all the way to Butare (five hours) because the local children think it is absolutely hilarious to stand in front of the bus as it literally careens towards them upwards of 80 mph until the last possible second. So I end up being the strange mzungu in the front of the bus letting out little yelps at every close call.

-Rwandese HATE the rain. It rains all the time and still wherever I am turns in to a ghost town at the slightest drop of moisture. Shira and I were trying to get a bus in Kigali on the way home and literally could not get to the ticketing agents since the bus terminals were full from people ‘escaping’ the drizzle. So instead it was a little like being in a zoo. They stared at the stupid mzungus in the rain and we stared back with a combination of frustration, confusion, and desperation.

-Umuganda is no joke. On the last Saturday of every month Rwanda screeches to a halt. Umuganda is a governmental policy whereby everyone must do public works. Although it was in place pre-1994, I gather that the government ramped it up in more recent years as a solidarity effort. I was staying with Elizabeth in Save, about twenty minutes outside of Butare and when we tried to go in on a mini-bus on Saturday we waited about an hour before we finally caved and paid for a moto.

Alas, we have returned to Kabarore, where the school situation has gone from bad to worse. I was concerned about the amount of hours I am teaching as well as the actual need for a history teacher since there is a geography teacher who would have covered history as well had I not shown up. So my field director called my headmaster to discuss this and told me he was sick in the hospital in Kigali. When we went to the Chicken dinner he had been complaining about his foot. He had stepped on a nail the day before. Well when we got to school our favorite teacher Alex was very upset. The headmaster was going to have his leg amputated! We’re still not clear if it has actually happened or not but the situation seems very dire.
So there we are no headmaster and we asked about the Director of Studies and found out he had disappeared, no one knew where he was. Great. So then, I went to teach the Senior 5’s history and about 150 students greeted me. Without any chain of command to speak of, all the Senior 4’s had started to arrive and since there are only two dormitories they had changed one of the three classrooms in to a dormitory thus all the students crammed in to two classrooms. I didn’t teach that day. The Director of Studies has since decided to grace us with his presence and we are now renting classrooms from a local primary school that is a thirty-minute walk up and down a huge hill.

So we’ll see how that all shapes up. Although, we went to the primary school and little kids are just so gosh darn cute so I can’t really complain. I got out of the car and all the kids sprinted towards me and then stopped about two feet away and stared. That whole zoo thing again. One cautiously approached me and I gave her a hug and that was the opening of Pandora’s box. Everyone wanted a hug, until the very mean school prefects came around with their sticks and started hitting the kids and yelling at them to leave us alone. I forgot all cultural sensitivity and started wondering to Shira in a very loud voice why they were doing that and commenting that they shouldn’t be so mean. All to no avail since I don’t think they spoke a word of English. Have I mentioned how rural we are? This school is about five times more rural then the town we live in! Basically the more rural, the less second language whether it be English in the North of French in the South.

I forgot to mention how good I am doing with all the cows. Those who know me well know I have a completely irrational fear of cows. Funny I know but I have been in very close range with them pretty much every day and I’m getting used to it. And these aren’t those nice looking cows, they have HUGE horns so I’m very proud of myself. Furthermore, I have a collection of pet goats. They commonly meander in to the classroom which I think is hilarious and in turn my students think its hilarious that I even react at all.

Remember the houseboy Kado? That definitely was not his name. Amos has procured a new houseboy (who doesn’t cook plantains for every meal! It’s the little things.) and when he called him over to introduce him he yelled Kado and Shira and I, being the two most naïve people on the planet, went ohmigosh that’s so funny! They have the same name! Amos just looked at us and said, quite unenthused, no, Kado means young boy in Swahili. Riiiight, and then he didn’t even know the kids name! So I guess to Amos they pretty much do have the same name. Just another one of those cultural things to be sensitive about…

So that’s about it. Send positive energy to our headmaster. I have been paying very close to where I walk since the consequences for stepping on sharp objects seems to be so severe!