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!