Chubs

You know when you wake up in the morning and you think, “Man I feel chubby” or “Wow these jeans are fitting pretty loosely!” but it’s such a minor loss or gain that you assume no one else will notice let alone care? Turns out they do notice and in Rwanda in particular they definitely care. Never has my weight been so closely monitored, and oddly enough it comes at a time in my life when I could care less how much I do or don’t weigh. Yesterday I got, “Your waist is small size, you are hungry!” Today it was “Claire! Your booty is very big, you have eaten!” Booty I’m assuming is a legacy of Beyonce’s popularity. Sometimes it’s as blatant as “ You are fat!” exclaimed with immense pleasure as being fat in a hungry nation carries an entirely different connotation than it would at home. Other times it’s, “Claire you will die.” And me saying, “What? Why?” “You must eat or you will die.” I honestly cannot have gained or lost more than five pounds since my initial weight loss in Kabarore but the entire female staff at my school is paying the utmost attention to how tightly or loosely my clothes fit on any given day. While the focus seems to be especially on weight, it’s as if I have five mother hens all commenting on some aspect of my appearance, especially now that I have become closer with all of them. Mama Cyizere (my Rwandan mom) in particular loves to comment on my hair (too short. “You are a mzungu! You must grow your hair!) my clothes (not stylish. “OOOO is this the mzungu style? It’s not Rwandan, Rwandans don’t like it.”) my food (not great. “It’s ok because you are not Rwandan and Rwandan women must know how to cook.”) or even my glasses ( snobby. “ O you are rich! Only rich people wear glasses, you want everyone to know you are rich.”) Finally after I’d had about enough I said, You and Mama Shema always make comments about me, why? Don’t worry!” I said it in my most joking happy tone but still she looked shocked, “because we love you!” she replied. So there you have it, she really does treat me like daughter and takes very good care of me so I love her too.
The female staff at my school are all in the administration with the exception of one female religion teacher (another mother hen) which I think really sends the wrong message at a science school but hey who am I to judge? Speaking of judging I had an awkward encounter with my favorite Senior 4’s today when I was attempting to define the word empowerment. I tried to explain the word through the context of female empowerment and cited the example of only girls cleaning the classroom every night while the boys play sports. It drives me crazy. So I said, “Girls empower yourselves tell the boys to clean, why should you have to?” To which every single student, male and female, responded in unison, “It is our culture!” Alrighty then, I guess we’ll leave that one alone. It’s a strange paradox though considering Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in government of any democratic country in the world.
I got a taste of that very government when I went to Kigali to attempt to file for NGO status in Rwanda. Holy bureaucracy! Once I finally found the office (underground one floor and down a very long hall in a huge soviet style ministry building) I was greeted by two people sitting at card tables and on plastic chairs but with really nice flat screen computers. This seems to be a theme in Rwanda as Kagame has decided to model Rwanda after Singapore and attempt to be the I.C.T hub of Africa. Never mind that Singapore is surrounded by water and Rwanda is landlocked or that I spend most computer classes trying to get the students to understand that to open something on the desktop you double click not simply highlight and then sit waiting for it to open. Another example, my school received a reward of 40 brand-new computers from the ministry (not really sure what for) which have been sitting in a room since April because they don’t have the money to build the desks to put them on. Meanwhile, I’m struggling through I.C.T class with fifty students and five computers! So anyway I found the office and the man was very nice if not slightly confused about the incentives for actually acquiring NGO status. I went with my Articles of Incorporation and IRS forms to which he smirked and handed me a list 13 items long that was required. The list included such necessities as a detailed list of ever donor who is or who might ever provide funding, a signed memorandum of understanding between the Minister of Education and the fund, a letter of support from the District Mayor of Nyanza as well as the Governor of the Province. I smirked right back and inquired, “So why do I really need to register? Theoretically I could just pay the fees without the government knowing right?” He looked schocked. “We will punish you if you don’t!” “With taxes? Or fines?” “ No no you don’t have to pay taxes! But we want to recognize you for all the good you do for our country!” So jump through hoops and we will thank you. I walked out of the office with the list slightly more confused then I was at the beginning, but then I went for an amazing pizza and the trip to Kigali wasn’t all for nothing in the end!
It’s exam time again. I hate exams. There’s no bigger blow to the ego then when a student fails an exam. It really upsets me. I’ve been educated in a system that requires you to apply theories and concepts on exams not simply regurgitate them and I can’t seem to get that form of test-taking to translate. This term we’ve been discussing formatting in Word, which is mostly me teaching how to change a font and go from single to double-spaced. Instead of asking them to recount the steps necessary to make a word bold and italicized on the exam, I wrote a word out different ways and asked them to identify the word that actually was both. I seriously almost had a mutiny on my hands. They were beside themselves! I still can’t understand the difficulty but it culminated in me promising to only have that question count for half a point to get them to be quiet as I wasn’t sure if their griping in Kinyarwanda was just that or also them exchanging answers! As much as it sucks when a student fails the students who really apply themselves and want to do well make it all worth it. It’s so cute when they all run up to me afterwards asking for the answers and whoop if they got a particularly difficult question correct.
I feel a little condescending calling my students cute since I would estimate that about 30% of them are older than me. I’ve become a bit more of a disciplinarian this term. I get that some students are going to talk but the acoustics in the classroom are so bad that if a student is whispering in the back they may as well be chatting right next to me. I also invariably look at the wrong side of the room when a student asks me a question, which is apparently hilarious to the students. Also hilarious, my duck and cover position anytime one of the huge, (apparently harmless) wasps comes flying in but hey, that’s just self-preservation. The other day the computer lab was locked and my key wouldn’t work because another key was in the other side of the door so I started banging. All the students outside started tapping on the window saying, “Prof!” or “mzungu!” Which I think did more harm than good because the students inside were obviously doing something they were not supposed to be doing such as watching “Kobe’s 10 greatest plays” on YouTube which seems to be a favorite, but the computers are so miserably slow that it takes about 2 minutes to get any window that is open off the screen. So as predicted, about 2 minutes later, they finally opened the door. I was livid. It was a bunch of Senior 6’s (the oldest kids) and I started yelling at them. Two of them were Kurera so they booked it out of there hoping I wouldn’t recognize them but then the rest just stared at me as if my tirade was incredibly boring. So I was like alright you wanna do this? We can do this. Only actually saying that would have been completely lost on them. I said, “Get out your discipline cards!” An initial look of shock came over all of their faces followed by the most wounded puppy dog look I’ve ever seen. It was as if I had completely broken their hearts, so I started laughing, somewhat hysterically, because sometimes the relative absurdity of my life gets me in stitches and lapsed right back in to easy-going young teacher Claire and asked, “So what’s so exciting anyway?” To which a collective sigh of relief was breathed.