The First Day of School

(This actually happened yesterday but the internet was acting up last night so I didn’t get it up)

Yesterday was the first day of a new school year here in Rwanda.  It was quite the sight coming out of the Village in the morning and looking up to see 500 students filing out of the dining hall and walking together up the giant hill to the school.

They began the day with a welcome ceremony.   All 500 students stood in the courtyard of the school for the better part of an hour before classes began.  After singing the national anthem, and introducing the new teachers, the Principal addressed the group.  Because the speeches were all in Kinyarwanda, one of the teachers translated for us.  The Principal spoke of the necessity for students to work very hard in school in order to be successful and achieve their goals.  He spoke of the role of the teacher as that of a guide helping them to stay on the path to success rather than being a vault of all knowledge.  And he spoke of the importance in doing lots of schoolwork as a way to stay out of trouble.

The school for the most part is a separate piece of the Village.  All the students in the Village go there but the teachers do not live or interact much in Village life.  I think this separation is important for both the students and teachers.  It allows the students to have lives outside of their school time hours and it allows teachers to maintain a relationship with their students that is professional and focused on their learning.

There were quite a few speeches to start the year, and each really stressed the student’s responsibility to work very hard in order to be successful.  The Village staff and teachers are there to help and support students as they navigate their four years of high school but the bottom line is: if the students do not do the work, they will not be successful.

The students here seem to embrace the challenge of a tough and rigorous school schedule because they know that through education they will be able to achieve their dreams.  Students here are in class from 7:30am to 2pm and attend classes in 2-5 different subjects during that time depending on their year and the day of the week.

Many of the students I have spoken to here, want to be doctors or businessmen/women when they grow up.  When I ask them why, they tell me it is because they want to help their families, people in their umudugudus (oo-moo-doo-goo-doos meaning neighbourhoods or villages…my favorite Kinyarwanda word!) and other orphans who may not get the chance to come to ASYV.  In case I haven’t said it enough, these students are extremely thoughtful and compassionate individuals.

When the ceremony ended and most of the students went to write exams to see what they remembered from last year.  No better cure for those first day back jitters than 6-8 hours of exams!

One more week and I will be home.  How time flies!

A Typical Rwandan Morning

Now that I am no longer teaching, I have some time to do some more frequent posting about funny things that happen here. I also hope to post about the first day of school ceremony we went to this morning later…..it may be a double feature day!

So as I said, the ‘formal’ English teaching component ended last week as the students are now in school full days. As a result, the other English short term volunteer and I have offered our hands to any of the staff in the Village who may need assistance setting up their specialty areas (ie. science centre, art, farm, computers, etc).

This morning, the arts and crafts department recruited us to help paint numbers on the tables in the dining hall. Each day there are 4 families of students who do ‘service’ where they serve the tables and clean all the dishes. We number the tables so they know which tables they are responsible for.

The way the dining hall is set up is as follows. Two long tables are pushed together to make a super long table that can hold 20-22 people. There are 28 of these super long tables split into 2 columns to fill the dining hall. Each super table is assigned a number and that number is painted on both tables that make up the super table. Ideally the table numbers in column 1 are 1-15 and column 2 are 16-28.

Now we didn’t know before we agreed to help paint numbers on tables that we wouldn’t in fact be seeing any paint whatsoever. We arrived in the dining hall to learn that some tables were numbered already, but that they were not organized chronologically. They also added new tables to make room for the new students so many tables were not numbered at all. Many of the super tables were made up of mismatched numbered tables and these were spread all over the dining hall. Needless to say, we found ourselves in the middle of a big giant table puzzle.

Now, you may be asking yourself – how would I solve this problem of arranging the table numbers chronologically? Well, I would paint over the numbers and leave the tables as they were. But here in Rwanda, we spent the better part of three hours moving each and every (EXTREMELY heavy) table around the dining hall until the ones that had numbers were organized chronologically and then we filled in the gaps with the blank tables. Of course this also involved pulling out, stacking, un-stacking and replacing the over 600 chairs that accompany each of these tables.

Where I am frustrated by processes that are different from what I am used to, the staff here smile throughout the entire process and then at the end hug you and tell you what a good job you did! You quickly forget how frustrating the process was and everyone is happy again!

Teaching and Technology

Last week I had a great opportunity to chat with my grade 8 Humanities class via Skype all about my experiences in Rwanda so far.  Skype is risky business here as the power tends to go out at the most inopportune times and the Internet continually resets itself resulting in dropped calls and a couple minutes of delay before the call can be resumed.  All those things considered — the call went pretty well.  The power stayed on and Internet only cut out twice!

It was really neat to be able to talk to the students in real-time and explain to them what I’m doing and answer their questions.  I didn’t prep them properly for what I would be doing here before I left because I wasn’t even completely sure so the call made for a great opportunity to explain where I was and what I was experiencing.

Check out this blog post by Mr. Jason Leslie, the Principal of Burnett, where he provides his thoughts and perspectives having been on the other side of that Skype call.

This trip has provided me an excellent opportunity to explore the uses of blogging and Skype.  I am definitely enjoying engaging with these mediums as it has given me a great reason to really reflect on all that is happening here so I can share it in a way that welcomes you into this experience and maybe provides others with some new learning or knowledge.

In the field to education we are constantly talking about what to make of the role of technology in our classroom.  Some teachers embrace it through and through while others like to provide an environment free of that constant stimulation – and the rest, like myself, fall somewhere in between.  I am interested in engaging with new forms of technology if I feel they can help to improve the quality of my lessons or enhance the students learning but sometimes find it overwhelming to determine which of these pieces is effective or useful as opposed to simply being a distraction.

There is also the issue of resources and whether we are well equipped enough to ensure that all students have equal access to the technologies we try to incorporate.  After a week of teaching here in Rwanda, I have come to greatly appreciate the resources we do have – even if they sometimes feel limited. .  Let me provide an example of how different things are here:

Here in Rwanda, everyone is very good at just going with the flow.  They plan for something and hope it works and if it doesn’t, it is fine, the students will wait until we figure out where they go next (I think they call this skill patience….). This is what happened during computer class last week.  Apparently no one had a key to the computer rooms (though they were magically opened when class started) and so no one had checked to see if the computers were working after not having been used since November.  They weren’t.  And then the few that were working, no one knew the login ID or passwords to get into Windows.  Needless to say in a room of 30 computers, only 10 were working and this was ok.  As one of the Rwandan staff said to me: “it’s good we have 10, it is possible we could have had 0.”  Right.

Comparatively speaking, the school here in the Village is far better equipped than the majority of schools in this country – but compared to what we have at home, is still extremely limited.  Even as we were preparing lessons, getting supplies like chart paper, pens, flash cards, or other materials was difficult.  My lessons were mainly taught with students sitting in a circle, discussing questions or vocabulary words we had written out on paper and stuck to the window of the house with a post-it.

Yet, the students here are so passionate and committed to their learning.  They don’t need bright power points or YouTube videos to engage them – they are simply engaged in the conversation and learning that is happening around them.  They aren’t exposed to and therefore do not need that constant stimulation.  The technology allows for different and really effective learning opportunities, which I hope my students at home recognize and appreciate through reading my blog and chatting on Skype.  But so much of the beauty of this place is in the simplicity – that there are limited things distracting the students from building relationships with each other and engaging in their learning.

As you can probably tell, I do not really know where I fall on this debate.  I am a big supporter of technology and use much of it in my life and in my classroom – but the pace of the Village has really made me question whether we are missing out on the larger purpose of teaching and especially of learning, because we are so distracted with being ‘tuned in’ to the most current technologies.

I love comments so please feel free to share your thoughts!!

If You See Far, You Will Go Far

The inspiration for this post comes from the first few days of teaching I’ve done here at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village.

The 128 students in the Village have been broken up into 3 levels for their English classes: beginner, intermediate and advanced, based on a short and subjective assessment done by the long term volunteers prior to our arrival.  Many of the volunteers were unsure whether they placed the students correctly; needless to say, we didn’t have much of an idea what to expect going into the first day.  I am teaching the ‘advanced’ English class where, as it turns out, most students are fluent enough to maintain good conversation.

My teaching partner and I planned a mini-unit based on her observations of students in her ‘family’ that were placed in our level.  We aimed to connect our content with many of the conversations the students have been having in their families during the course of their first week.   It is the first time many of them are setting goals for the future and thinking about bringing change to their lives and we decided to build on that through our discussions during this week.

It has been eye opening for me to learn about the way these students see the world.  In North America we spend the majority of our time teaching history from a European context and even though we both recognize and teach the consequences of colonization and the havoc that it wrecked on much of the developing world – it is a much different perspective speaking to students whose entire lives have been defined by the Belgian colonizers division of the Rwandan population which ultimately led to the genocide.

This is the only context many of these students have for understanding the history and tragedy that has engulfed their lives.  In my classrooms at Burnett, there are diverse groups of students who come from various backgrounds, with different histories and understandings of the world.  Because of this constant exposure to various perspectives, our students are familiar with looking at history through many lenses and respecting the opinions of their peers regardless of whether they agree with them or not.  I found here this past week, that things work a bit differently.  Let me give you an example.

I was talking with my students here about what makes a good leader.  We had brainstormed a list of traits that the students identified with someone who is a leader (Obama is a fan favorite around here, so he made for a great example!).  We had spoken about Hitler and the Holocaust the previous day and so I asked them whether they thought Hitler was a good leader.    We went back and forth for a while and there was one student who was strongly advocating in support of Hitler.  In fact, he so strongly believed in Hitler as a leader, that to him, the role Hitler played in the murder of millions of innocent people was a small almost irrelevant blip in an otherwise unblemished career in politics.  The rest of the students in the class were beginning to get quite heated trying to reason with him.  At that point I cut the conversation and finished the lesson but was a bit uneasy about the aggressive and somewhat ignorant mindset of this young man.  With his limited language it was a difficult thing to address so my teaching partner and I decided to leave it for now.

About 20 minutes later, I had returned to my house and was typing up the lesson I had just finished on my porch when 3 other young men from my class approached me.  They had come to apologize for the other student.  They began by telling me that they were orphans because of the genocide, and if anyone had said something good about the people who murdered their families they would not be able to be around them.  They were very concerned that because I was Jewish, I may have been offended by this boy’s argument and they were upset by that.  It was a teachable moment handed to me on a silver platter.  I first reassured them that I was not upset by his comments and in the conversation that ensued we talked about the responsibility that we each have as people, to share our histories in order to teach each other.  We talked about the value in trying to understand where others may be coming from, respecting their histories and being tolerant and accepting of views that may different from their own – regardless of whether you agree or not.  It was an extremely powerful conversation that made me smile, and reminded me (once again) of how lucky and grateful I am to be here.

Since then, I have been trying to determine how best to articulate the way those students impressed and inspired me.  They signify a common value I have seen amongst most of the students here — one of compassion.  At the end of the day, these are kids.  They are kids that have lived the majority of their lives with no parents; they have raised and protected younger siblings, cousins and friends and yet, they are not jaded.  They have picked up and moved away from a world they know, to be with 128 strangers who they have taken in as their brothers and sisters without a moment’s hesitation.  Everywhere you look kids are walking hand in hand or arm in arm with people they have known for a week.   They believe the world can be a better place, and they want to learn as much as they can in order to make it so.  It seems so cliché to us in North America, but as I looked into the faces of those three young men, I could see the compassion, integrity and perseverance that will take them very far in their lives.

I can’t wait to see what will become of Rwanda in years to come, because if these are their leaders of tomorrow, they will be in very, very good hands.

A Visit to Rubona

After a long 4 hour class this morning, the 4 of us short term English volunteers ventured out of the Village to check out the local market in the town of Rubona about 15 minutes down the road.

The Village is not exactly what many would expect from a rural ‘village’ in Rwanda.  In fact, I would argue all things considered it is quite luxurious.  There is plumbing, electricity and in the guesthouse where we are staying, there is even hot water! The grounds are meticulously maintained with beautiful flowers, grass and a variety of different plants.

It was definitely a reality check for us to venture out into Rubona.  It is a very poor town in the Ramagana District of the Eastern Province of Rwanda and represents how much of the Rwandan population live.

On Tuesdays they have a market in Rubona where they sell fruit, vegetables and a variety of fried breads.  As you can imagine, 4 very white people walking through this market drew a lot of attention, especially from kids who followed us throughout the market and into the stores surrounding it.  We picked up some bananas, really good Rwandan tea and a variety of different breads to bring back with us.  Here is a really quick video I snapped while heading out of the market.

The level of poverty was clearly apparent in the types of small shacks or houses where people lived and the appearance of the children.   But the people were so friendly, the kids were playing with each other, teenagers were dancing to rap music on the side of the road and women sat together in groups laughing away.   Children followed us most of the way down the road trying to hold our hands or get their pictures taken.

Many of these people depend highly on the Tuesday market to ensure they have enough money to get them through the week but there is also something special in the camaraderie of the market.  From my short time there, I got the sense that this was a social endeavor as well as a financial one.  People seemed happy to be visiting with each other.  In North America we have so much, and much of the time we weigh our happiness on the value of our material worth and in that process lose the simple pleasures of spending time with good people.

Many of these people struggle to meet their basic needs on a daily basis.  Children run around with ripped clothing and no shoes but with huge smiles on their faces.  It is hard to reconcile the feeling of having so much when many people have so little.  But the comfort and ease with which people interacted with us and with each other was really touching to see.  The feeling of being in this market and seeing a world so different from my own will stay with me as I return home in a couple of weeks.  It is another reminder of how lucky I am, and to not take a single day for granted.

The Students of Agahozo-Shalom

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

The last few days in the Village have been really nice.  We have kind of been tourists  — visiting a bit with students, learning about the village, meeting all the other volunteers as well as doing some preparation to begin teaching tomorrow.  It has been great.  New Years was especially interesting watching the students perform a series of traditional dances, modern dances, songs and skits.  I didn’t understand much but the dancing was awesome.  Check out a short video of the traditional dances here.

The greatest problem in Rwanda after the genocide, was fear that there would be an entire generation lost as a result of the large orphan population that remained.  When Anne Heyman founded ASYV it was to provide an opportunity for these orphans to improve their lives through education, proper health care and social and family support which would ultimately help Rwandan society in the future.

The Village provides 4 years of secondary level education to the students here.  In Rwanda, public education is free from grade 1 to grade 9, at which point many students don’t continue with schooling.  Those that do continue, need to be able to pay for boarding school – which many cannot afford.

The newest students in the Village have completed grade 9 but begin their schooling here in an Enrichment Year, which is sort of a gap year between grade 9 and 10.  Its main purpose is to ensure that students are all around the same level when they enter Senior 4 (which is grade 10).  The way the public school system works here, students just continue through the grades each year, meaning they may not necessarily be at a grade 10 level when they complete grade 9, hence the Enrichment (or Catch Up) Year.   These are the only students in the Village right now until Saturday when the Senior 4, 5, and 6 students (grade 10, 11, 12) arrive.

The process involved in choosing the students who attend school in the Village is lengthy.  The recruiters from the Village get lists from the districts around Rwanda of students who would qualify for admission.  In order to quality students must have completed grade 9, be orphaned (which in Rwanda means only having 1 living parent) and be considered to be living in a ‘vulnerable’ situation.   ‘Vulnerable’ is very loosely defined and leaves room for the recruiters to use their discretion in choosing the students who lives would be the most greatly impacted by being here.  There are 30 districts in Rwanda, 4 students from each come to the Village each year.  This will be the first year that the Village will be at capacity.  Come Saturday, there will be 500 students living and learning in the Village.

Depending on which district in Rwanda the new students have come from they may or may not have any exposure to English.  This where we, the English short-term volunteers come in.  We are going to be spending this coming week teaching English somewhere between 2 and 4 hours a day (because it is Rwanda we will know at 8am on Monday how long classes will be) in the hopes of trying to expose new students to language that will help familiarize them with the Village and to push the learning of those who already have the basic foundations.  I am very excited to get started teaching and get to know some of the students here.

The students in the Village right now are so welcoming to those of us that have just arrived.  Each day we meet new students all with different stories that have brought them to this amazing place.  Relatives or neighbours who already had their own children took some of these orphaned students in after the genocide, but may be struggling to provide for them in addition to their own kids.  I have heard some really sad stories about how some of these students have been treated back at their homes, and about the extreme poverty that some of these students come from.  It is really sad but also really amazing to see how grateful and appreciative these students are for this opportunity.

Many of these students have no concept of what it means to think about the future.   Many aren’t used to thinking past their next meal, so this place is a real adjustment for them.  They pile their plates so high at meals, out of fear that there may not be a next one.  I was told when they first arrived they could not believe their accommodations, where each has their own bed, plumbing and electricity.  Apparently they just jumped all over their beds and couches laughing and giggling with each other.

When the students arrive, they are assigned to a family.  Each family has a family mother who lives with them.  These women have also faced great tragedy as a result of the genocide either having lost their husbands, children, or both and have now gained a new family in the Village.  The families also have siblings who are the native Rwandan staff.  They live in the Village as well, and help the students adjust to their new life and support them with their studies and planning for the future.  The families also have cousins, who are international volunteers that come for a year and work in the Village.  These cousins stay with the family while they are here but when they depart at the end of the year, the families do not get new cousins.  So only  in the Enrichment Year (or 1^st year) does each family have cousins.  The larger aim of this model is for these students to make Agahozo-Shalom their home, that even when they graduate they have a family with many siblings, cousins around the world and a loving Mama.  Something many of these children did not have previous to their arrival here.

Many of the students have told me they are excited to begin learning English.  You can see in their faces and the stories they tell (most of which I get through translation) how much they appreciate and are grateful for being here.  This place will truly change their lives, provide them with learning and opportunity for the future but most importantly provides them a supportive family that they will have the rest of their lives.

These short 2 days here have really made me think about my life, and the people in it.   I am so lucky to have such great friends and a truly amazing family who support and love me unconditionally.    Without you all I do not know where I would be, so thank you all for being in my life.  It is that support and love that has made me who I am and I am truly grateful for that.

Best wishes to you all for a healthy and happy 2012!!

First Few Days

This last week has been a whirlwind.  I spent 30 hours on planes, visited 3 continents, 4 countries and 5 cities but I am finally here and it is unreal.  Let’s start at the top.

I arrived Thursday night and met up with the other volunteers, grabbed some dinner and had a really good shower and sleep at the house owned by the Village in Kigali.

We woke up Friday morning and had a jammed packed day touring Kigali before heading to the Village.  The city of Kigali is quite interesting.  There is evidence of extreme poverty on one side of the street, where people are living in huts made of mud and then mega malls with stores selling electronics and trendy western attire on the other side.  Many of the buildings seem to be left from the days of Belgium colonization and are quite grand and European looking. The city overlooks gorgeous valleys of farms with plush green rolling hills and trees.  After spending a few hours walking around we stopped for a famous Rwanda buffet lunch where dined on local delicacies of rice, beans and potatoes.

From lunch we went directly to the Kigali Genocide Museum.  The museum is extremely well done.  I don’t know what I expected going in but learned quickly that I really didn’t know very much about the genocide and I struggled with some of the images and stories of the atrocities committed here in 1994.  The museum is broken down into 3 sections: The first one documents Rwanda before the genocide and then the genocide itself.  The next one looks at other global genocides like the Holocaust, Bosnia, Armenia and Cambodia.  The last section is a tribute to the children lost during the genocide.  Outside the museum are 3 mass graves that hold over 2500 corpses. It is quite a powerful experience.  The section on the children lost in the genocide was chilling.  They had pictures of the children along with brief descriptions about them, their favorite foods, sayings and way they died, which were described quite graphically.  All in all, the museum I thought was outstanding but made for quite an emotionally exhausting afternoon.

From there, we began our journey to the Village.   It is an hour drive but of course took much longer than that because, as they do in Rwanda, the driver does his errands, picks up other people and random pieces of luggage on the way.  Everything here takes a long time, everything runs late and when it rains, which is daily, nobody goes anywhere until the rain is done! I find it quite humorous, I have to say.

We spent the morning today doing a 2 hour walking tour of the village.  This place is absolutely amazing and unlike anything I have ever seen before.  Firstly, the accommodations are quite luxurious.  Everything was built in the last 5 years and looks very modern.  The grounds are immaculately manicured with tons of plush grass, flowers and trees.  The farm is awesome and grows most of the food that is eaten in the village like pineapples, cabbage, avocados, corn and bananas.  It is also home to 600 chickens and a bunch of cows.  It is very cool, hopefully we will get a chance to do some work on the farm next Saturday.

Sorry for the pretty rote account of the last few days but it is time to get ready for dinner and the New Year’s celebrations of dancing, singing and skits performed by the students so I will update more tomorrow about some of the amazing kids that I have met so far and hopefully post some pictures.

I wish you all a safe, happy and healthy new year!