Things that made me smile today

I’ve realised my blog makes it sound like life over here is kind of difficult. It’s really not, sometimes I just have a nice day, but I don’t write about it. So these are the things that made me happy today. (I’m easily pleased)

1.       My chicken, Gladys. And two others called Inkoko koko and Jimmy, but Gladys is my favourite.

2.       The lovely email that was waiting for me when I got into work this morning.

3.       Two men eating canned fish and having a little dance before 8am. This morning Tricia and I called into the shop to get chapattis and eggs. The shop beside work is not unlike Yourells shop in Dunboyne used to be, except you can buy a snack and eat it at the counter, and dance.

4.       The stadium behind my house, why am I only realising now how great it is there? Rose and I have found somewhere to run without being harassed, and there are no hills!

5.       The little girl who lives on my road. She’s about four, and she’s so cute! She hugs me every time I see her. Then she asks me my name. Either she has a shit memory, or that’s the only English she knows.

Feeling a bit more settled

Slowly but surely, a strange thing has happened. I’m starting to feel like everything around me is normal. Now, I still never know what’s going on, everyday at least one thing happens that I can’t fathom (e.g. We’re driving along the side of a mountain, the moto driver suddenly stops, starts shouting, gets me off the bike, and speeds off, leaving me alone in the middle of nowhere. No problem, I didn’t need to know why he threw that Mickey fit, sure enough the other driver came back after a while to tell me that driver #1 had gone to get his brakes fixed and would be back to get me soon. You just never know what is going on here)  I still notice and love the differences, like how beautiful the countryside is, and the way the people are, and  the amazing journey through the mountains to get to school, etc, etc, but things that used to confuse me are becoming normal. Like today when a gang of little boys joined me on my run, that was fine, it seemed normal. Or while I was waiting (for ages) at the bank and saw a man sitting on top of another man and holding his hand when there were loads of free seats, that was normal. The nightmare journey to Ngororero? I did it again last week. It was grand. When people I don’t know follow me and want to know all about my personal life and ask for my number, I don’t get freaked out. I also don’t give them my number, but I can say no without being rude. I can even pee in a hole in the ground without complaining. much. I don’t think the goats are amusing anymore. I was uncomfortable when Beate and Felicien thought they had to clean my shoes, but not anymore. Now I just hide my shoes if they’re muddy.  It’s funny how quickly we adapt. It’s not just me, one volunteer (who shall remain nameless) told me that a while ago, she saw her own arm, and for a split second she thought ‘oh yeah, I’m white!’. I just stayed with priests for two nights, and spent my evenings making small talk with a man in a Hawaiian shirt with holy Mary on it, and that wasn’t odd at all. OK that was a lie, the priests were a bit funny. Oh and getting our hair cut in Kigali, when Rose and I ended up doing each others hair in the hairdressers chair, that was a mad experience. OK forget the adapting idea, I still think Rwanda is mad and I still love it for being different!

I mean, I’m only here a few weeks and I’m still a fish out of water. There’s some things I will never get used to. Like the conditions in schools. It’s difficult to write about this but I want to write about the schools we work in. Basically, we forget how lucky we are in Ireland. Schools here have NOTHING. Tricia and I have just completed two weeks of observations in schools in a remote sector. What we saw was a real eye opener. The schools usually have uneven earth floors, sometimes the children have only low benches to sit on with no tables to write on. They have no colours or pencils and a shortage of paper, so they don’t draw or do free writing. The walls are bare, there are no resources to put up but even if there were, the walls are these dusty bricks, you can’t get a nail into them and nothing sticks. Classes are huge. I went to a nursery where one teacher had 81 three year olds. And they were as good as gold, I don’t know how she got them to be like that. The children seemed so happy to be in school, they were all smiles. You should have heard them when they started singing, I have never seen or heard anything so cute!!!! The teachers get paid a pittance and work double shifts, which means they teach from 7am until 5. (sometimes factor in an hour or more each way, walking to school and home on top of this long day)There is no such thing as special needs, resource teachers  or even differentiation. One head teacher introduced us to a little girl with no legs. She drags herself around the school on her hands and knees. She’s been provided with an old battered wheelchair, but it has to stay in the classroom because it can’t cope with the mountain the school is on. There is no support or help for her at the moment. Another head teacher I met when I visited Pauline’s school told us that the children are all hungry in that school, they are lucky if they eat once a day. There is a milk for schools scheme, but the really needy schools don’t get it because they are too far away from the road. He told us that a lot of children don’t even get to go to school, because you aren’t supposed to go if you don’t have shoes and a lot of families can’t afford shoes for their children. Another school has very poor attendance because the children are out working. In 6^th class, there are very few boys, and only one of them passed his exams last year.

It’s all just so so sad. We’ve met teachers who are so hard working and inspiring and enthusiastic, I really admire them and I hope we can be helpful in some way when we start the training workshops in June.

I’ve realised how miserable this blog has turned! If anybody reading this thinks I need to tone it down, please tell me! And I’m so happy to be in Rwanda, the poor teachers have a tough time but I’m really looking forward to starting the training and doing something constructive. Apart from work, this week I’m going to Kigali for fun and food and the cinema and we’re doing a fun run on Sunday so the next blog entry will be nicer.  And to end on a very happy note – I don’t want to speak too soon but it’s been really sunny recently and I think the dry season has arrived!

The muzungus guide to matatus

On Monday, I took a Matatu from Gitarama to Ngororero by myself. I will never, ever, complain about the 70 ever again. I don’t think Matatus are always so dramatic, I think I was just unlucky that evening? Here’s instructions for how to get from my house to Paulines’

1.       Go to the bus park. Ask the drivers of the fuller busses if they’re going to Ngororero. When they say no, realise with a sinking heart that the empty Matatu is the one you have to get. Empty is bad because the bus won’t leave until it’s full.

2.       Get on the bus. Wait.

3.       Wait.

4.       Wait.

5.       Have a conversation with the man beside you about your age, job, where you live, marital status. Run out of words you know in Kinyarwanda. Sit pressed together not talking for a while. But this silence won’t last long. (see no.6)

6.       Ask the passenger beside you to stop playing with your bra strap. If you don’t know how to say this, just say ‘Oya!’ (no) then give him your most angry look.

7.       Wait.

8.       Wait.

9.       C’mon, it’s been an hour and a half.

10.   And you will be so squished you will think you are going to die from suffocation.

11.   Keep waiting for the bus to start driving.

12.   Develop claustrophobia.

13.   Now, no matter how uncomfortable you are, do NOT open door so you can breathe. Some big bags will fall out the door from under your seat if you do. And you will feel really stupid.

14.   Finally, after two hours, the bus will start! Yay!

15.   Now the trick is to hold on. At this point you will be so squashed that you physically cannot move any part of your body. That’s OK, bits of you will go numb after a while. The reason you are holding on is because there is a chance the door will slide open a bit while you’re whizzing around a corner. But if it does open, don’t worry, give a shout and the bus driver will stop and fix it. And everybody will laugh at how scared you are.

16.   The bus may fill with black smoke. Again, don’t worry, the bus driver will stop and sort it out.

17.   After a while the bus will stop to let more people on. You might think the bus physically cannot hold any more passengers, but you’re wrong. Even if there are no actual seats left, it is possible to crowd surf head first into the bus. The good thing about this is everybody will laugh at the crowd surfing man. And it will feel good that people are laughing at somebody who isn’t you. However if you get too caught up in the hilarity, people will start laughing at you again. You will know this is happening because they will be saying something about ‘muzungu’ while they laugh.

18.   If you realise that you have been on the bus more than 2 hours, that’s OK. Don’t panic and assume you’re on the wrong bus. Sometimes the journey takes a bit longer.

19.   There may come a point where you wish you never got on this bus.  Just remind yourself that this will be a good story to tell in the pub at some later stage. And anyway, everybody else on the bus is happy out. It can’t be that bad…

20.   You might want to have money handy. There’s a chance the bus driver may stop to buy meat from a stall at the side of the road. (Not always, so don’t rely on it)He will ask you if you want to buy some too.

21.   Eventually you will get to Ngororero!!! And you will be so happy! Don’t forget to thank the bus driver and wish him ‘mura muke’.Some of the people who had been laughing at you will shake your hand and say goodbye. See, they didn’t mean any harm!

*Oh, it’s important to add, the journey was worth it. Ngororero is gorgeous. And I had a lovely time with Pauline. And she gave me an omelette. With CHEESE. And she has proper chocolate. I’m doing the same journey again next Thursday, wish me luck!

Umuganda

So, at 8.15 this Saturday morning, I found myself with my kind of hoe-shovel thing and my workboots, covered in mud, working away shoulder to shoulder with my neighbours to dig a trench and widen a path close to my house. I think I’m actually quite good at manual labour, I don’t think anybody agrees with me though… So for anybody who isn’t living in Rwanda, I should explain about Umuganda. Every month on the last Saturday, everybody meets up to work on their local area. From what I can make out the work varies, they just do whatever needs to be done. It’s taken quite seriously, public transport doesn’t run on these mornings because you’re not supposed to leave your town, everybody is supposed to pitch in and when I was there a lady went around with a list of attendance. As foreigners, we can get away without doing it but I thought I should go at least once to see what happens.

I’m delighted with myself that I went. I attempted chatting to my new neighbours in very bad French and even worse Kinyarwanda. A lot of people laughed at me hoeing. Apparently I’m hilarious. I laughed a bit too, I also thought it was slightly surreal that I was there.  Children swung out of my plaits and rubbed my sunburnt arms. A few women took my hoe out of my hand to examine me for rough skin and blisters, shaking their heads. A man showed me the best way to hack into the grass and then use my hoe to kind of shovel the dirt off the path. Even though it was a kind of strange experience, and I probably wasn’t very useful, I felt like it was a good thing to take part in.

 When it was over we all sat on the ground while the leader of our umudugudu gave a speech. They LOVE speeches here. I sat on the ground for about two hours getting sunburned and listen to Kinyarwanda, the only word I understood was ‘muzungu’, said in a sentence with emphasis and dramatic gestures in my direction. He sounded really angry, I imagined he was saying something along the lines of ‘the muzungu is crap at digging’ but I was told afterwards that he was saying he was happy that I was there, I’m an example!

So in other news this week, I had my first day in my work, we went to the office and then had an unplanned drive up to one of the sectors we’ll be working in. This entailed a few hours drive through beautiful mountains, a near death experience where I really thought we were going to go backwards over the side of a mountain, and a marathon singalong with Tricia, Ann, and a lot of children.  I also shadowed Julia at work and got to see a few schools in her district. We don’t realise how lucky we are in our schools in Ireland. I sat in on a Chemistry lesson with 89 students. 89! I got to read the Gruffalo, my favourite story, to a class outdoors under a tree. That school was in a remote area and I don’t think they see many white people, I’d been warned about the swarming but it’s really weird when you have loads of little hands coming at you to feel your arms and your hair.  But anyway after my introduction to the schools I can’t wait to start working in my own district!

Two other brilliant things happened this week. I got hot water in my house!!!!!!!! There are no words for how much this pleases me! And also I had my fist trip to the local gym. It’s very different to the one at home. Also I made the mistake of turning up early, by myself, so I was ‘helped’ around all the different equipment before the class started.  But still, jumping around to music looking silly is the same in any language, and it was so much fun! Sarah – over here ‘super’ is just ‘Hey!’ 

Oh and I had a little trip to Kigali. I got the bus in and stayed in the VSO dorm with Julia, Rose, Pauline and Christine. It felt like a little holiday! We went to the cinema in Nyamarambo, and then today the sun was shining, we ate lovely food and then, for something to do, we went to a very strange karaoke mass. Despite the singing and clapping, I can cross Anglican off the list of religions I might convert to. There was an awkward moment when they made us stand up and introduce ourselves, then they sang at us and blessed us. And the best song was the one where all the little kids got up on the stage and sang ‘Satan is a loser man’!

 And then the last little weird thing was the man who sat down the back of the bus with us, with his arm around Pauline for the whole journey. No reason, he didn’t talk to us or anything, he just was comfortable like that.

So, it’s late and I have to get up at a ridiculous hour tomorrow. I should get my beauty sleep. Night night!