received pronunciation at Mushushiro

March 5th

I’m determined not to get caught up in office work today, and I certainly don’t want a repeat of yesterday’s fiasco at Gikomero, so I get off as fast as I can in a taxi bus to Mushishiro. I know I’ve been rooked by the convoyeur; he’s charging me 800 which I suspect is the fare for the full distance. But, then, if I had hired a moto it would be around 1500 at the very least, so I’m saving VSO some money. And as usual there’s quite a wait hanging around in the bus park for the taxi bus to fill up.

I know that the school is about 2 miles from the main road, and I’ve been there before ( by accident, en route to somewhere else – the usual mistakes by moto drivers), so I’m confident I can find my own way.

When I get off the taxi bus I’m immediately jostled by moto drivers, all eagerly waiting for the chance to fleece the muzungu. I tell them I’m walking and you should see the sulky looks I get….

It’s a longish but very pleasant walk down the earth road through Mushushiro village and down to the school(s). Its market day and everyone is setting up, but all comes to a halt when a muzungu passes through. Once again, you don’t get many white people this far out, and NEVER on foot. I don’t care; I feel safe and confident that I can handle things; I know where I’m going and it’s a beautiful morning with blue skies, green mountains, and people calling to me from the fields. This is precisely why I came to Africa.

There is a big complex of schools, centred round the paroisse and its church. There are two big established secondary schools, Buringa and ACODES right next to each other, and Mushuishiro primary school where Cathie and I did a training last year. The new Tronc Communc section is a brick built, 1950s block about half way between the primary and the secondary schools, so we have quite an educational complex here.

All the children are on their mid morning r beak when I arrive and I get mobbed, even by these teenagers (and much older than teenagers with some of them). The head, Alphonse, is in a meeting so I am met by the English teacher, who fortunately I have already seen and helped when he has visited the District Office earlier this term. There are four teachers, one of them is experience and the other three are all probationers. None of the probationers has been to teacher training college; their qualification for teaching in a secondary school seems to be that they have finished secondary school themselves. Of course, the rooms are bereft of niceties such as books, posters, equipment of any sort.

Eventually Alphonse, the head, arrives. He’s an enterprising chap and I like him. He’s done a deal with the priests to be able to use a church building which has electricity, so he can bring his own laptop to school and teach some rudimentary ICT to the classes. There are 3 classes with 52 in each and still growing – that’s more children than we’re officially allowed in primary school classes under the nouveau regime. They’re packed into the rooms so that it isn’t easy to move around, and it’s very difficult for the students to get up out of their seats and write on the board.

I watch an English lesson with the experienced teacher; he’s good – calm, in control. He’s teaching phonetics, so we learn to say the vowel sounds correctly, including a very plumy, “RP” version of “O” which would come naturally to a public school girl but sounds hilarious in the middle of Mushishiro.

Then I watch a biology lesson with one of the probationers; he’s a nice lad and knows his science but nobody has taught him any teaching technique. He scribbles all over the blackboard and it’s difficult for the kids to make notes. He talks to the board rather than to the class; he scribbles drawing where he ought to take his time and make the drawings the most important part of his lesson. He suffers badly from the Rwandan mania to classify everything into lists, and doesn’t realise how potent diagrams are as an educational tool. He’s also acutely nervous of having both his directeur and a muzungu inspector in the room with him.

I give him a very positive debrief in front of the head; he’s got the makings of a good teacher and it’s not his fault if the system doesn’t give him any help in teaching technique.

Alphonse is a head teacher with initiative. He’s arranged for two women from the village to come and cook lunches for 70 of his pupils for a nominal sum each; he’s persuaded the priest to let him have use of the church room at weekends so that he can show films to his students and try to build up some sort of team atmosphere among the pupils. After all, he’s very much competing with two far bigger, far more established schools right next door.

The school will be short of rooms again next year, and there is no water on site – they have to use water from the next door schools or from the presbytery tank. That means they’ll be the first to be denied water during the dry season.

Honestly, absolutely nothing seems to have been thought through when setting up these new secondary schools!

I walk back up to the main road; Alphonse comes with me part way. There’s been a head teachers’ meeting in the secteur office all morning and they’re just packing up; I bump into Étienne, the hew head at Cyicaro who I’m visiting on Monday, with his parents’ committee chairmen – two elderly farmers who don’t speak a word of English or French and to whom Etienne has to translate everything.

As I’m walking through Mushishiro market there’s a taxibus almost ready to leave for Gitarama. I can’t believe my luck – I was sitting a good half hour on one this morning before it left the bus park in Gitarama. The convoyeur says its 600 francs to get home. I’m the talk of the bus, and start chatting to anyone around me who talks French. Two men quietly tell me that the fare should be 500, not 600; when I give the convoyeur 500 he doesn’t bat an eyelid.

As I’m drifting back to the District Office after lunch I bump into Raima, who is desperate for some maths materials. I promise to bring her some of the maths games and wall posters that I have in my resource collection; it’ll have to wait till a quiet day.

In the afternoon I write up my report ready to email to Alphonse and give to Claude. Then I get a phone call from Joe, who has somehow managed to miss getting off a bus at Kibuye and has just arrived in Gitarama. Can we put him up for the night? Yes, of course we can.

So when Tom comes home we decide to eat out, and take Joe to Nectar for the joys of “omelette special” (I still can’t open my mouth properly, and Joe is horrified at how swollen my cheek is. I look like a hamster on my left side).

By nine o’clock we’re all tired, so it’s off to bed with Joe on a mattress in the lounge.

Best thing about today – everything. It’s another nice day out in the countryside visiting schools.

a wasted trip to Gikomero

March 4th

Into the office as usual, and I’m expecting to go out to Gikomero school out in the mountains of Nyarusange. But Claude intercepts me and tells me the senior six results (Rwandan equivalent of “A” levels) have just come in and he wants me to do the analysis. That isn’t difficult to do, and only takes me about an hour and a half, but one page of data has gone missing so everything’s incomplete. That keeps happening; it’s because the crafty headteachers intercept the results and accidentally take home with them the original documents. Eventually we will have results available on line and the problem will be solved. Eventually, too, Kigali will do all the analysis automatically and that will save days of work here at District level. Dream on…….

By the time I’ve done all the work for Claude it’s too late to visit Gikomero in the morning, so I decide to go in the afternoon. It’s a nuisance because it’s a fine day, and for once I’m not going to be bothered by torrential rain and muddy roads.

In the afternoon I can’t find a taxibus willing to take me to Gikomero, so I have to hire a big moto. We get to the school and I dismiss my driver, only to find that Vincent, the headteacher, isn’t there. He’s gone to a meeting in Gitarama and I’ve probably passed him on the road. To make things worse, two of his four teachers have also “had” to go to the District to sort out some of their documentation. Two other teachers are not scheduled to teach in the afternoon and are sitting in the staffroom. Meanwhile the three classes are sitting there without anybody teaching them.

I’m cross with myself for messing up the day, and cross with this school. They have decided to work the Rwandan equivalent of a “continental day” with long morning and short afternoon. But on Wednesdays they work a longer afternoon in order to get all the necessary teaching hours in by the end of the week. So why on earth have they all decided to go to Gitarama on a Wednesday and abandon their classes. If this sort of thing happened in England it would lead to formal warnings and threats of dismissal. Here, even in the new TC schools with everything to play for, it seems that you only teach if you can’t find any possible reason not to….

So unfortunately I have no choice but to go back home. It’s a lovely walk of about a mile or so up; a woody, gentle slope, through a couple of villages, to the main road. I get the usual dumbstruck stares from people in the fields and the usual demands for money from little children.

At least I’m able to use the rest of the afternoon to write up some reports and get up to date with paperwork. Nobody’s been expecting me to be able to do anything today because of the state of my tooth – my mouth has ballooned out on the affected side. It doesn’t hurt but it looks spectacular.

In the evening Tom is frantic; he has to prepare lunch for his party of visiting Americans and he has promised them home made Doritos and guacamole, so I’m in charge of doing our own evening meal. Between the pair of us we’re cooking from about half past five until well after nine when we collapse into our beds. God this life is tiring!

Best thing about today – sorting out as much of the “A” level results as I could. Claude had it in his little hand within 90 minutes, which is something of a record!

Worst thing – waste of time and money travelling to a school which I wasn’t able to visit. It had to happen sooner or later. I’m also very conscious that sooner or later I’m quite likely to get seriously stranded overnight in these rural parts. So, the moral of today’s story is that I must make sure I do all my visits in the mornings!

having a tooth out in Kigali

March 3rd

OK, so this is the day I put myself at the tender mercies of Rwandan dentists to have a tooth out. I arrive in good time, having walked the last mile from Kacyiru crossroads. It’s a beautiful morning.

At the dentist I’m seen straight away, and operated on by Mr Longin, the boss man, and the one Christi recommended as being competent and pleasant. The operation takes an hour and a half. It isn’t pleasant, even with anaesthetic. I’m having the lower left 8th tooth removed – a big molar. It’s an inaccessible tooth to begin with. The roots are impacted and fused together, and the dentist has to cut and drill and cut and drill time and again before he can get the roots removed. He is operating very close to a nerve; despite the anaesthetic I keep jumping when he drills close to the nerve and he gives me a second shot of anaesthetic.

When the roots are finally removed – he’s so pleased and relieved himself that he brandishes the bloodstained, infected lump to show me – he has to stitch up my gums to close the wound. I’m still in la-la land with the anaesthetic but even at this stage I know I’m going to feel mightily sore when I come round.

He prescribes painkillers – brufen and codeine; good job I’m not going to be driving.

I settle up with him (RwF37000; a tiny fraction of what it would have cost back home) and set off walking up towards town, finally admitting defeat in the heat and taking a moto to the VSO office.

At VSO, still ga-ga from the anaesthetic, I get a lot of business done. I reclaim my passport, visa and green card. I get clearance to have my mid-term grant paid, which will partly pay the cost of my air fare home in the summer. VSO agrees to repay all my dental charges – hooray because together they have cost me well over a third of my March allowance! There’s various other little admin things to be done at the office, and a lot of emails to catch up on, too.

By the time I leave, early in the afternoon, I can feel my jaw returning to normal. I quickly do some shopping both at Remera and in the town centre, and then realise I need to get home fast and start taking the pain killers. On the bus home I feel terrible; it’s not so much that it hurts - quite honestly it doesn’t hurt much at all. But my face is swollen and my tongue has swollen grotesquely. I can’t swallow properly, and I’m drooling a mixture of saliva and blood. I’m trying hard not to leak this drool all down my shirt; it would certainly put the wind up any Rwandan sitting next to me on the bus!

I had planned to buy bread and vegetables in Gitarama, but when I arrive in town I just want to get home, take my painkillers, and collapse on the bed.

By the time Tom comes home I’m deep asleep, with a bloody, drooly “moustache” all round my mouth. Even Tom admits that I look pretty terrible. On top of everything else we have the usual fault with our electricity meter, so we’re in darkness. And because neither of us has been able to go shopping we’ve got virtually nothing in the house to eat.

So we venture out into the night, and eat at “Nectar”. I reckon I can manage an “omelette speciale” because it’s soft. Swallowing is getting a bit easier and the main problem now is that where the dentist has stitched my face back together it feels tight and I can’t open my mouth wide enough to eat properly. Honestly, today I feel as if I’m about 90 years old. I’ve never seen myself with such a lop-sided face!

Sorry if I’ve bored you with all the grisly details, but all in all it’s been an interesting day. On the plus side there are good, kind and competent dentists in Rwanda (or certainly there’s at least one), which is nice to know. Despite the tooth issue, I have got a lot of sorting out done at the VSO office. True, I haven’t managed to get any school work done, but then there’s always tomorrow!

How not to teach ICT with no computers or electricity.

March 2nd

A generally stressful day today, but a very successful one in the end!

Down to the internet café by quarter past seven to try to print out this CV I have done for Didace, the bank clerk. I’m sure the Office won’t have any electricity, and I want to leave my computer at home when I go to inspect Nsanga school. But, of course, this is Rwanda and nothing works out as you expect.

In the internet café their computers are so old that my Vista isn’t compatible with their ancient version of Windows; it screws up the columns and layout in the CV and looks a mess. I try to correct it with a computer of theirs, but all their equipment is second hand from Dubai or somewhere else in the Gulf; all their keyboards have got Arabic layout (not our QWERTY ones), and all the letters are “in the wrong places”. I’ve promised Didace he’ll have this CV by eight o’clock, and I’m running out of time.

So I hoof it to the District Office, and sure enough they’ve got no power in our block. I can’t get into my own new little office because I left the key with Soraya on Friday, and she, being helpful, left it somewhere in Beatrice’s desk on Friday afternoon for me to find this morning. But with all the change in offices Beatrice can be using any one of three desks, and I have to move Innocent and Mugabo and Claudine aside while I ransack their drawers (so to speak). I spend a good five minutes trying to work out where Soraya has hidden they key, and try out at least half a dozen identical looking ones, but eventually manage to find it. That’s the first good thing to happen today. But I still haven’t got Didace’s CV printed, let alone given to him. By now it’s about five to eight.

I have to go into the other block and beg to use a computer and printer; the woman in the planning department looks down her nose at me and makes excuses about viruses on my flash. I explain that I’ve already checked it this morning, and I’ll check it again in front of her. She’s still very reluctant – how dare she!!! If all her stuff is clean she’ll be the first Rwandan with a computer not infested with viruses! Fortunately she has to dash off to the Monday morning staff meeting, so I’m free to take over her machine whether she likes it or not and print off the CV. I hope to God that nobody else uses her machine while the team meeting’s in progress – if they leave viruses on her computer she’ll assume it was me and come gunning for me tomorrow!

By now it’s starting to rain hard outside. Just what you need when you’ve got a day up in the mountains ahead of you. I decide to lock my computer in my office and take a moto in the rain down to the bank and deliver the CV. Didace is all but pawing the ground when I arrive there at about ten past eight, and I get daggers looks as he waves me to the front of the queue, and daggers again when we part as best friends.

He damn well should be grateful – Tom tells me that local secretarial services charge RwF5000 for what I’ve just done for him, and probably less well laid out and certainly less fluent in English. The reality is that I’ve been stitched up by this bloke, but then he is the cashier at my bank and you never know when it might be useful to have someone you can ask to pay you back a favour….

I squelch back to our flat, and I’ve not been inside more than five minutes when we have a massive thunderstorm and very heavy rain for two and a half hours. Honestly, where’s all this rain coming from?

I’m marooned in the flat. I can’t do any proper work at home because my computer’s at the Office; I can’t work at the office because there’s no power there. So I sit down and relax and read a book for a couple of hours, making endless cups of tea.

By lunchtime I’m bored to tears; the rain has stopped here in the town but I can see the mountains are still swathed in cloud and no doubt rain too, and my school for today is deep in the mountains.

Eventually I drift down to the bus park at about mid-day. I decide to catch a bus up the Ngororero road to Nsanga; it’ll be much cheaper than a moto. Unfortunately it looks as if a bus has just gone, and the next bus only has one other passenger in it at the moment. It means I can claim the best seat at the front but I’m waiting an hour - a whole hour- in the blasted bus park before we get going. Every single beggar in the town comes past me at least once; the one legged old man who’s getting confused comes past three times and each time begs as if it’s the first time he’s seen me. There must be at least a dozen boys selling bread, three selling hats; one selling socks and shirts, and endless women selling little plastic bags of Japanese plums. You can see them take one look at the muzungu and think “oh hell, he’s never going to buy any of this stuff” and off they shuffle to wherever the next taxi bus is loading up.

I have to pay the full fare to Ngororero even though I’m getting off half way there, but its only RwF800, whereas the moto would be at very least 1500 and more like 2000 in wet weather. All the passengers gawp at the muzungu – very few white people go this far up the Ngororero road, and those who do are usually in posh NGO vehicles with private drivers. What poverty stricken white idiot, they think, needs to use the taxibus to get up into these hills?

So by the time I reach Nsanga it’s after two o’clock and I’m going to have to be careful with my time or there’s a real risk I’ll get stranded overnight in the mountains. Very few vehicles indeed will come this way after dark, and the chances of any of them stopping for a hitch hiker – even a muzungu one – are vanishing small.

But as soon as I get out of the taxi bus it’s glorious – beautiful scenery, total silence except for the noise of streams and birds and the distant noises from goats and cattle. It’s rustic Rwanda in all its grinding poverty, ragged clothes, and smelly people, but boy, is it beautiful to look at. In the very far distance I can see one of the volcanoes; I’m not sure whether it’s Karasimbi or Muhabura because I can’t tell them apart unless I’ve got some of the others to orientate myself.

Charles, the head of the tronc commun section of the school, is a charming man, and we get on well. He comes from Kibungo and is delighted when I tell him I know it. A large number of pupils from the school – primary and secondary – are off for a sports fixture this afternoon, and what with that and the rain the two head teachers and assumed I wasn’t going to arrive. They’re both pleased to see me – Nsanga gets few visitors and they enjoy showing off their nice buildings to an outsider.

Nsanga’s problems are the same as all the other TC schools, and I’ve already listen them in the blog, so no more on that score.

They’ve decided at the TC section to run a “continental day” but parents have complained, so they’ve done a compromise. There are very short breaks morning and afternoon, and a condensed dinner hour, but the school finishes early in the afternoon. I’m also the very first “official” visitor to the Tronc Commun School!

The only lesson I am able to observe is ICT. This turns out to be a farce. Faces with me and Charles in the room, the teacher tries to do the lesson in English, but while her pronunciation is good she’s struggling with her vocabulary and I ask Charles to tell her to give up and use French. The language of instruction is the least of our worries.

Here we are, in a school with no electricity, and no computers, trying to teach ICT. I get Charles to ask the class how many of them have seen a computer. (Answer: about a third). Then I get him to ask them how many have used a computer. Answer – none. They laugh nervously at the very thought that any of them might have had a chance to use a machine.

By now I’m really kicking myself for not having brought my laptop with me. What a difference I could have made to this lesson – it would be a lesson none of these lovely children would ever forget!

Now I know many people find ICT boring, but it takes a quite special talent to make a lesson as useless and boring as this one. Firstly the teacher does this wretched thing about repeating previously covered work in the hope that I’ll be dazzled by all her students’ right answers. I’m not – I’ve already checked in their exercise books to see what they last week and the week before that.

So how do you teach ICT without a computer, and to children who have never seen one? Answer: you make lists of facts about computers; you write out detailed instructions on how to switch them on or off.

I tell Charles to get her to draw a computer. She won’t, but we get one of the boys to draw one. Fortunately this child knows what he’s doing and does a good drawing of a desktop machine.

After another ten minutes of listing the different kinds of computer; listing all the peripherals you can run from a computer; listing the different kinds of connections for these peripherals, I’m getting close to murdering this teacher and suggest to Charles that we leave her to get on with it….

She’s in her first term of teaching and the lesson serves to remind me that the teacher training colleges need a bomb up their backside if they think this is the right way to teach ICT. It’s no good gunning for the young girl teacher; what’s at fault is the whole culture of “there’s only one way to teach and don’t you dare risk trying anything else”. Unfortunately wading into the TTC system is outside my remit as a VSO so I’m just going to have to swallow my fury. Aah; now then, take a deep breath and look out of the window. Far below is the Nyaborongo river, bursting its banks in places, is wriggling northwards towards Nyabinoni. There are at least five separate successive waves of hills over towards the western horizon. And a young mother is giving me the glad eye as she glides past outside the school, baby on her back and bowl of maize on her head.

In my report I’m going to point out the futility of teaching ICT in this way, and also that while the District is going to get some laptops for its schools, they won’t be used for very long unless they get solar panels into the schools. And then we need to get rid of all this cloud and rain and get some strong sunshine to power the solar panels. But I can’t blame the District or even Mineduc for the rain!

I debrief with Charles (despite all the ICT farrago I’m going to give him a good write up because he’s got all the right ideas and given some financial backing I think he’s got the makings of a good head. He’s already persuaded the primary school’s English teacher to give up her Sunday mornings, and all the rest of the staff to come back to school on Sunday for staff English lessons).

Next it’s off with Jean-Claude, the primary head, to talk about his problems. We sit in on year 2 who are learning their Kinyarwanda words beginning with “kw”. And there are a lot of them in Kinya. This is the tail end of a lesson, and next we have maths with the same yr 2 class. The young teacher is really good. Even with children this young she does the whole thing effortlessly in English. The kids have learnt their numbers, too.

Rugendabari is another very poor secteur; two boys can’t afford the little exercise books these children use; they are working on slates. The teacher needs to get some of the function commands more ingrained into them (speak louder”; “come and draw on the blackboard”; “put your hand up when you want to answer” – that sort of thing. But her maths is good; she’s doing lots of drawings to illustrate numbers, and she is using things outside the classroom. We’re drawing nine cars, eleven balls, seven flowers, instead of the everlasting chalk/book/door/desk vocabulary that we usually get. Jean-Claude is chuffed to bits when I tell him to congratulate her and tell her to carry just as she’s doing.

We do a quick debrief and I’m introduced to the head of the parent’s committees for both schools. The primary person is an elderly farmer who can’t speak anything else except Kinyarwanda; the secondary one is a woman who looks about twenty five. She can’t possibly have a child in the secondary section – or can she? She speaks French so I make a fuss of their importance and ask her to explain what I’m saying to primary Papa (who has left his hat and stick outside the office door in deference to the two headmasters within). We shake hands and I say I really have to leave immediately.

Charles says he’s coming with me; he lives at Buringa on the way to Gitarama and like me he’s going to catch a bus. The sun is setting behind the distant mountains and the light is already starting to fade. A bus stops for us and we get jammed in - there are at least 23 people n the bus and it is so overloaded it can barely make it up the mountain.

At Buringa several people get off, including the convoyeur, which is very strange. Round the next bend we discover why – there’s a police checkpoint. I think someone has tipped off the police that we’re overloaded, and we get pulled over. But someone else has tipped off the convoyeur, which is why he got off and ensured we were just legal. (The driver will collect our fares and the convoyeur will come behind us on the next taxi-bus). The police seem very reluctant to let us go; they open all the doors in case someone is crouching down on the floor (fat chance – it’s full of shopping and other luggage), and eventually we’re allowed to pass.

Back at Gitarama I pick up my laptop (I’m paranoid about not leaving it in the offices overnight – you never know if the guards have got a spare key and are running some sort of racket with local thieves), and go home.

Tom’s frazzled; he’s got a group of ten visitors come from America and as the FHI logistics bod he’s run off his feet getting everything organised for them. We eat late, but well, and get to bed absolutely whacked.

Best thing about today – all of it, really, especially the afternoon at Nsanga. For anyone thinking about volunteering, this is a pretty good example of the kind of life we lead and all the little excitements that happen during an “average” day.

Worst thing – ICT with no computers and no electricity. It sucks.

Umuganda at Gahogo

February 28th – March 1st

Today is umuganda day. This means a nice lie in, very much appreciated.

After breakfast I make up some Permethrin solution and douse my mosquito net in it, draping it over our rear balcony rail in case it pours with rain again this morning. As the solution drips out of the net and dries it leaves an oily mark all over the balcony; I must try to rinse it off with soapy water in the afternoon.

Christi and Danielle (one of the American gap year girls – the other one has succumbed to a tummy bug) come round at about half past eight armed with picks and shovels, and we set off to do umuganda with the Gahogo brigade. Our guard seems us leaving and rushes to his little store room, coming back with a shovel for me.

The sight of four muzungus walking up the main road obviously equipped for umuganda brings Gahogo to a standstill. We get laughed at, cheered on, but most of all just gawped at by everyone.

There always seems to be a lot more women doing umuganda than men, but in this particular little group we seem to have landed with the Atraco people – the taxi bus drivers and convoyeurs, who are overwhelmingly men. There must be well over a hundred people descending on a little dirt road in Gahogo, down near the school, where we are to dig out the roadside drains. These are getting choked with grass, and by turns have deep pot holes where a lorry could sink in and break its axle, or shallow runs where the torrential rainwater sluices over the road and wears away gulleys in the earth surface.

Of course, being Atraco, many of them have driven here in their taxi buses and we also get a lift to the final working place – all of a hundred yards away!

It’s a carnival atmosphere. We get a lot of ribaldry but now we’re able to give as good as we get; Christi especially because she’s pretty fluent in Kinyarwanda. Espérance, the head mistress of Gahogo primary is there, and comes up to welcome us, as do two of her teachers. It’ll do me no harm at all to have been seen doing umuganda by some of the teaching fraternity.

Within a few minutes we’re all getting stuck in and showing the Rwandans that we can indeed handle a shovel. It’s all good bonding stuff, and the fact that we’ve bothered to turn out is very definitely noted. (Later in the day, while I’m going round the market, one of the market women tells everyone around her that she saw me digging out the ditches this morning). It’s a humid morning, but fortunately without the burning sun that we had the last time we did umuganda.

The work’s not particularly hard; we dig for ten minutes and then rest while someone else who doesn’t have a shovel borrows ours and takes his or her turn. Where the rainwater has made deep gulleys it has exposed water pipes running down the road; I try to restrain a couple of the men from swinging their hoes too vigorously in case they chop right through the pipe. I’m also worried about electricity cables which might be buried just a few inches down, but fortunately we never find any.

By mid morning there are so many people working that someone decides we have done enough, and the immediate job of unblocking the drains is finished. There’s the usual confusion for twenty minutes while everybody waits for someone to make a final decision (and accept responsibility for the decision), and then all the Rwandans go off for a meeting. Now we know from last time that this means a two hour harangue in Kinyarwanda, so we are allowed to escape back to our flat. The girls can’t go back to their houses because just down the road we can see policemen stopping anyone from passing, and sending them back up to Gahogo for the meeting. So we hide in the flat, drink maracuja juice and discuss the state of religion.

Eventually normal life resumes; the hairdresser’s stereo comes on, taxi buses start passing, and women head towards the market with their bowls and sacks of produce. The girls leave, and after a few minutes I go out to do the market and buy some veg.

I make yet another of my soups for lunch, changing the recipe slightly and making a double batch. Tom wants to do his own thing so I freeze the second half of my soup; it’ll come in handy for lunch tomorrow when I get back from Kigali.

We spend a lazy afternoon; Tom makes a bean salad as his contribution to Christi’s party; I make an enormous fruit salad as my contribution to Kersti’s. It just fits into our biggest Tupperware box; getting it all the way to Kigali intact will be a logistical problem but I’ve double wrapped it in paper bags and then again in plastic bags.

I get the last bus into Kigali; there’s no point in arriving early. I’ve double wrapped my box of salad in two paper bags, two plastic bags and my big laundry bag – if the blasted thing leaks I don’t want fruit salad sloshing around the bottom of my rucksack! When I arrive in Kigali the whole town is lit up – except Kersti’s district which is in the middle of a prolonged power cut. We think it might be due to there having been two big sporting events at Amahoro stadium, both needing floodlights, and that this has caused the local power to trip out.

Irene and I light loads of tea lights to illuminate the room and the driveway, including a carefully arranged “kink” to avoid a muddy patch on the path! Meanwhile Nick is negotiating to hire a generator – not an easy job because half of the other families in the neighbourhood are doing the same thing.

The party is good fun, except that we don’t actually get the generator till late, which cuts down on the dancing, and the food doesn’t arrive till even later. Lots of people have brought puddings – we have the best collection of puds at any event I’ve been to since I arrived in Rwanda. Home made pecan and fudge pie is sensational!

Unfortunately I only know a couple of people at the party; most of them are Kersti’s colleagues from the American school, but towards the end of the night Cathryn and Marion arrive, Cathryn’s just given up her job at Mineduc because they will not get their act together and sort out what she’s supposed to do; and Marion has fallen out with her landlady and has been given notice to leave her lovely little house near theVSO office.
We decide to forgo clubbing this time, and eventually we all subside to bed at about half past two. A bit of an early night for Brucey’s partying weekends….

Nobody stirs on Sunday till well after ten; Kersti’s got up to go and give an English lesson to people in the town. The houseboy has cleared up most of the party debris. Irene and I put all the furniture back, and we want to make breakfast but there’s still no power. So we cheekily text Kersti and ask her to bring us back some proper coffees from Bourbon, and lo and behold, she does!

Breakfast is the remains of my fruit salad, lashings of it, and we pig ourselves on the remains of the puddi8ngs and cakes from the previous night.

We spend a lazy day, discussing the politics of Kersti’s American school. First of all she’s treading a very difficult path between evolution, intelligent design and out and out creationism – a difficult job for a science teacher, but faced with a faction among the parents who are bigoted and armoured inside their evangelistic leanings.

Secondly, the parents are intrusive into the staff’s domestic arrangements, and can’t understand that whether someone’s married or not has no bearing on their ability to perform their job as a teacher.

It reminds me how lucky I have been to spend all my teaching career in a state system with well defined rights and practices, and how vulnerable people are when they are teaching within the private system, especially when a religious foundation is hijacked by fundamentalists.

Back to Gitarama on a sweltering bus; the passengers always shut all the windows as soon as the bus pulls away; they’re terrified that the slightest draft will give them a chill or worse. In full sun, and on plastic seats, the journey becomes a bit of an ordeal and I’m glad we’re only on the bus for an hour or so.

In the evening we go to “Orion”, the posh new bar, to give it a second chance. Moira and Kerry are there with a whole bunch of colleagues from the teacher training college. We order our drinks and then see about food. The melange is stone cold. So new ask to warm it up in the microwave. The microwave is broken. So we ask for a plate of chips. No, can’t do chips – we need to order chips in the afternoon if we want chips…. We order samosas: no, can’t do hot samosas… And all this is after Tinks told them we were coming on Sunday and they had to get it right or else….

So we leave the place and go to Nectar and because only four of us are hungry enough to brave the wit at Nectar, we do quite well. Just what does it take to get a meal around here?

It has been a relaxing Sunday and we’ve all caught up on all the gossip. Funnily enough, many of the people I was expecting to see either at Kersti’s party or at the muzungu meal weren’t there, and I’m suddenly aware of just how many muzungus there now are in Kigali. When I first arrived we were a real rarity; now there are muzungus around every corner and you barely get glanced at in the capital. The villages, of course, are another matter altogether. And tomorrow I’m off up country.

Elena Guerra school, Cyeza

February 27th

Brilliant day today after a really inauspicious start. On my way to the office I detour via the FHI house. I want to find Janine and ask her to buy me a load of fruit at Rwandan rather than muzungu prices so that I can make a fruit salad to take to Kersti’s party tomorrow. I arrive at the FHI place just before seven. There’s no sign of Janine – she hasn’t arrived yet, and the American crowd staying there are just getting up. I see a strip of light under a door and think it must be the kitchen, so I open the door and breeze in. Turns out it’s the wash room next to the girls’ bedroom; there’s one of the young American gappers cleaning her teeth and it’s just pure good luck there isn’t anybody stripped off and washing. Cue a quick retreat by a very flustered Brucey and a very surprised young American!

I eventually leave a note and some cash for Janine, and get up to the office. Here I find we’re in the middle of yet another power cut. It’s only in our block; the main block has got power. There isn’t a fault with the meter this time; it’s a technical fault probably due to all the rain we’ve been having. This cramps my style and it’s difficult to know what I can gainfully do.

I just see Claude for long enough to give him the parcel with a new outfit for his baby daughter. If she doesn’t get the outfit soon, she’ll have grown too big to get much use out of it. Claude says thank you but he’s preoccupied and I get out of his way fast and let him get on with his business.

I just get settled into the office and it pours with rain, and does for the next three hours. This is very unusual; normally at this time of year we get rain every afternoon. Rain in the morning is a thundering nuisance because after it has gone the roads are still too dangerous to travel by moto. I’m supposed to be going out to a big meeting and what with the power cut and the rain I think I’m facing another down day, just like yesterday.

At that precise moment my phone rings and it’s the chief cashier at my bank, asking if I will translate his C V from French into English. Of course I say yes (anything to keep on good terms with the bank), and within ten minutes Didace has arrived at the District Office with his manuscript version in French. I spend the best part of an hour trying to decipher his flowery script, and have to get Valérian to help me. I also have trouble with some of the technical terms – “le gérant de la succursale” turns out to be the bank manager; “facile d’apprendre d’autres logiciels” we translate as “quick to learn new ICT applications”. I tell you, my French is coming on in leaps and bounds! I just about get it done before my computer batteries are drained. I have to nip into the other building and beg the logistics department to let me use one of their working power points for half an hour to recharge. And good job I do, too, as you’ll see later on.

Today I’m going out to Cyeza again. This time it’s to Elena Guerra secondary school, for a big meeting of all the new tronc commun heads and many of the existing primary heads. I travel with Valérian in comfort in the pickup truck; I feel a bit embarrassed because many of the new heads (especially the men in their sharp suits or best imitation leather jackets) are having difficulty finding transport. But they can speak Kinya and they can arrange deals with moto drivers much better than I can, so I suppose it’s a good job I’m in the car.

At Elena Guerra we have one of these typical heads meetings’ We don’t get started till about eleven, which sounds scandalously late to all of you reading the blog but is necessary to give people time to come down from the far reaches of Muhanga. Because of the rain many of them are even later than eleven in arriving, and I think it’s a miracle some of the Nyabinoni and Rongi people manage to get there at all.

The meeting is really good. We talk about forming a head teachers’ association (like DASH in Dorset). We talk about having a major “education day” with exhibitions and demonstrations by young people. We talk about standardising end of year assessments either across the whole District or at least secteur by secteur. At every turn people are pleading poverty, of course, but Valérian is very strict with them and tells them these jobs have got to be done and they’ve just got to budget for them. I’ve been put on the top table and I have some real input to make to the meeting. I have one of the new heads, Emmanuel from Ndago, sitting next to me to translate and he does a first class job. He’s another of these bright young Rwandans who’s going to go places, and he’s already a useful ally. I’m able to introduce myself to all the new heads; several of them already know me anyway, and from now on I know that if I ring any of them to visit their schools they’re going to be able to put a face to my name.

What’s even better is that we’re beginning to get a “team feeling” among the new heads, and I work hard all day to encourage this. Anything rather than the aloof, isolated system the French and Belgians have left us as their inheritance!

At the end of the meeting I get my slot. I ask how many of them don’t have all the schemes of work for the tronc commun subjects in their schools. Almost every hand goes up. “OK”, I say, “you’re in luck because they’re all on my laptop here and if you’ve got a flash drive I can give them to you at the end of the meeting”. When the meeting finishes I’m inundated with around 25 flash drives, all of which need checking for viruses before I download stuff onto them. But I know immediately that it’s a good job done, and hopefully nobody is now ignorant of what’s supposed to be taught in their schools.

I also tell them that we need their email addresses – they’re all bright young things who’ve been to university and are used to ICT there. Many of them own laptops at home, even if their schools don’t have power. Some schools are due to be issued with laptops in the next month or two even though there’s no power in the schools to use them…..

So within half an hour we have at least half of all the new directors with email addresses. This is going to revolutionise communications. Instead of all of them having to trek down to Gitarama for meetings which are really just conduits for information, I’m going to be able to send all the stuff to every one of them at the touch of a button. Yay, the 21st century really is arriving at Muhanga!!

At the end of the meeting we have a packed lunch – lumps of meat, roast potatoes, cake and a filled sandwich – all in a little foil tray, with a fanta. It’s very welcome; I’ve been up since half past five and by now its half past one and I’m starving.

While we’re eating I circulate and arrange an entire week’s visits to tronc commun schools, so that I don’t have to fight the phones every morning. Another good job done!

We’re milling around in Elena Guerra’s beautiful grounds in bright sunshine while we’re waiting for our transport to arrive to take us home. E G is considered a model school; it’s right next door to the Cyeza Catholic Church and Paroisse and is very, very catholic, but beautifully maintained. Despite the poor, exhausted soils of Cyeza the school has a riot of flower beds in brilliant colours. The sun’s out, it’s hot, and all the hills around us are vivid green. I’ve been here before, back in June, with Cathie to do a training and fell in love with the countryside then. Today it’s at its best; washed clean, rustic in every direction as far as the eye can see. Up here on E G’s hilly site you can’t see the grinding poverty at individual house level

Valérian’s phone rings and its Claude telling us all to hang on because the MINEDUC Inspector who has been touring the District is on his way and wants to speak to us. So we troop back inside their beautiful school-hall-cum-chapel to listen to his words of wisdom. He gives a good speech, in particular hammering the need to teach in English and the need for all students to be fluent in English. Rwanda is really, really serious about this East African community business; it’s going to be modelled on the European Union with people able to move and work and live equally across any of the member states. They won’t be able to do this unless they can speak fluent English. I also notice that most of the forward looking new tronc commun schools are offering Swahili as a foreign language since Swahili is the second lingua franca in East Africa (and is a damn sight easier to learn and with fewer fussy grammar rules than Kinyarwanda). French really has all but disappeared from schools – and yet it’s the language we tend to use at the moment to communicate with each other because my Kinya and their English are so often insufficient.

After this talk we go on a tour of the school. This is the first time I’ve been round the dorms and living accommodation in a secondary school – Elena Guerra is a boarding school as are virtually all the older secondaries in Rwanda. The dorms are a revelation. Think of the most cramped Youth Hostel dorm you’ve ever seen, and then double the number of people in it. You can only just get your body into the gap between the beds – bunk beds, all of them. There are old metal framed beds with creaky springs. The rooms must get sweltering at night with this number of bodies in them. Few beds have mosquito nets; I assume children are responsible for providing their own but are too poor to do so. There’s no mosquito netting on the windows, either. There’s absolutely no privacy and almost no storage space. I can’t see any lockers for personal possessions; everything seems to have to fit in a kitbag which lives on the bed when the bed isn’t being used for sleeping. (OK, so where do they put all their stuff at night?) The wash rooms are adequate, and very clean, as are the dining rooms and drying rooms. (Elena Guerra has about 2/3 girls and 1/3 boys, so the drying areas are festooned with multicoloured knickers. It’s a very good thing all the girls are in classes and don’t see some fifty odd adults trooping round peering at their smalls). There’s no decoration on any of the walls – not a single poster. For those of you reading this blog in Dorset – if you went on any of the church trips to Jerusalem and were taken round the orphanages in Bethlehem, well, the Palestinian children’s dorms are infinitely less Spartan and far more specious than this model Rwandan secondary school’s.

There is a library with quite a reasonable book collection, even including some fiction. The school has a TV in the main lounge area with a video player, so programmes can be recorded and played back. There are plenty of water tanks, and all the outside passage ways connecting the various buildings are covered so that pupils can keep in the dry while moving from room to room. It is generally considered the “model school” for Muhanga and one of the best in the country, and I’m really lucky to be given a tour.

The science lab is pretty basic, especially when you consider that in the upper cycle the school has a bio – chimie speciality. There are a lot of wall posters, some brand new, but they are all in French so they’ll have to go pretty soon. On the other hand the computer room is pretty good, with about 20 machines, all networked.

The only things I don’t like are the kitchens. There are three huge vats, almost the size of brewery stills. One is for hot water, one is for rice, and one is for beans. They’re kept lit continuously, and it means that even in this relatively enlightened school the diet is a monotonous beans’n’rice affair with just occasional variations.

Finally we go home – I’m with four other heads sitting in the back of a pickup truck. We have to be careful where we sit; the truck was last used to bring a delivery of charcoal to E G for their kitchens, so we daren’t sit down in the well of the truck. And if we perch on the edges we risk being thrown out as we bump and jolt our way through ten kilometres of ruts back to the main road. It’s certainly not the most comfortable rive I’ve ever had, even by Rwandan standards. But it definitely beats walking.

Back at the flat I just get through the door before it pours with rain again, this time a sharp thunderstorm. I’ve clean forgotten about giving Didace his C V, and in any case I haven’t been able to get it printed out. That means I would have to give it to him on a flash, and there’s no guarantee I’d ever see my flash again. And tomorrow is Umuganda, and the bank is shut in the afternoon, so he’s going to have to wait till Monday.

Tom comes in, cursing, with a huge bag of fruit for me from Janine. It weighs a ton and he’s not happy at having had to carry it. (I had told Janine to ring me when she’d bought it and I’d come and collect it from her house or the FHI place).

By now its well after six, dark, and we haven’t got much food in the house. I’ve decided we’re eating out tonight. Then Tom says Christi wants to use our oven, so we’re going to have to wait in for her. We’re not sure whether we’re all going to eat together, or we’re going to wait for her and then have a late meal. Christi keeps dithering as to when she’s coming or even whether she’s coming at all, so we cobble together a meal with what little stuff we’ve got in the fridge and virtually clear out our fridge.

Christi comes and joins us for our meal, and then cooks raisin cookies in our oven. It smells wonderful, and part way through the cooking process Teresa rings. I can barely concentrate on what she’s saying because all our stomachs are rumbling in anticipation of eating cookies…..

By half past nine I can’t keep my eyes open and I have to go to bed. I’m asleep within seconds and never hear Christi leave, or Tom slam our front door to shut it firmly.

Best thing about today – absolutely everything. A really good day.

wet day at Gitarama - one of many!

February 26th

After all the excitement of yesterday, today turns out to be a damp squib – almost literally!

At the office I get press-ganged into printing out schemes of work for Mata secondary, and this takes so long that I’m almost too late to arrange a visit to a school. Mugabo is insistent that I’ve given him the wrong English syllabus. There’s one version for Anglophone schools, and another for Francophone schools. I’ve given him the Anglophone one and he’s demanding the other. So we go back to the NCDC website, only to find that there’s only one version on the official site and it’s the Anglophone one I’ve printed off for him. He goes stomping off muttering; whether it’s about the silly muzungu who can’t find his paperwork or whether it’s cursing MINEDUC for their inefficiency I can’t tell.

Then it starts raining and carries on raining all morning. I’d have got soaked if I’d tried to go anywhere far.

During the morning Étienne, Laurence and one of the new TC heads come in, all from up the “Great North Road”, with tales of how appalling a journey they’ve had trying to reach us in Gitarama. Some other people who had intended to come down are giving up and returning to their villages up in the north. So that’s it – no school visits for me today.

It’s first day for Soraya and I in our new “Bureau Bazungu”, and we cause great amusement to all the visitors who either timidly knock on the door, or come charging in, expecting to find Claude there. I, of course, am sitting in Claude’s chair. So you can just imagine all the ribald comments I’m getting from my friends like Étienne!

Some of the new Tronc Commun heads are getting to know me, and without exception they all pop their heads round the door for a chat. I have a spare copy of an R E syllabus for one, and for someone else I’m able to give them an electronic copy of all the syllabi.

I get a whole lot of stuff prepared for the two gap year girls who are staying in the FHI office. They want data about Cyeza secteur, so I find them the school census information and exam results and give it to them entire, so that they’ve got to do the analysis by themselves. I’m not doing their degree dissertation for them!

There’s no mail for us today, and at lunchtime I decide to come and work from home because I’m feeling at a bit of a loose end. At the flat I time myself as to how long it takes me to do one of my “instant” (well, sort of) homemade soups from scratch. Answer: 45 minutes from coming in the door to serving up. But, just as on Monday, its well worth the wait and this is one recipe I’ll be using over and over again.

I’m supposed to be giving an English lesson at the end of the afternoon, but John Robert never turns up and doesn’t contact me to explain why. I’m cross, because I’ve spent half an hour preparing some interesting tasks for him to do. At least they’ll keep till next week.

This morning Tom had a tummy bug, and as the afternoon goes on I realise I’ve got it too. The only food we’ve had in common is mélange at Orion last night. Hayley was the only other person to have mélange there. So I text her and sure enough she’s got the runs as well.

Meanwhile I’ve decided I’ve caught it from drinking unboiled but filtered water, so I hastily boil all the water in my filter. Now, of course, after talking to Hayley, I know that the water was perfectly OK and didn’t need boiling and I’ve wasted ten minutes worth of gas.

Janine has brought our washing back, but the weather’s been so awful that she hasn’t been able to get it properly dried. Good for Janine –she drapes my underpants all over the bed rail so I can see they’re still damp. As I’m working from home, and as its fine weather in the afternoon, I rush down and peg them on our drying line, much to the amusement of the guards. (I think they’ve decided that muzungus are such fragile creature that they don’t know how to peg out washing).

In all the fun and games of preparing English lessons I forget to soak my mosquito net in the anti malarial stuff – I’m cross because it would have dried by the end of the afternoon.

The only other piece of worthwhile work I do today is to go right through the new VSO volunteer handbook. I have a draft version, and I’m chairing the volunteer committee meeting which is going to dot the “Is” and cross the “Ts” at our next session.

We decide for our evening meal that we need to bung ourselves up, so to speak. So it’s a home made savoury rice – lots and lots of rice – and because we’re feeling sorry for ourselves I open my last remaining packet of jelly babies to sustain us through the evening.

I try ringing Nyarusange school to arrange a visit tomorrow, only to find out there’s some big meeting at Cyeza for all the new TC heads and all the new primary heads. I reckon Claude’s been stung by my criticism that these people haven’t had any INSET and he’s doing some last-minute stuff himself. I think I’ll try and come out with him. I want to know what he says to them, and it’ll also give me an opportunity to make appointments to visit a whole crowd of them next week.

So not a wasted day today – we’ve actually got quite a lot done, but one of those days when nothing has gone as you anticipated. That’s Africa for you!