My first Rwandan school

Jan 24th

This is a very long diary entry but bear with it and you’ll get a real taste of Rwanda!

Off to the primary school in Gitarama. It’s (mostly) new – only a few months old, replacing older buildings. A long, single story classroom block with blue corrugated iron roof. Surprisingly, in a brand new building, there’s no electric light or power points (I’m told this is because it’s expensive and a bureaucratic nightmare to arrange for Electrogaz to wire the place up to the mains). There’s a national school uniform consisting of beige shirt and shorts for boys, and blue shift and trousers for the girls. It’s not as smart or sexy as the Cuban school uniforms I saw in December, but it does give the teenage girls still in primary school a measure of protection from lascivious men.

You have to look at children’s feet to judge whether they’re affluent or not. The children from well off families wear “proper” shoes or trainers. Next down the list come high-class designer flip-flops. Further down are plastic, shoddy flip flops. And, of course, I’m sure we’re going to find barefoot children in the rural areas even if not in Gitarama.

This school, on a site no bigger than an English primary, holds 1250 children. There are 21 teachers and the Head (who doesn’t teach). One of the teachers is paid for by the PTA which in Rwandan schools is enormously influential and can get teachers sacked if there’s a consensus that they’re ineffective.

We meet the Head who is efficient, courteous and welcoming. (We’ve been warned that it’s going to be quite likely the Heads of schools either won’t be there at all, or will virtually ignore us on our visits). This guy is good, and his school is – by a large margin – the best in the whole district. His name is Hormisdas Twagirumukiza and I’ve been practising saying it all the 20 minutes walk from the flat.

We’re taken into a year 5 classroom and sit at the back in the brand new but old-fashioned double desks. As we appear at the door with the Head the whole roomful stands up and chants “bonjour Monsieur le Directeur” and then “bonjour Madame” to Cathy and “bonjour monsieur” to me. The interior walls are bare brick, devoid of any decoration. (In the rainy season any paper or cardboard posters would simply wash or rot off the walls. If you want durable wall posters you use plastic (expensive) or make your own from rice sacks (a VSO speciality). There’s a full width blackboard at the front. There’s no book store in the room; I think most sets of books are in the Head’s office which is the size of a classroom and doubles as school office and time-out room for naughty children.

Unusually, in this class all the 53 children seem about the same age, with only a year or so between them. We already know that at this stage in the Rwandan system it’s not unusual to find children from as young as 10 to as old as 17 in the same class. You don’t move up to year 6 unless you pass yr 5; if you’ve got special needs you tend to spend years and years and not get beyond about year 3. It’s a crazy system. Many children never finish primary school. At 15 or 16 the boys want to earn money and gradually disappear from the system; many of the girls are being married off or are already pregnant before they can complete year 6.

But this school is as good as it gets. The woman teacher is in command, confident. She has every single child’s attention and they’re desperate to be chosen for the question and answer sessions. Rwandan children don’t put their hands up to answer; they wave their hands and click their fingers. In a confined space it’s deafening. They’re doing maths: adding, subtracting and dividing distances. The work has been set as homework the night before, and the teacher is checking they’ve done it by making them do it in front of each other. Woe betides the child who can’t remember where the decimal points go.

Next we watch an English lesson with the same class and teacher. She speaks in English to them the whole time. They’re learning noun plurals, and already they all seem to know which are regular forms (girl/girls) and which are irregular (ox/oxen; baby/babies; wife/wives), potato/potatoes but mango/mangos). All the kids are desperate to be chosen to go up and write on the board; only one in about twenty gets the answer wrong.

Unfortunately the lesson never gets beyond lists of words and their plurals. We both feel the teacher has missed a trick in not getting them to use their new plural nouns in sentences – it would have stretched the abler ones and made the whole exercise more relevant to everyday English. But it’s an impressive feat – English is these children’s third language and they’re only about 10-11 years old!

Now we go to year one in a shabby, older building. It feels bleak inside even in the humidity of an African morning. These children have only been at school for three weeks and it shows. Constant fidgeting with coats and bags, a steady procession to the loo. Two row in font of us we can straight away spot the bully of the future who spends all his time pushing and shoving the other boys on his bench. It’s another class of 50-plus. The teacher gives commands in Kinya, but the lesson is French and she’s trying to get the children to introduce themselves using the formula “comment tu t’appelles?” – “je m’appelle …….” It doesn’t really work. The kids are distracted by each other, and by their muzungu visitors. We agree she ought to break off after 15 mins and do a song or something, but she ploughs on and on. Nobody’s barefoot but these children somehow look a lot poorer than the year 5s.

We report back to the Head, praise as much as we can, and he shows us round the rest of the place. Toilets are a smelly shack in a corner; there’s a single standpipe for water in the middle of the playground. The school is built on a steep slope and he wants to level a terrace to use as a garden and teach vegetable growing as well as produce flowers. The playground is bare earth with huge potholes where children have worn the soil away down the slope. It must be a nightmare on a wet day.

As we leave it’s playtime. The boys, of course, are playing football. The girls are doing and intricate clapping and dancing game which looks incredibly complicated.
We mull over what we’re going to say to Claude as we walk back to the matata park. Cathy’s going to Kigali to renew her passport and see a doctor; I’m going home to write up our report. But it’s been a great morning and at last I’ve been into my first African school!

After this, the day goes steadily downhill. I walk towards the office and am given a lift in an ambulance. People part as the ambulance swings in the front entrance; heads turn as white man jumps out, perfectly healthy, and tries to make an unobtrusive entrance to the building! This could only happen in Rwanda…..

I’m desperate to talk to Claude. Our carefully planned schedule of visits is shot to pieces within 24 hours because the moto charges to go up to Rongi will be beyond our budget. But Claude’s not there and I won’t see him till Monday. Hastily write him a note on the office computer. Half way through, the power goes off. Use my laptop. Discover I’ve picked up a worm virus from the office machine. My virus checker catches it, but it quarantines the files, which means most of the academic work I’ve done so far is now unusable. Try to recover the situation. Post a note under Claude’s locked office door. Walk back home the scenic route. Take a wrong turning and end up causing quite a stir in the Moslem quarter of Gitarama. As I retrace my steps the grand daddy of all thunderstorms breaks loose and I’m stranded for two hours, running from one house’s front awning to the next. A dressmaker’s shop invites me in to sit and wait out the storm and I’m the subject of giggles and a lot of innuendo from about six women. It’s so dark in the shop I can’t see to read, so how on earth they can carry on sewing is beyond me. Get home soaked and change. Tom’s also had a frustrating day in Kigali; he went to see the Dutch ambassador about funding for business start-ups, but the ambassador didn’t come back from his lunchtime engagement…..

We dine on instant Chinese noodles and a sauce so full of chemicals that even cheese and barbecue sauce won’t disguise it.

Spend the evening watching DVDs on our laptops while the shop over the road plays Bob Marley for the umpteenth time.

High point – visiting the school; the reception the children gave us.
Low point – everything that happened after the school visit.

Sorry this entry is so long, but it seems to sum up what the Rwanda experience is all about!