Canelled school visits and cheap floozies!

Feb 13th

This blog entry is about how to make the most of setbacks and “down time”. It’s also about how we keep fit here. One of VSO’s slogans is “expect the unexpected…..”

Cathy and I set off for Mushubati primary school. We had the usual hassle of trying to find moto drivers who knew (or thought they knew) where it was, then the ridiculous business of trying to agree a price.

Mushubati is more than three miles out of town along a tarmac road till the last half mile; and a moto ride on a good road is one of the pleasanter things in life.

We got to the school to find the Head was out. I realised I’d screwed up on the phone when I’d texted her yesterday; I’d said we would come “demain” (tomorrow), but then given Thursday’s date. Stupide! It’s grossly rude to attempt to inspect without the Head being present, so we had no alternative but to leave.

We walked all the way back into town, meeting a most interesting elderly man who turned out to be a leading light in the Rwandan equivalent of the “université du troisième age”. This is an attempt to provide high level education for elderly people and it’s a different remit from our British O.U. The whole thing is currently stymied for lack of funds, but it’s another example of how Rwanda is thinking big (and why it deserves western support).

Back in town we go to the internet café to try and email home. She’s OK by plugging her powermac into their loop. I struggle and struggle for 20 minutes but can’t get even a yahoo mail page to load. I tell the owners I’m going home to get my laptop; he’s totally cool about it – he’s a nice guy. So home and back with the laptop. That’s another good mile walked. Plug the laptop into his wire and after another 15 minutes I’m still not up and running and my laptop battery’s dying on me. Also, even Cathy’s machine has come to a halt. So we bail out. I’m apologetic, but I’m not paying anything if I can’t even get started.

By now I’m a foul mood – first the school visit screws up; now the bloody internet’s all against me. Cathy knows my mind and invites me to their place, so by the time we get there we’ve both walked a good four miles in all from Mushubati school. After lunch we decided to work on a newsletter project we’ve had in mind for some time. We want to produce a short newsletter every month – two sides of A4 – and get Claude to get it copied to every primary school. We want it to have diary dates, some text which primaries could use with their students as comprehension or grammar exercises, some clear grammar tips, some lesson management things we’ve picked up on our inspection visits – that sort of thing. Within an hour or so we’d produced two sides, all formatted and ready to go. It’s not great shakes, but we know the primaries will like it and we feel good for having got it done. Whether Claude will fund its distribution is another matter altogether.

Next we slog back up to the office - 2½ miles – and get it printed off for proofing. We want it to have a snappy title in Kinyarwanda, and ask Beatrice, the secretary, for help. Eventually we settle on “IKINYAMAKURU UMUREZI” which loosely means “teaching news” which is hardly original but fits neatly across the top of a whole column. Besides, if we make the title too idiomatic it might deter some of our more traditional colleagues.

The title has come from an old copy of a printed in-house magazine, presumably for Rwandan local government workers in Muhanga, that’s been lying around in a filing cabinet. While Cathy’s working on something else I read through the magazine.

Suddenly there’s one of those moments you couldn’t make up. Here, in front of me, is an article, in French, about prostitutes in Gitarama. The article starts by saying, rather smugly, that a whole load of girls has been kicked out of the town for soliciting, and then explains even more smugly that the vast majority of them were from elsewhere in Rwanda including as far north as Gisenyi on the border with Uganda.

If it ended there it wouldn’t have been interesting. But it then goes on to describe, in detail, the services the girls were offering, and also their prices. There were prostitutes in three different parts of town, including one group out in a village just beyond the town boundary. These girls were the cheapest. In each case the services were offered at three levels. Least expensive was a “quick bang”, which in the village was a mere RwF500 (50p). For a whole night’s attention you paid around RwF1500, while top of the range at around RwF2000-3000 was what can best be described as bed and breakfast – with extras!

When I read it out to Cathy she nearly fell off her chair with laughing. We tried to put ourselves into the mindset of the average straight-laced, fiercely devout Rwandan reader and work out whether they would have been offended or riveted. We decided probably offended for the men and riveted for the female readership.

But, joking aside, just think about it: selling yourself for 50p a go, and almost certainly getting HIV in the process. That’s what rural poverty is all about. And that’s why we’re all here trying to do our bit to fight it.

Talking about viruses, the one I’ve picked up from Innocent’s computer is making electronic life rather hard by now, so we pack up and come back home – another two miles for me, more for Cathy.

It’s not until I get home and Tom arrives back that I realise it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow and I’ve totally failed to phone, or email, or send a card home. Whoops.

High point of the day – the newsletter; that article in the in-house magazine
Low points of the day – virtually everything else. You can’t win’em all, and on balance there’s loads more good days than bad.

Today we walked at the very least 9½ miles each; Cathy probably did around 11 because she’s further out from the town centre.