Priests and pancakes

Jan 5th

Off to Kabgayi today to visit the Petit Séminaire de St Léon. Kabgayi is only a mile or so out of Gitarama, and is on the same side as our flat, so I walked. Welcomed by Jean de Dieu Hodari, the Head. Between his English and my French we find conversation easy. I spend all day there, going into four classes and talking to some of the lads.

This is no ordinary secondary school. For one thing, its results are by miles the best in the district. That’s because there’s a strict selection process involving letters of recommendation from the local priest. The whole place, with its quadrangles and spartan boarding accommodation, is redolent of an English public school of the 1950s. For a second thing, it is boys only. Thirdly, it’s a private school whose fees (RwF45 000 per term) make it inaccessible to most children, however gifted. And finally, its original purpose was to give a preparatory education to youngsters who would go into the senior seminary to become Catholic priests. So not your “bog standard” secondary, especially in Rwanda!

Centrepiece of the school is a huge chapel. Turns out that Mr Hodari is an organist and singer; when he discovers I am too, we get on famously.

At senior levels 4-6 the place specialises, like all secondary schools here. This school’s speciality is biology and chemistry, which seems an odd choice for a seminary, but there you are!

I sit in on some French and English classes. The behaviour is impeccable; there is total quiet across the entire school site, so much so that you can hear traffic on the main road outside the high enclosing walls (topped, like most Rwandan walls, with enormous amount of broken glass). The lessons are, as usual, dull and repetitive, with students copying lists down from blackboards. They are totally passive recipients of the teachers’ wisdom. In one senior English lesson, the textbook (one between three seems standard here) is a typescript collection of extracts from French and Belgian newspapers. But the whole book is about wine and things associated with wine, which seems obtuse in an African country which doesn’t grow grapes and where nobody can afford to drink wine. In fact, the extract these students study today is about “the mythical qualities of wine” and extols, among other things, the bistro culture of Paris. Where do they get this stuff and who chooses it? What on earth made anyone think this would be remotely relevant or even interesting to Rwandan teenage boys?

But we plod on. No phrase is left unexplained. The teacher, no doubt inspired by my presence, adds his own pearls of wisdom; we dutifully write the definition of “being on the horns of a dilemma”. If you could see the Akole cattle here, whose horns have a six foot or more span and are about five feet long, you would appreciate that Rwandan dilemmas come big, and that if it were you on the horns, you wouldn’t survive the dilemma for too long!

Deep in the chintz of the priest’s staffroom, I’m entertained by the chatelain, who is polite and cultured. We get talking, and I explain the dilemma Cathy and I face in terms of the costs and wear and tear in travelling up to the far north of Muhanga. I ask him if there is any possibility of accommodation in any of the priests’ houses up north. “Mais oui, pas de problème!” Turns out he has a relative who is priest in Nyabinoni, the furthest north of all, and he knows the priest in Rongi. Ten minutes later I have their names and phone numbers and promises of accommodation for both of us whenever we need it. All we have to do it let him know dates. We can’t get any further, because we need to know how close the priest’s houses are to the schools etc, but it’s a promising start.

Back home and write up my report for Claude, then its time to get cooking. Today is Shrove Tuesday and Tom and I are hosting Karen and co. We’re cooking for six, including the guard, and it’s the first time we’ve entertained at home so we want to get it just right. Tom looks after the meat and sauce; I’m in charge of the greens – definitely to be al dente and not soggy. Things go well; for pudding we do fruit salad and yoghurt (after all, you can’t possibly go wrong with that), and I try my hand at pancakes.

Christi’s brought her frying pan, but it’s lost all its non-stick and the first pancake is a disaster. Tom’s pan has lost its handle (another triumph from the Chinese bazaar in Kigali – frying pans with plastic handles), so we can’t toss the pancakes but at least the non-stick works. We end up with so many pancakes we’re groaning.

When everybody’s gone we high five; it’s nice to feel we can return hospitality in this flat.

High point of the day – it’s got to be the meal
Low point – “the mythical value of wine” in fading, grubby, dog-eared textbooks.

Postscript: there is a gruesome cautionary tale about Akole cattle. It may be apocryphal but there’s a ring of truth in it. The adult Akole are huge animals and their temper can be uncertain. Even their herders are wary of the bulls. Apparently, some time ago, an American volunteer (not VSO) walked too close to a bull, assuming that because it was tethered in a confined space, it was safe to approach. The bull took fright at the woman’s floaty skirt and lunged with its five-foot horns. It caught the woman clean between her legs and impaled her, doing such damage that she died shortly afterwards. Moral: always give these animals a wide berth and treat them as semi-wild. There are very few around Gitarama; we mainly see them packed into lorries on their way through town for slaughter in the Congo.