Up country for the first time

Jan 30

BRILLIANT! Absolutely the best day of all so far. I’m writing this with a backside so sore it feels like it’s been sawn in half, and I’m so tired I don’t know where to put myself……

Let me explain. Today Cathy and I went on our first formal school inspection (as opposed to just a school visit), and we did it in style. We went to remote Rongi secteur in the far north of Muhanga district. We descended on Ntungamo primary school after two and half hours on motos through some of the wildest and most beautiful scenery in Rwanda. At one point we got lost and had to ask the locals for directions (I suppose you could call that a Rongi turning…..).

The landscape is simply beautiful. Because it’s so hilly the view is constantly changing, and round every bend there’s yet another breathtaking view of hills, terraces, rivers, and zillions of banana trees. At one point we drove through an empty market (a piece of rare level ground filled with kiosks and stalls that obviously comes alive on some days in the week but not others). We turned a corner, the ground dropped away into a gorge, and there at the bottom was an enormous river, brown and swollen by all the recent rain. The Nyabarongo river, one of the biggest in Rwanda, and a tributary of the Nile.

Everywhere there were people walking to market or to their fields. Here a woman carrying a sewing machine on her head. There a man almost invisible under a huge bundle of sugar cane. And everywhere children, girls in blue and boys in beige, running out into the road to see this strange spectacle of two white people riding by. Loads of people with bicycles, not riding them but using them to carry sacks of potatoes, onions or maize. Most women under about thirty with a baby strapped to their backs and a tub of tomatoes or Japanese plums or Rwandan oranges (green, look like big limes) on their heads.

When we reached the school the head received us. Charming, efficient and energetic, he impressed us both. He looked about 25 and probably wasn’t much older. The school buildings were run down – earth floors, sky visible through every roof (imagine what it must be like trying to teach in it during the rainy season!), furniture home-made by parents and hammered into the earth to keep it upright. There was no electricity, and no tap (the nearest water was a 20 minute round trip away to a spring on a hillside).

We went on a tour of the site, inspected the loos (not bad by Rwandan standards, but a hundred yards away and down a one-in-three earth slope. You wouldn’t want to go there in your flip-flop sandals during a tropical; rainstorm).

His office was a little hut built onto the main teaching block. His three hundred pupils in six classes (first year of 82 split into two groups working half day shifts each) absolutely disciplined, his teachers all wearing white lab coats just like Colombia. He explained that for most of the two youngest year groups we were probably the first white people they’d seen. There was a Belgian priest in the area a few years ago but he had left. So you can imagine the effect we had on the reception class! It wouldn’t have been any different if we’d descended from Mars!

The ride out was just gorgeous; we’d left Gitarama at 6.30 in the cool of the morning; by the time we left the school at mid-day it was hot and we were cooking inside our crash helmets. It was the first time I’d worn mine; I’d given up the struggle of trying to wear it with glasses so tucked by glasses in my backpack. I could see the scenery well enough and there was no point in trying to read any road signs because they were all in Kinya-rwanda and didn’t mean a thing. We stopped at intervals to take photos. I’d taken a lot of snaps around the school but decided not to photo children inside the classrooms as it would have caused too much intrusion. Looking back on the pictures, though, I wish I had taken some interior ones now.

No matter, we’re back to Rongi secteur for the next two Wednesdays, so I’ll have other chances.

One of the topics du jour here is inclusion (or rather the lack of it in most Rwandan schools). So I was chatting to the Head about whether he had refugee families still arriving back from across the border in DRC with problems of integration. He mistook my question (remember that the entire inspection was in French, which was second language for both me and the Head), and told me there were around thirty families from the secteur still in the Congo. They daren’t come back because they’re all implicated in atrocities and face Gacaca Courts if they show their faces. Turns out the Head was a Gacaca judge until very recently. He said he thought Gacaca was a good system, but wouldn’t be drawn into any specifics. As for inclusion, there were a couple of lads with moderate physical handicaps and a very young elective mute girl who was being assessed to see if the school could cope with her.

Until recently primary education in Rwanda was not free. This meant the very poorest families, as at Ntungamo, couldn’t afford to send their children to school. Now the fees have been waived, and families are trying to get their kids literate in a frantic catch-up operation. So you’ve got big girls of up to thirteen in the very youngest reception class, and strapping great fully developed sixteen and seventeen year olds in years five and six. Takes some getting used to. For a minute I got quite excited - thought a couple were classroom assistants until I saw they were just big pupils in uniform. And it’s a nationwide rule that all schoolchildren, boys and girls, have shaven heads to keep down lice. Looks ugly, especially on the older girls, but I suppose it helps protect them.

(By the way, a juicy bit of gossip today from Cathy. Raina, the Bulgarian primary school head from last week, had to rush off to court today to try to get her houseboy released from prison. He’d beaten up his wife, (I think not for the first time), and she’d had enough. Not sure how the story ended but family relationships are a pinch point between the traditionalists and modernisers here).


Riding for a total of five hours on the rutted earth roads is no joke, and we were so shaken up when we got back we could both of us barely move. I took my laptop down to Cathy’s place and we wrote our report together; Claude will be well impressed by four sides of A4 first thing in the morning. Cathy had used my official pad of Rwandan government lesson observation sheets; we really are the local equivalent of HMIs in Britain.

High points of the day – pretty well everything, really. This is turning out to be an exceptional week!
Low points – after the jolting ride, every bit of me aches. It’s the first time I’ve been on a motor bike since scout camp in the New Forest when I was about twelve. But I loved it on the bike; you can see everything (or I could if I worked out a way to keep my glasses on), and the drivers stop for you to take pictures. A lot more expensive than matatas but beats them hands down.