Up the great north road - again

Feb 7th

I’m Mr Inspector Man again, so by 6.30 I’m off on the moto to Rongi, up the “great north road”. Twice in two days – man, this is devotion to duty or sheer stupidity! It has rained most of the night, so I’m all togged up in hiking boots, waterproof trousers and cagoule. It’s dewy and misty in the valleys, and my helmet visor gets covered with raindrops on the outside and condensation on the inside. Never mind, without my specs on I couldn’t see anything in much detail to begin with!

By nine o’clock we’re at the school. The hilltops are still shrouded in mist, but it’s burning off fast. The school stands on a spur of hillside, about half way up the slope. With no sun shining on it, it looks bleak and forlorn. We discover it’s both a primary and secondary on the same site (nobody at the D O had thought to tell us).

Mr Harerimana, the Head, comes to see who we are. Nobody at the D O has told him we’re coming. We’re certainly not about to turn back after two and half hours on motos, so we go into his office. Cathy arranges to watch a couple of lessons; I tell him I’m going to inspect his official documentation and then watch a lesson or two if there’s time.

His admin is chaos. He has a secretary, but she doesn’t seem to do anything remotely secretarial for him. He has a couple of cupboards jammed with old files and papers, but all is confusion, with current and old stuff all mixed in ancient ring binders and tatty exercise books. Everything, of course, is laboriously hand written. There are electric sockets and light bulbs in his office, but (he tells us), the electricity hasn’t worked for years. He gets more and more flustered as document after document can’t be found, or he roots out stuff from three years ago rather than what I need to see, or finds registers for only half the school. This guy seriously needs taking in hand and telling to sort out his files (after all, even primary heads don’t teach, and he can’t say there isn’t any time ever to do the paperwork). It’s enormously difficult to get all the information I need.

There’s an obvious huge problem with space – all three first cycle years are on “double vocation”. This means one set of pupils taught in the mornings and another different set go to school in the afternoons. (They change the morning/afternoon order each week so all children get some lessons when they’re fresher in the mornings). But this means nobody in the lower school gets a full day’s education. So they fail their end of year exams. So they have to repeat the year (up to a third of the entire year has to repeat). So he’s got more and more children to pack into inadequate buildings. So most of his budget is being spent on new classrooms and refurbishment when he should be sorting out the teaching……

There are a few bright moments, but only a few. His “club d’environnement” is thriving, and part of his Action Plan and Budget is to buy a cow. Good for him!

We go for a stroll round the site, but we can see from his office that there are major problems – no shade; lack of flat land for games; old, decrepit buildings.

The secondary school is right alongside the primary. There don’t seem to be many pupils in it; outside it a group of lads aged about 18-20 are axing a tree trunk in a way which would get the school closed by a British health and safety minion. We daren’t watch!

Cathy re-emerges having seen two lessons and asks if she can teach a demonstration lesson to a year three class. While she’s performing, I go into a year five French class. Earth floor, windows on only one side and so dark in the room that pupils and teacher are straining to read. (“Windows”, of course, don’t have glass; we’re talking about holes in the mud-brick walls with wooden shutters to close at night or to use to keep out the rain. Except that if you close them to keep out the rain you’re in pitch darkness inside and nobody can do any work…)

And yet it’s the best lesson I’ve seen so far in Rwanda. Competent teacher in control of her class of forty plus; well prepared; good blackboard technique; she involves the pupils in practical tasks; and based on a narrowly defined objective which they totally master in forty minutes. I heave a sigh of relief and give her a four star write-up.

The Head has none of Étienne’s sparkle at Ntungamo. I ask him what his biggest constraints are, to give him a chance to get back at the District, and his answers show none of Étienne’s vision or ambition. In the event, we’re glad to leave the school.

When we’re back, less sore now we’re getting used to the distance and because we’re learning to relax in the saddle, as it were, there comes on a massive thunderstorm. Cathy is marooned at the flat so we prepare a strategy to nobble Claude with in the morning. Our master stroke is to ask him out to “Tranquillité” for lunch. We know he likes it there, and if he’s out of the office he’s less likely to get pestered by everyone else. Meanwhile, the lightning is fierce, with two of our three transmitters in Gitarama struck. One is less than a kilometre from here, so we jump out of our skins.

Cathy leaves and for the next few hours I’m tidying up my bedroom and the lounge because we’ve got visitors coming and we need to feed them. Tiga and her friend Lisa, a German (non-VSO) working with Rwandans to develop their skills in peaceful means of resolving conflict. I’m giving the girls my bedroom, so I hastily put on clean sheets and tidy away all my junk. When Tom arrives we whip out our secret boxes of ready-prepared food from the freezer and get cooking.

The girls arrive late (they’ve had real problems in getting here involving cadging lifts in 4x4s from other NGOs down south, dodging a major accident involving an overturned petrol tanker, and catching the last bus of the day from Butare by getting a 4x4 driver to pull in on it as it was leaving the matata park). Tiga’s nothing if not resourceful and determined!

We’ve done them a real feast and they fall on it. A massive vegetable curry, then fruit salad with yoghurts, and pancakes with lemon and sugar. Tiga and Tom have met very briefly at Kigali on the day we went to the Chinese bazaar. Lisa is chatty and interesting; her English is almost perfect except for her “v”s and “w”s. I can’t help smiling when she talks about “uniwersity” or about an “alternative wersion”. We gossip till very late and fall into bed. It’s the first time we’ve ever had guests staying overnight here. I’ve explained to the night guard who our visitors are, but I’m sure he and all the other neighbours will assume they’re women of ill repute. I’m too tired to care.

I sleep on the spare mattress on the lounge floor. It’s noisy next to the road, and I’ve no mosquito net, so from about three o’clock onwards I hear continually the noise of real or imagined little beasties.

High point of the day – entertaining the girls; somehow it makes your place feel like a real home when you have people to stay.
Low point – the dreariness of Rongi school and our limited ability to help so many children whose only mistake is to live miles from civilisation.