INSET, the latest instalment

April 2nd

Nice warm, sunny day – turns out to be the first day in ages where we haven’t had pouring rain for hours!

The compulsory teachers’ INSET gets more farcical by the hour. Elson managed to escape last night and came home on his bike to sleep with Cathie, leaving very early in the morning. (Because the training is in his own school, and he knows the ropes there, he’s managed to bag one of the surveillants’ little dormitories which gives him more comfort and more privacy – he can sneak outside without everyone else knowing)!

The whole exercise feels as if it’s being run by the army. They start by waking everyone at 5.00a.m. (i.e. before dawn) and taking them for a run along the dirt roads. Can you just imagine that with our Dorset teachers, including those in their fifties, men and women….. Breakfast is sorghum porridge with a little salt. The two other meals are maize and potatoes and beans. Little if anything else. The training sessions seem to be mainly in the mornings. In the afternoons it’s like Umuganda and they’re all supposed to do good works like making earth bricks to build new classrooms for schools. Yesterday they weren’t properly organised so they had all the teachers peeling potatoes and cleaning their dormitories. In the evening they go on till 11 at night, with the evenings being taken up with a lot of traditional singing and dancing. On previous INSETs of this type they’ve sometimes gone on till past midnight. What a way to treat your professional classes! Just you wait till someone back home starts whingeing about Professional Development Days! Morris Dancing till 1a.m. anyone?

Spent half the morning slaving over my laptop, then Vivienne comes down from Kigali. She’s not a teacher, but has worked at very high level in local authorities, including East Sussex. So we know schools in common. She’s another educationalist on a three month contract, and as with Polly’s case her placement hasn’t been thought through. To start with, she can’t speak French and once again she’s been put into a French speaking environment without an interpreter. Just what is VSO thinking? She’s based in a Catholic secondary school in the city with a head teacher who is also a priest; he has absolute job security for as long as he chooses to go on (he’s well past the usual retirement age) and while he acknowledges the school is living on faded glories from its past, he’s so autocratic that the place is a shambles. There’s no kind of management structure and the whole place is rudderless. Vivienne and I talk for a couple of hours on what strategies she can use to help, and fortunately I’ve got a lot of material she can take to use with them. Take a bow anyone from Beaminster School who’s reading this blog; your staff handbook is going to be put to good use in another country! And take a bow Christine at Kamonyi because all your stuff from the Head’s training day last week is also just what this school needs!

Poor Vivienne; to cap everything else she’s living in the priest’s accommodation and cringing at his mishandling of his domestic staff (the man has clearly never ever had to cook or clean or launder for himself in his life) and the general domestic squalor. This situation arises because we don’t really have a say as to where we live in Rwanda; finding accommodation is our employers’ responsibility. What’s especially galling for Vivienne is that Martine, another vol, lives just up the road in a beautiful house with bedrooms to spare….

At lunchtime I weaken and take my guest to Tranquilité; it’s the first time I’ve eaten there since I started my economy drive. Cathie comes to join us; she’s suffering with a bad cold and has just been told that, after hours of planning and submitting bids, there’s no money left in the District kitty to fund all the training sessions we had planned for primary teachers. That’s such a serious blow we can’t really take it in. What is the point of our being here, with a brief to do training, if they then decide there’s no money to do the training? I know the game; they hope that if they plead poverty then VSO will stump up the cash and the effect will be to make the District’s budget stretch further. But VSO is also strapped for cash and has had to prune its development programme severely. So we’re caught both ways. (There’s another issue here too; we seem to be getting more and more volunteers arriving and we must be well over fifty people now, but the amount of money available for us to do anything while we’re here is drying up fast. I’m really worried that they’ll decide there’s nothing in the pot to pay for my transport to schools, and if that happens I’ve either got to pay for it myself or only go to schools within walking distance of Gitarama….)

While we’re having lunch Tom texts me to say the new mayor is being sworn in at the stadium at 2.00. Typical. Wouldn’t you think my own office would have told me? Cathie puts Vivienne on the matata back to Kigali and I drift down to the stadium to meet Tom for the ceremony. Since the mayor is my employer I decide it would be politic to be there and be seen. The new lady mayor arrives punctually at two. That’s a good sign; perhaps things will get more efficient around here. She’s dressed traditionally, as are many of the guests. The younger women look amazingly beautiful and elegant in their robes. However, we’re all kept waiting while we wait for some official from Kigali to arrive in his chauffeur driven 4x4. He finally gets here at just after three. Then we’re waiting for the legal person to saunter in wearing his robes. So it’s around half past three before the ceremony starts. Fortunately some of the District staff are warming up the crowd with community singing so it doesn’t get too boring, and there’s always the crowd to watch. It’s windy and gusty and the Rwandan flag on its little stand keeps getting blown over and falling into the dust. This is sacrilege, so somebody is despatched to get boulders to weigh it down. I’ve bagged seats dead centre at the rear of the stadium when there were only a handful of people there. Little did I know that they’d sent cars out with loudspeakers telling everyone that shops and office were to close for the afternoon and people were to come to the stadium for the occasion. So by half past three the whole grandstand is packed with people, many of them done up in their absolute best clothes, and Tom and I are feeling decidedly underdressed for the occasion and that we’re placed a tad too prominently. Unfortunately there’s no way we can move away discreetly, so we just have to stick it out. The ceremony itself is impressive; a shame I didn’t have my camera with me so I haven’t any pictures. But there are at least three official photographers present and what looks like a film news crew with a video camera. (When you remember the recent past history of Mayors of Muhanga there’s every probability that this ceremony will make the national evening TV news. So sit up straight there and look the part, Brucey!). And, of course, we are far too unimportant to be introduced to her highness, so when the do is finally over (after the National Anthem has been sung twice and everybody seems to have made two speeches) I can get home and go shopping in the market.

We caught the odd word or two from the mayor’s speech; she’s certainly promised to do something about the local schools, and I think things are going to change pretty forcefully over the coming months. Well, perhaps somebody will eventually tell me what’s going on. But if they do it will probably the day I really needed to know….

For our evening meal we try coating some fish pieces (tilapia from the German Butcher) in flour and frying them. We also do a fried potato dish with grated carrots and cabbage and diced French beans. It tastes wonderful. Can’t think when I last ate so much fresh veg!

Janine’s cleaning and shopping routine for us has got all out of kilter, but she explains that her mother’s got malaria and she’s trying to look after her as well as do her other jobs.

Best thing about today – a really good and tasty evening meal.
Worst thing – Cathie and I feel very depressed about the training and advisory part of our jobs here and at the moment we can’t see how we’re going to be able to do anything at all at grassroots level to improve things.