Students stranded after exams

Here's yet another little snippet from today's "New Times" which shows you some of the difficulties schoolchildren face here in Rwanda. In England you expect to sit your big exams in your own school. Here in Rwanda you have to travel to neighbouring schools which are set up as exam centres. But while the supervision of the exams is done with military precision and with armed police and soldiers present, in at least one part of the country nobody thought about how their students might get home after the exam.....


NGOMA – After completing national exams on Tuesday, scores of rural students failed to return to their homes due to a lack of transport.

There were no buses or taxis to take the students home, leaving most of them to loiter in Ngoma town till late in the evening.

Those who talked to The New Times in Kibungo town, Ngoma district, said they were not sure where they would spend the night if they failed to get transport.
“It is approaching 5 pm and yet we can’t find any bus. We are bound to sleep on the streets,” Claudine Kanakuze, one of the students said.

Drivers of ONATRACOM bus services said they were overwhelmed by the number of travellers and they did not have enough buses to transport all of them in time.
“They have to hang around and wait for some of the buses to make return routes,” a driver only identified as Abdul said.