To Teach or To Be Taught

As of two days ago, I have officially become a teacher in a Rwandan school! As part of our training, we were literally dropped in a classroom with a partner and expected to just teach. Surprisingly, our first few days went relatively smoothly. We played music every day, had students answer questions about "California Gurls,' taught all of the "Wh' questions, completed a crossword as a class, and took some time to discuss pictures out of Time Magazine (thanks, again, Mom and Dad for sending that). Being a teacher is a welcome change of pace to our otherwise routine lives and has given me the opportunity to do what I really want to be doing in Rwanda, which is to get students thinking and to expose students to the limitless possibilities the world has to offer. Before I get to sucked into playing that role though, I think it is important to reflect on the things that I have been learning, rather than paying attention only to the things I will teach. The best way to reflect on that is to write about the homestay experience, which has, by far, been the best teacher I have had yet.

Living with a host family is hardly what I would call easy and it is full of awkward miscommunications. I haven't forgotten the first day, on which I spent 10 minutes trying to explain to my host mother that I don't eat meat and thought I had succeeded...only to find that they had cooked it especially for my arrival later that night. On another occasion, I used the wrong broom (one that is apparently meant only for the walls of the house) to sweep my floor, which almost resulted in a shouting match between my host mother and I before Fanny was able to intervene and tell me that she wasn't trying to keep me from cleaning altogether. Once you start to get past moments like these, your homestay starts turning into a place that you can actually begin to be comfortable. In the time that it has taken for me to get to know her, my previously malicious old grandmother has transformed into a goofy old woman, who loves nothing more than being able to spend time with her grandkids.

Now that I've opened myself up to them, it seems that my host family teaches me something new each day. Sometimes this comes in the form of practical lessons, like how to effectively wash your clothing by hand (I can now say that some of my whites are whiter than they were even at home) or how to make fries over a wood-burning fire.

On other occasions, the lessons are more about gratitude and perspective. As an American, I am easily the most vulnerable and protected member of the family. On one night, I couldn't catch a taxi from the neighboring market village and showed up well after dark and well after when I said that I would be home. Fanny was panicked. She was terrified that something might happen to me because I was an American and that, if it did, she would go to prison for failing to protect me.

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense from an individualistic American standpoint, but from a Rwandan standpoint, it is perfectly logical. Not only is everything communal, but crime is considered to be especially communal since the genocide is still very much in living memory and was, itself, a communal crime. The failure of any community member to intervene is an instant indication that they may be responsible for any event that takes place, no matter how out of their hands.

Fanny's concerns also shed new light on my identity as an American and a citizen of the developed world. Identity is something that the privileged pay very little attention to, which is probably because it is so rarely a hindrance to them. However, when you make the shift from the developed to the undeveloped world, identity becomes infinitely more important. Not only do you have to consider the impact of your actions on the people who are responsible for you, such as your host family, but you also have to consider they way your previously thoughtless actions affect the community you are staying in. Frankly, foreigners are among the most interesting of topics for the isolated community in which we are training and this means that we are almost always watched. On more than one occasion, I have drawn a crowd who literally listened to my every word for multiple hours while I was trying to Skype with friends at home outside of the town's one location for wireless. This can be exhausting, but has made me incredibly grateful for the amount of difference I was exposed to growing up, which was, frankly, not all that much by American standards. It has given me the open-mindedness to see past the color of someone's skin and to view them as a human being, rather than an oddity.

With how much my family puts themselves out to care for me, I can hardly even begin to give back in the way that I wish that I could. For all the meals that they have given me, I have introduced them to PBJs (I'm planning on grilled cheese for tonight). For all of the language they have taught me, which is enough to navigate the village and survive, I have taught them the Hokey Pokey, Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes, the Chicken Dance, and the Macarena, none of which they will ever need to get by in life. To date, my largest contribution to their well-being has been to bring fruit into the home and to encourage Fanny to go running with me. Last night, I tried the tactic of showing them photos of home and a map of the world, but the fact of the matter is that I will never be able to teach them as much as they have taught me without bringing them home. That's the real value of immersion. It's not that you learn a language or a couple of recipes, it's that you learn a whole new way of being. You lose the superficial parts of yourself that were really just byproducts of your environment and you determine the parts of yourself that are there to stay. I have no idea who I will be at the end of these two years, but Rwanda definitely has a lot to teach me.



(My host siblings performing the macarena)

It Kind of Reminds me of Ireland

Wow! It's been a long time since I've been able to write so I can't really include everything, but I guess I will talk about the most important thing that has happened so far, which was my visit to my site for the next two years. This was just like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Training is incredibly grueling and I was starting to feel a bit burnt out without having any tangible goals to work towards. Now that I have seen my site and feel confident that I will actually be able to enjoy my service there (complete with running water and electricity too!), this whole experience has gotten a lot better.

I live high up in the mountains and the terrain up to my site literally makes the mountains of Colorado look like cute little rolling hills it is so steep. This causes a lot of motion sickness on public transport, which can be a bit unpleasant, but I have yet to have someone throw up on me. My actual village is fairly close to Volcano National Park and the area is absolutely beautiful with moss-covered volcanic rock everywhere. It kind of reminds me of Ireland...or even Lord of the Rings when I can see the glowing lava of one of the volcanoes suspended in the night sky from my house.

Since I am so close to a lot of major tourist areas (volcanoes, gorillas, and even a beach!), it is easy to escape the curious looks I so often get during training and to go to market to get well-missed treats like cheese. That's not to say people in my village don't still treat me differently, but I have found that they are generally more welcoming and eager to talk to me than the population at the training site, which will be a welcomed change of pace.

My neighbors are...interesting. I live immediately next to a gigantic Catholic Church (another reason my site seems so much like Ireland), a local bar, and a primary school. Surprisingly, the bar causes me no problems at all, while the primary school will probably cause me the most problems during my stay. The kids have nothing at all to do after school and their parents and teachers don't really look after them, so they often resort to leaning in on the fence and trying to spy on the house all afternoon. Since the volunteer I am replacing is also leaving her dog with me, this could potentially create some problems down the road. Rwandans aren't necessarily the biggest fans of dogs and the kids can get a bit out of hand with her. I think I will be spending my first few months perfecting my Kinyarwanda to say "Why are you staring at me?", "I am no different from you", and "My dog cannot hurt you so don't be scared." I also think I will try to organize an after school sports or running program for the kids because if there was ever a group of children that needed one, it would definitely be these kids.

Living in a highly Catholic community will be a bit of an adjustment as well. Since I live so close to the church (and since the school I will be teaching in is Catholic), it is likely that I will have to integrate into the worship community to some extent. I had dinner with both the priests that live closest to me and the nuns that live a ways down the street and I have definitely decided that a friendship with the nuns will be beneficial to my psychological well-being. They are the friendliest women in the world and invited me to dinner, got a little tipsy, and then got dressed up and tried to teach me a traditional Rwandan dance. They also have bunnies...hundreds of bunnies...on their property. Granted, the bunnies are meant for sale and eating, but they are incredibly cute and fairly well-cared for so it is nice to be able to go and visit them.

The school I will be teaching at is probably the most unexpected perk of all. I will be teaching at a Catholic boarding school where the majority of the student body can be expected to go to university. I will also be teaching S5 and S6 (approximately Juniors and Seniors in high school), which is a bit more advance than I was expecting, but since my school is a science school, they will not be taking an English entry exam. This essentially means that I get to spend my time teaching having good dialogue and debates with incredibly smart students without the stress of standardized testing so I can determine what it is that I think it is most important for them to know. These kids are SMART too. Within the 15 minutes that I was able to talk to them during a tour of the school they have already asked me some heavy philosophical questions and I can't wait to see what they would say in writing assignments or debates. The one thing that is hard to handle is the boy to girl ratio. When I first arrived at the school, I thought it might have been all boys (something that would have been cause for a serious moral dilemma), but out of 400 students, there are 70 girls. These aren't great numbers, but they are an improvement and the girls are treated the same as the boys and have the same confidence and expectations that they will go to university. My headmaster is also big in the push for gender equality and is constantly reinforcing the message that male and female classmates should be supportive of one another, which was definitely encouraging to see.

Basically, I can't wait to start teaching! I already have a million ideas churning in my mind about potential debates, about resume workshops, and about how I'm going to structure my classroom. Another volunteer mentioned that they hosted a debate on the importance of education vs. agriculture in Rwanda, which sounded like it was rather successful and sounds like it would be right up the alley of my students. On day one, they were already asking me questions about race and ethnicity in America and why I chose to give up the developed world to come to teach them. These are hard questions to answer, but I think the ongoing dialogue of hard question after hard question will be good for me and ensure that I come out of this experience a stronger and more thoughtful person.

(As a side note, a bit of research tells me that there is a caving site close to my house! Life is good!)

Week 2 (I rode my bike uphill in the rain to post this)

It’s amazing how much 14 days can change your life. I feel like I have been here for most of my memory, but it’s only been two weeks….two weeks of constant language training even on the weekends (enough that I can now successfully navigate a thriving Rwandan marketplace!!!), of living without electricity, and also two weeks of being surrounded by some of the most BOMB people I have ever met (the other PCVs) and our training director, Mupemba, a giant teddy bear from the DRC who tells us he loves us on a daily basis. I love what I’m doing and the people I am doing it with, but being immersed in such a new reality is not without frustrations. I don’t think it would ever be possible for me to actually record everything that has happened since the last time I wrote, but there are a few things that really stand out to me as important and those are the things that I have chosen to write about.

Umuganda: Saturday made me realize how much the Rwandan and American work ethics truly differ. It was Umuganda, a state mandated workday that takes place one Saturday a month. Everybody is required to attend (unless ill or otherwise indisposed) and to help out in major constructions and development projects across the country. Peace Corps decided that volunteers shouldn’t have to be left out. The idea of a white person doing work in Rwanda is, as I’ve mentioned) a foreign one and I could feel it on Saturday. The site of muzungus even carrying work tools was so preposterous that one woman actually came out of her house just to laugh as us and take our picture, a strange irony considering the fact that most volunteers feel uncomfortable taking pictures of Rwandans. This treatment didn’t go away for most of the day, but it was still completely worth it to get to work. In one morning, I helped to build not only one, but two, roads to farmers in the countryside. This was followed by a ceremony in which we were pulled into a crowd of dancing Rwandans and actively forced to attempt traditional dance moves….emphasis on attempt. Like all Rwandan ceremonies it seems, this one also included a large speech-making session in which anyone of any import whatsoever in the community was given time to speak and the economic head spoke for a grand total of 35 minutes…all in Kinyarwanda. Since that day, Rwandan speech-making has already become something I have learned to anticipate and taught me several lessons in patience.

Church: There are very few people in Rwanda who don’t attend church, but on Sunday, my family planned to be those people. My host sister claimed that she was too sick to go and that was that for her. I realized later that she might have had the right idea. Curious (and stubborn) as I am, I resolved to go to church even without my host family and tagged along with another volunteer instead. At first, I couldn’t see why my family was so reluctant to go. I have never heard such a beautiful choir in my life. The music was so rich and so moving that it constituted a god-like experience just to be in the room and listening. However, just as with Umuganda, the high I felt from a truly rich and beautiful cultural experience was significantly lowered, yet again, by Rwandan speech-making, this time followed by an English translation. The church service was over three hours of yelling (in mixed Kinyarwanda and English and with a slightly faulty sound system) and that pastor and I did not see eye-to-eye. He made the analogy that the degree of your love can be measured only by how much you give….and then went on to explain that he had recently thrown away a Blackberry that he had purchased on-sale for his wife because he realized that it was a knockoff and therefore not a worthwhile gift. It’s really not my place to say, but I felt that his message failed to recognize the material disparity between himself and his own audience. Still, I am moved by the amount of faith Rwandans seem to have. I won’t be converting anytime soon, but I will most likely be going to church again for the music and to gain a better understanding of my community.

Mud: It’s the rainy season here right now, which means that I have seen more rain in a day than I am used to seeing in a month of Colorado weather. It also means that I am almost always covered in mud from trudging between my house and the training. This would be frustrating enough by itself, but the reactions of my host family have managed to make it worse. The first time I came home this way my host family insisted on making me remove my shoes and put on a pair that belonged to one of them to wear inside the house so as to not get my feet dirty. Granted, getting your feet dirty here is no small thing. It can result in jiggers, an infestation of tiny bugs, in the soles of your feet, or several other nasty skin conditions we’ve been warned against, but this still doesn’t justify the deference with which my family treats me. If I ever want to integrate, I can’t be treated like a little princess every time it rains (which is pretty much every day) or my clothes get dirty. Therefore, every day is a battle to clean my own shoes and do my own muddy laundry.

Fanny: Fanny serves as a constant reminder of the real reasons I am here. On my last day in Colorado, Tanya asked me what it was that I was looking forward to the most about Rwanda. My instant response was that I wanted to find a Rwandan girl friend that I could really confide in, knowing that the success of my service would depend almost entirely on the relationships I build while I am here. Thankfully, Fanny is one of the most open people I have ever met and over the course of just a few nights we have talked about everything from boys to dropping your phone down the toilet. Fanny reminds me so much of all of the reasons I decided to do Peace Corps in the first place. She’s a complete free spirit, has a boyfriend her parents didn’t approve of (who is currently studying in China), loves to go out clubbing (and did for 6 months while she lived in Cape Town, SA with her brother), and studied chemistry and biology in school, hoping to someday become a doctor, but wasn’t granted the opportunity to go to college. Due to almost completely random circumstances, it seems like Fanny is restricted from having the kind of life she really wants in almost every way. And she just keeps on trucking, serving as a constant reminder of my own desires to be free of limitations because, let’s face it, that is a large part of the reason that anyone does Peace Corps.

Kigali Genocide Memorial: The Kigali Genocide Memorial is easily one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen in my time in Rwanda. Instead of the typical cement or adobe coloring, it has been painted bright white, a color that we rarely associate with death. However, the memorial is located at a site where approximately 259, 000 were killed during the genocide of 1994 and is surrounded by the graves of the dead. The memorial and museum contained very little information that was new to me, but they certainly did put the information in new perspective, now that I am actually here and in the same landscape in which it happened. For another, the museum is host to a child exhibit, which is full of large scale pictures of children and lists their favorite foods, sports, and songs….as well as their last words. More than anything though, I was frustrated to think about how little we did to stop the genocide when it was happening. We brought a large flower arrangement from the Peace Corps with the words “Never Again,” but these kind of promises have proven almost impossible for the world to keep. Rwanda hasn’t given up hope though. The museum doubles as an education center with an eye to genocide prevention. It will be interesting to see how the country moves forward in the next couple of years that I am here.

(Picture of Zack and I after an epic bike ride in the rain to access the internet)