Three weeks ago, I started to do what I actually came here to do: teach. That's three weeks that I have been running around with my head cut off, trying to make sense of a world that is simultaneously frustrating, uplifting, thought-provoking, and hilarious. I don't know if I can fit the entire spectrum of what I have been faced with into one blog without doing a disservice to some of it, but I am fairly certain that, the longer I put it off, the harder to will be to do so here it is.
The start of term in Rwandan schools in notoriously chaotic. Students (and sometimes teachers) show up a week or two late to school, the schedule isn't decided until a month in, and even then, no one sticks to it. I think things are a bit different at mine. Besides a steady trickle of additional students coming into the classroom, things went off without a hitch for me. I spent the first day on introductions. I thought this would be relatively simple. And I was wrong. In America, students don't normally want to know a whole lot more about their teacher besides their name and whether or not they assign a lot of homework. In Rwanda, it is a custom for students to spend the first day of each term asking their teachers questions about themselves, a custom I hadn't taken all that seriously because I didn't really think that there were even that many questions to ask. But there are. So, for three straight hours on my first day of school, I got to answer awkward questions about myself, questions about where I'm from (explaining snow was fun), questions about my family, my studies, my university, the American education system, and, most importantly, the big one, “Are you single?”
Soon enough, I was able to turn the heat back onto my students and made them tell me about themselves, giving me only a fraction of the information that had pulled out of me, but valuable information nonetheless. Knowing the names of your students isn't a requirement for Rwandan teachers, but it is a requirement for me so I made each of my students a name tag to help me learn them. This was a completely foreign concept. When I brought the name tags to class (having already explained them the day before), their unanimous question was “Teacher, what is the significance of this paper?” The significance?... the significance is that it's your name and that I'm planning on using it when I talk to you because you should feel significant in your own classroom. I also like learning their names. Some of them are difficult and in Kinyarwanda (Enock, Nadjilla, Bahati), some of them are quaint and easy to say (Jean Peter, Pat, Innocent), and some of them are straight up ridiculous because I told them that I would call them whatever they wanted to be called in my class (Priestartist, 44 shooter, Holy Mafia). There is apparently a lot to be learned from somebody's name alone.
I also made them tell me their age, which most of them thought was unfair because I had made the decision on day one not to disclose my name for fear that I would lose the respect of my students if they knew how young I am, telling them I would tell them when they graduated. This was definitely a good call. I slip and call them kids sometimes in a sad, subconscious effort to make myself feel like more of an authority figure, but half of my students are older than I am, ranging from 16 to 25 years old. Conversations held over the lunch break and after school have informed me that most of them are as old as they are because of opportunities lost in the year of 1994. Many of them now are the “chiefs of their households,” meaning that there are no parents left to take care of their younger siblings so it is on them now. They are burdened with heavy questions, questions they pose like this:
“Catie, in your opinion.......
How may I stop my mind from worrying about my family when I sit down to study?
Can someone be successful in Africa without the opportunity to go to university and no capital or connections?
And.....
Why do the leaders of this world do nothing while other people are dying?”
Answers like meditation and self-initiated job creation can begin to satisfy the need for an answer to the first two, but the latter has me caught up in an existential crisis that I can guarantee will last me longer than the two years of my service. I ended up writing my friend Moses in Uganda and asking him to start up something like an advice column for some of my students because I knew I wasn't the right person to be fielding their questions. Even when they aren't asking questions, my students can be overwhelming. I have found myself in shock this evening when one of my students casually mentioned that he was afraid to swim because his father was murdered on a boat during the genocide and then asked me what ice cream is.
In an attempt to indirectly address some of the issues my students seem to be concerned with, I gave them a lesson on Martin Luther King, which has rapidly expanded into a whole unit on human rights, nonviolent vs. violent revolution, and what it take to make change in the world. One of my classes is so invested in the topic that they actually chose to have a history lesson today instead of playing a game so I'm planning on introducing them to Malcolm X next week and having a mock debate from their two perspectives.
English Club is one of few retreats I can find to have lighter topics of discussion. It's three times a week and run by none other than my fabulous dog sitter Priestartist/Faustin, who, I am convinced, will someday rule much more than English club (seeing as he does aspire to be a Music Superstar/Doctor and spends his free time attending national conferences as a representative of the youth of our district). In the meantime though, he organizes topics of dialogue and persuades even his older peers to humor him in a games like Simon Says over their lunch breaks. English Club is completely optional so its members are confident and enthusiastic, which makes it fun for me to be there and a great place for me to test out new game ideas for my classes.
The teachers also have their own Teacher English Club, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the student English Club. Student English Club is run by students, but Teacher English Club is (apparently) run by me. Student English Club is willing to play games, but Teacher English Club is too serious. Student English Club lets me act any way I like, but Teacher English Club insists that I compose myself in the manner of a Rwandan teacher, which is “to be very serious,” never to use the eraser myself and always exit the class before any of my “students” can leave. Of course, the biggest difference is that my teacher students are actual horrific classroom participants due to the fact that most of them are too shy to actually speak English, seeing as they spent most of their education learning French and only recently have been forced to make the switch to English. They're terrified of actually using English and absorbed in the details of the difference of the simple present and present perfect tense and when it is appropriate to use the word “for.” That's not to say that they can't speak English though. They can and they do when they are one-on-one, but getting them to do it in our mock classroom is a battle.
Despite its challenges, I have to admit that I have a pretty cushy setup as far as my school goes. Burdened as my students are, they are privileged to three meals a day (that's three meals a day more than most schools in Rwanda can guarantee their students), running water, and electricity to study by at night. Discussing the hard stuff pays off because I know that they actually have a chance to take what they are thinking about and apply it when, someday, they are actually leading their country. It's hard to know what they've been through, but it is inspiring to think about where they are going.
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