Life is unpredictable!

I’ve resigned to take up my new job setting up a street kids project and centre in the East! I have two weeks left of school, invigilating and marking exams, and then it’s off to England for a couple of weeks before moving to my new home and job.

It’s an exciting project with an alternative approach, and it’s really gaining momentum which is great news. It's been started by two former VSO volunteers who've invested everything in it - their heart, soul and money. So far IRC are on board and funding the expansion and development of the programme as the main element of their unaccompanied children and social work programme in this country, but the project is also being courted by several other agencies.

I spent this weekend on site, looking over the property we’ve acquired to run the community and education programmes out of and to accommodate the younger children and emergency cases, and me of course! It’s an excellent property, not quite finished but huge and with massive potential for achieving the objectives we have and more.

Work in progress!

Genocide tensions live on...

It’s been a thought provoking and eventful few weeks.

Security wise things are a little edgy at the moment. 30,000 genocide perpetrators have been released, having confessed, ‘repented’ and served nearly 10 years in prison; most have returned to the communities in which they used to live and where they committed their atrocities. The bodies from some of the many mass graves have been excavated and reburied individually, stirring up communities.

The Gacaca (traditional village court system where the accused meets the witnesses and together they relive the experience) has got underway in earnest in an attempt to deal with the huge outstanding numbers of untried alleged perpetrators. The head of the neighbouring Gikongoro region has named almost the entire elite of Gikonogoro as genocide perpetrators or as receiving bribes from perpetrators to remain silent.

The borders are insecure with interhamwe (the trained killers who after the genocide fled to Congo) amassing on the borders. The Rwandan army, contrary to the Congo’s peace agreement, have gone back into Congo in an attempt to track them down. The Rwandan army allegedly surrounded a UN MONUC team (Congo peace keeping mission) and forced them out of one area where they were fighting the interhamwe.

Interhamwe are also on the border with Burundi just down the road from me, complicated further by the fact the Burundian rebel group which refused to sign up to the recent power sharing agreement in Burundi are still launching attacks into Burundi from Rwanda’s Nygungwe Forest down the road from me. Other groups of interhamwe have surrendered and placed in rehabilitation camps, intended to reintegrate them into society.

Congo has stepped up their attempts to rid the country of the interhamwe since they have been colluding with some of the Congolese rebels and fuelling the conflict there which has killed 3 ½ million people since 1998. There are been reports of several massacres in a village in the north west and two villages half an hour up the road from Save. Last Friday everything shut, across the entire country, for community security meetings.

Then this week there were security meetings for the students and we now have police posted permanently at the entrances to the school. We have several students in trauma over the memories, but the school has isolated them in a bid to limit the spread since a neighbouring school has had to shut down because, as my Principal says, ‘it is a social disease which spreads quickly’. Another of our students committed suicide during the Genocide Memorial holiday which has shaken the students up further.

A memorial sign at my school, with the names of the 100+ students and teachers who were killed...

At the same time, the government is denying anything is happening. Meanwhile, in Kigali there are conferences after conferences about the genocide where the government and its propaganda machine hurl blame at the international community and NGOs and the government continue the questionable and unofficial practice of ‘selling’ the genocide to attract more aid.

But still people are quiet. We are living in an authoritarian police state, with a culture of distrust, prejudice, suspicion and rivalry driven by dire poverty. The security issues have just boosted the government’s case for security measures. You don’t question. You certainly don’t oppose. That’s why last month’s village memorial was so interesting and peculiar. People talked openly at least. Survivors, widows, people who’d lost their children, organisers, killers. And many of them expressed emotion openly. Some see that there is peace, in the sense that there aren’t the massacres and genocides that have plagued Rwanda’s history since Belgium left. They don’t want to rock the boat. It’s a logic with merit but you can’t build a future on suppression. The people who suffered most are now being expected to suffer further as the killers return to live as their neighbours… This is the most densely populated country in Africa – there’s nowhere to escape your memories. I can’t even begin to comprehend how an individual deals with that.

Therapy time...brace yourself

It's been a crazy few weeks. The principle reason for being busy is that, true to women’s assertion about men, I have failed to do two things at once – to study and teach. So, now as my essay deadline and exam loom, I am in a frenzy trying to read and comprehend lots of academic gobbledegook, at the same time as teaching. Self inflicted pain but the end is near. We have a two week holiday on the horizon too which will be a welcome breather from teaching. Scamper is assisting by putting paw prints over everything, having already urinated on my text book several months ago. And by tormenting me by sleeping all day while I’m trying not to flake out in the midday heat.

Trying to get things done has also been infuriating with yet more unannounced holidays. I went into Butare on a Saturday to e-mail and go to the market but oh no, it was Community Labour Day so all the shops were shut and the market had literally been gutted – there was not a thing in it which is incredible as I have no idea how on earth they achieved that. Then I went into Butare the other Monday but again everything was shut – it was National Women’s Day and apparently that morning the national radio had announced that it was going to be a national holiday. Hurrah! It’s getting ridiculous. Since November I’ve had five random days off on top of the universal holidays - these plus AIDS Day, Tree Planting Day and a religious holiday. Oh, I forgot – we also had Rwanda Revenue Authority Day when all the shops shut to pay taxes or hide from the tax collectors.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for Bristley. For a while we’ve been looking for a vocational college that would accept Bristley despite the fact he hadn’t finished primary school. In January we found one in Kigali where he could study an 8 month course with a rolling start date to qualify as a mechanic and driver. So I put word out that I was looking for an opportunity for Bristley to work evenings and weekends as a live in domestic worker. A fortnight ago I got a call from a new volunteer who has just started working as a strategist for a charity here, saying she was interested. Once we had confirmed Bristley could start at the college asap and I’d arranged a replacement for him, I headed up to Kigali with him to move him into his new house… I think I was as excited as he was about him starting out on a career path! Sad too because he’s been great company and I shall miss him being around.

In his place I have Bristley’s cousin, now the second person I’ve moved out of Zaza to relative civilisation! He’s the only survivor of a family of 9 – he was in the pit latrine when the others were taken away and killed… I wasn’t sure whether this would bring with it extra complications but so far so good. He’s an excellent lad with a good attitude. However, whereas Bristley had a little bit of English from his time as a refugee in the camps in Tanzania, Kiki has none so I now have a motivation to revive and improve my Kinyarwanda!

I had an excellent birthday celebration on Saturday. I bought lots of meat and ice in Kigali as a treat on Friday and several of my friends came over for a barbeque. Then in the evening we went into Butare to a nightclub there. That was perhaps the most bizarre experience of my time here! In Rwanda men are very tactile with each other, ignorant of how their behaviour would be interpreted in England and elsewhere - men openly and casually hold hands, wrap their arms around each other etc. This no longer catches my eye as unfamiliar having been here for a while, but it took a while to get used to their different boundaries in the nightclub - men dancing with men, men dancing to themselves in huge mirrors, men dancing competitively, men inviting other men up to dance, men bumping and grinding with other men, yet apparently never with any sexual attraction or motivation. I guess it’s almost a case of necessity – people here love to dance but only men and prostitutes go out to nightclubs. Another amusing observation was that the only picture in the nightclub was a huge old poster of Boy George! Anyway, it was a fascinating place to go and offered some hilarious and eye opening cultural insights! I wish I could video the scene and take it to the Pre-Departure Training Course on culture for future volunteers! Words just don’t do it merit!

Finally, we've had two albeit tiny earthquakes in the last two weeks. Another bizarre experience to add to the long, long list!

A Rwandan kid and a Chinese martial arts star

Bristley is a lad who works for me doing washing, cleaning etc who is invaluable and good company. I took him on when I was in Zaza when I needed someone to shop and walk to the next village to get water everyday. When I moved to the other side of the country I invited him to join me! He was separated from his family during the genocide ten years ago when he was a small child, found his way back to Zaza with the help of the UNHCR but has never seen or spoken to his parents again. So, he had nothing holding him back so he joined me!

I found a room for him in a house in the village so he has his own space and paid for him to return to Zaza for his Christmas and Birthday present so he seems content. His English is improving quickly, he’s consuming some technical books I got for him, I’ve just started teaching him computers and we’ve found a vocational training college for him to start studying mechanics and learn to drive when I leave in 2005.

He’s such a good lad – excellent attitude, hard working, lots of initiative, creative and practical, and stands out from others so I’m determined to help him build a career for the future. Funniest thing – I was told his name was Bristley which I assumed was spelt like that but the other day I asked him where it came from and he said his father worked for a Chinese man and saw some karate films and decided to call his son Bruce Lee!

Condoms, snakes and a school fete

The teaching has been going really well and I’m building up a good rapport with the students which is rewarding. I’ve been trying to broaden the context of my English teaching to include social issues relevant to the developing world which has proved really rewarding. I spent two weeks studying fair trade with my Senior 6, bolted child labour onto the end of the topic of professions with my Senior 2, and used report writing practice to justify spending two weeks of HIV / AIDS education with my Senior 5. The latter included a condom demonstration followed by all 44 students (including a nun) practicing with their own condom and banana, which I suspect the nuns who run the school will imminently reprimand me for! Challenging teaching sexual health with a language barrier. And chaotic when I told the students that yes, they could eat their banana afterwards!

Teaching computers without electricity

I’ve had a HIV / AIDS outreach youth centre in to discuss HIV / AIDS with the students, do some drama etc which was excellent but nearly didn’t happen because the Director, a nun, cancelled it without telling me and without explanation. Thankfully, I found out half an hour before and cancelled the cancellation, rounded up the 400 female students from Wednesday afternoon’s manual labour activities, herded them into the hall, welcomed the organisation to the school, showed them into the hall and stood outside the door refusing to let the nuns in! I sense that I may have been overly assertive but…! They’re going to return again for a follow up session and I’m going to try and take some of the really interested students down to the centre one weekend to show them everything they do – testing, counselling, treatment, peer education, social activities etc.

The high street of Save!

This past weekend I ran a global education workshop (development, international trade, international perceptions of different parts of the world etc) with a couple of other volunteers for the rest of the volunteers and our Rwandan colleagues. Tiring to organise with all the complications of doing so in this context and with translation for everything but it was a huge success, in marked contrast to the workshops that the Programme Office run! Weirdly at the end one of the Rwandan attendees stood up and read out a 3 page letter of thanks that the Rwandans had prepared for us. Very generous but I have never heard such a ridiculously formal and over the top letter of thanks, nor one so long. Then that was followed by an amusing response to the evaluation forms we handed out. The Rwandans misunderstood and thought when we asked for feedback on sessions titled ‘What is development?’ etc, we were testing them and they proceeded to write almost essay length responses!

Save

It’s been an eventful week or so wildlife wise. The big highlight was a snake in the house. I returned from school on Wednesday to find Bristley backed up against the front door pointing to the corner of the room. I guess ignorance is bliss because I ushered it outside with a broom while he stood pinned to the door going ‘aye ya ya’. Once outside my evidently crazy fearless carnivorous chickens gruesomely attacked, killed and ate it. Scamper stepped up from catching geckos to catch a bat and a bird, which I would have no real issue with if she just killed and ate them but she doesn’t. She carries them around in her mouth from place to place and plays with them patting them around and rolling around like a wrestler with them!

Then yesterday we had the school fete – St Bernadette Day – which was arguably bigger than Christmas! I spent almost two days solid drawing and painting two huge HIV / AIDS awareness murials on white double bed sheets for the day and revealed them right at the last minute to ensure they couldn’t veto my inclusion of a life size silhouette of a man and woman! Lots of praying, guests, food, singing, dancing, sketches and the obligatory long boring speeches! The day concluded with a student and teacher football match, well three teachers anyway, one of whom was me. Good fun and I survived but I am now sporting a massively swollen, black and blue cheek and eye after a clash and my leg needs some skin grafting! All of which added to the entertainment for the students watching. Going to ask VSO if my health insurance include facial reconstruction surgery.

A bold presentation for a Catholic school!

Life here with the Rwandans in my village, or ‘the peasants’ as my Kigali based VSO friend refers to them, is going okay. I love returning here after a weekend away. The water and power cuts are becoming longer and more frequent as Rwanda struggles affording and providing utilities, but it’s bearable. I haven’t had any more run ins with the crazy mad woman although the young female teachers next door are driving me nuts. They have been combining their abnormally loud conversational voices and habit of shouting everything they say, with hours of screaming and laughing every evening like they’re being tickled whilst watching a Chippendales show or something!

I haven’t done any of my Masters study for ages with so many things on, and the immediate future doesn’t look too promising either. Rather bizarrely, for someone who only has four months experience of teaching English, I’m going to be running part of an English teaching skills workshop for Rwandan teachers next weekend! This weekend I’m busy trying to put together the final elements of a global awareness website that’s going to be linked to VSO’s website (address to follow once it’s online!). I’m trying to identify from among the many, a couple of seriously underprivileged kids to sponsor through primary school – uniforms, materials etc. And subject to resolving a transport issue I should soon be starting to teach English evening classes to some fair trade coffee farmers who farm about 30 minutes drive from here and supply Sainsbury’s. (So next time you’re in there look out for Maraba Union Roaster’s fair trade coffee!) We’ve got a muzungu vs. Rwandan football match coming up next month too. And with the 10th anniversary of the genocide fast approaching I’m trying to write some articles for the local press back home. Oh, and twice a week I’m supposed to be studying French but my excuses are numerous and my commitment appauling! It feels good to have lots of things to get stuck into in addition to teaching but I have my last essay to do for the end of March and my exam end of April so I need to get back on track soon. The weeks and months seem to be passing by so quickly.

The market in Butare

The most bizarre night...

I’m going mad. Literally. It’s 3.30am and I’m preparing this e-mail for you guys. Why am I up at 3.30? Well, for the last 9 hours I have had some crazy woman laughing, ranting and singing at me outside my house and shouting ‘muzungu’ a lot. Loudly. She even tried to get into my house. So what have I done about it? Unable to call on the local police, or anyone else for that matter, I lay in bed pondering various courses of action. At 11.00 I went out and started shouting at her and then chased her through the mud. I was unprepared, being a bare footed muzungu in the pitch black, so I returned to the house. Between 11.30 and 12.00 I emptied two buckets and a washing up bowl of water over her. This appeared to have worked. There was silence broken only by occasional sneezing for the next hour.

But then she resumed her craziness. So half an hour ago, after deliberating over a range of unconventional strategies, I decided that I’d try to catch her and tie her to the football goal post where she could stay until the morning when I could find the village elders to deal with her. With my trainers on, some material to shove in her gob, some rope to tie her arms up and a torch I went after her. To her credit she doesn’t half have some stamina. I have chased her around my flipping house several times which she found highly amusing, and then across the vegetable fields around my house. She managed to evade me and disappeared into the night so I came home to wait for her return.

It’s 4.37, the latest rain storm has past and psycho woman has started again. I was genuinely close to lynching her, woman or not, cultural sensitivity or not. The human mind and character is a fragile thing. By sunrise though she'd gone. Once I'd caught up on a little sleep I sent out the house boy to ask questions around the village and find out who on earth it was and why she was ranting outside my house all night. But it was fruitless. It might as well have been just in my mind...

New year reflections on life in Rwanda

Anyway, it’s the first week of a new term and all is more disorganised than usual so I have the luxury of a little extra time to myself. Time to reflect on Rwanda. When I left for Uganda before Christmas wondering whether I could stick it out. But crossing the border back into Rwanda it felt like I was coming home.

Rwanda’s a phenomenally beautiful country with a landscape absolutely littered with hills, mountains and volcanoes. Every hill side, from the valley bottom to the top, is cultivated, lush with banana trees, sunflowers, tea & coffee plantations, maize etc, with dwellings dotted everywhere rather than being grouped together. It’s a very compact country with a capital ‘city’, Kigali, which is barely bigger than a small town.

While I’ve had no difficulty adjusting to waking up to such a stunning environment every morning, elements of the Rwandan culture have made life somewhat challenging. There appears to be a cultural issue with difference which manifests itself in hostility and distrust, for white people the hollering of ‘muzungu’ (white man) at you everywhere you go, aggressively and with no intention other than to make you aware they’ve noticed you (like they wouldn’t when you’re the only white person for miles!).

It takes a lot of time spent with people before you can get past this but once you do village life is more sedate and fun, playing with the kids, having superficial discussions in Kinyarwandan with the adults, living up to their expectation that you’re mad with your different behaviours etc, dodging the trails of cattle….

Of course, there’s the language barrier too. I’ve been living in really rural areas where only the local language, Kinyarwandan, is spoken which makes life difficult – it’s going to take me a lot longer than two years to grasp the language well enough to hold a conversation that is more than pleasantries and market arguments! Beyond here, French is the second most common language so I have a tutor in the hope I can revive my faltering GCSE French. I’m not a very committed student though unfortunately and keep wagging my lessons! Plus, there’s a definite culture embedding itself of expectancy and dependency, engendered by the incredible amounts of aid that has been ploughed into this country.

To briefly summarise Christmas...

Angie left on 22nd, I went to Kampala, Uganda on 23rd, found the solitary bank that allows you to get money out on a foreign card, went to a beautiful place called Sipi Falls at the foot of Mt Elgon on the Kenyan border, spent Christmas there in a log cabin perched on the mountain side overlooking three huge waterfalls one of which was 90m tall, met up with a couple of Americans working for NGOs, went back to Kampala with them, couple of days later went to a little fishing village and hitched a lift on a fishing boat to an unpublicised island in Lake Victoria owned by an English guy who’s colourful life has included numerous dodgy things connected with the mineral mining in Africa but now comprises living on the island, smoking copious amounts of pot which he provided free for guests and drinking all day long. That was ‘interesting’.

Anyway, met some great people working for an NGO called Medair, went back to Kampala to soak up relative civilisation again, then to Lake Bunyoni near the Rwandan border which was just stunning, and finally back home to write my latest essay and prepare for school. Haven’t done much preparing yet. I’ve just spent a lot of time catching up with the other volunteers and trying to work out what to do with myself in 2004 and 2005. Sent Bristley off to Zaza for his Christmas and Birthday present. Built a sofa for my house which everyone is very impressed with. House feels very empty without Angie. Also missing Uganda’s relative development, supermarkets with a range of goods rather than empty shelves, and lovely friendly people (except for a man in the market who told me to go back to where I came from). School starts Monday. Well, some of the kids turn up on Monday. Then we have a couple of weeks waiting for the kids to return home and get their school fees.

Safari with a twist

Having wrapped up the school term, Angie and I ventured over to the East to spend a day in Rwanda’s game park. What a delightful day that was. Rather than go to the park in a 4x4 vehicle as the park instructs me, somehow we joined a trip organised by the Region as a celebration and instead went in a convoy of eight taxi-buses.

As if this didn’t look bizarre enough, the convoy was headed up by the Head of the Region who was accompanied by the army, the police and the game wardens, each in their own 4x4. Inside the taxi buses was an eclectic mix of Rwanda’s finest – among them people from the Region’s administration, the Region’s volleyball team who’d just won the national championships and some students from a school that did well in last year’s national exams.

Maybe I’m the odd one but when I go on to a national park I tend to try to keep a low profile and keep quiet, hoping that I won’t frighten the animals off. Not in Rwanda. Just to top off the disruption of a huge convoy of slipping and sliding decrepit hooting taxi buses, we had lots of Rwandans singing and shouting loudly in their taxi buses. Maybe it’s just a crazy idea that the game wardens and I have but I thought it was advisable to stay in your vehicle and observe rather than try to interact with the animals.

Not in Rwanda. When we are lucky enough not to scare off the occasional animal, the convoy had to grind to a halt and everyone on the taxi bus had to get off and attempt to befriend the animals. Some Rwandans were even generous enough to offer the animals their chupa chups lollies and bubblegum which was a particularly touching moment. This was followed by everyone privileged enough to have a camera, getting snap happy and taking some wonderfully composed shots of Rwandans in the foreground and the arses of a few animals disappearing in the distance.

Inspired by the plentiful array of animals, I used my camera to take pictures of the Rwandans – I’ll use them if I ever study anthropology. We topped it off with a trip to the brand new Game Lodge which had been opened by the President the day before. Under the pretence of “we’re just going in quickly to check the prices”, 8 taxi buses of grubby, noisy and smelly Rwandans, most of whom will never be able to afford $120 a night, emptied themselves into a serene hotel and spent nearly 2 hours asking the incredibly tolerant reception staff for tours of the hotel and bedrooms and disturbing the guests who were sat around the pool.

Update as the year draws to a close...

We’re into the last week of term, although every school seems to shorten or length the official term on a whim. The last three weeks of teaching and exams have been interesting. We’ve had three public holidays, two of which I had no idea existed until I found my classrooms were empty. Increasingly my students started sleeping in lessons, a reflection of the 8am-4.30pm school day etc rather than my teaching I hope!

I’ve had two surprise inspections by my headmistress, which went well with the exception of her taking my lesson plan off me to mark despite me needing it to teach the assessed lesson and her beating several students during the lesson! I haven’t started teaching any ICT (computers) yet because it’s not been organised or timetabled.

My pay has not been approved by the Ministry because 10hrs of my teaching is extra curricular.

In my last teaching week I turned up at school at 8am to discover that I was going to be on a 3 day computer hardware maintenance course starting that moment, which was very constructive given that a) I’d had no warning, b)it was in French, c) I had students to teach and d) I had exams to write. The exams have been a mixed experience with 75% of the 2hr exams I’ve supervised taking all students 15-45minutes to complete. When the exams aren’t a joke, the students have no watches or wall clocks so can’t manage their time. The headmistress just says “It is no problem, there is a bell at the end of the exam”. And the teachers spend half of their supervision time correcting errors on the exam papers.

It’s been a fairly smooth term though with my inspections getting a ‘very good’ and an ‘excellent’. However, I have got into trouble for going into school on my day off wearing shorts and sandals, for not visiting the school with Angie and for turning up ‘late’ after they changed the exam timetable at the last minute without telling anyone. And they are genuinely horrified that I don’t have any faith – they don’t really care which faith I have, so long as I have a faith. My hippie temporary secondment Programme Manager has told me she thinks my experience of Zaza and Save - first with the priests unhappy with my atheism and trying to convert me, and now the nuns – is fate and that I must have some unconscious religious personal issue to resolve! Wacko. I have been teaching the English club English carols in an attempt to redeem myself, which strangely enough has been quite good fun!

Last week I discovered that the government has changed the school year quite dramatically. They delayed the start of university until January because they didn’t have any money left in this year’s budget so now they’ve had to change the school year so it fits in with university! So now instead of being September – June, this one is going to run until September and thereafter January – September. Which in some ways is good news for me because I’ll have 5 ½ months holiday next year and I don’t start back until January 19th!

We’ve been away quite a bit and had people over several times. Last weekend we went to the north west and a town called Ruhengeri, nestled in the volcanoes. Incredible, especially in the morning when you can see the volcanoes in their full glory and the mist is hovering in the valleys. Angie went up to see the mountain gorillas while a few friends and I went walking around the lakes which border Uganda for the day. It was a great weekend, marred only by picking up an e-mail saying that my MSc essay online submission hadn’t worked – still waiting to find out if there are any consequences to late submission…

This weekend we gave up waiting for VSO to lift the ban on us going into Nyungwe Forest (Burundi rebel groups are supposed to be launching their attacks on Burundi from camps in the forest and there’s a lot of military action down there) and went anyway. Another beautiful place with stunning views over mountains of forest canopies. However, during a 5 hour knackering walk up and down umpteen mountain sides , we saw no primates until we returned to the road ironically and we got absolutely drenched in a thunder storm and spent 2 ½ hours travelling home on a taxi bus, soaked and freezing. Needless to say we are now both suffering although since recently finding a supplier of fresh milk in the village we do now have the comfort of gorgeous hot chocolate!

One of the new additions to the house – Scamper the kitten - is providing both entertainment and irritation. For the first week she was adorable. This past week she has been variating from being adorable (usually when asleep) to largely irritating (when awake). She is mental, rushing around, fighting with everything, climbing everything including our legs, rolling around in her fantasy world, chasing her tail and shadows, harassing the chickens.

The two nameless chickens are frequently irritating too – their wings haven’t been clipped so they can propel themselves a good height into the air, they are eating my plants, they haven’t laid any eggs yet and we haven’t finished building their run outside so they are running around the courtyard and sneaking into the kitchen causing havoc. Scamper and the chickens are still weighing each other up and vying for superiority, a process which is quite entertaining to watch. For as long as it doesn’t involve any casualties!

The brochete man preparing the meat!

Anyway, next weekend we’re off to Kibuye on Lake Kivu and after that Angie’s heading home and I’m off to Kampala in Uganda to find a bank that accepts credit or switch cards so I can withdraw some money for travelling over the holidays! For now I’m going to continue to mark exam papers, blow my nose and laugh in a totally unpolitically correct way at the students’ answers.

My new home...

It’s now three weeks since I said my goodbyes and left Zaza, rather conspicuously on a big lorry because the police had impounded all of VSO’s vehicles! And three weeks on still have – 17 signatures and new number plates are required before they will release them, which in the bureaucratic, job creation, African time world of Rwanda is going to take forever! Mixed emotions about leaving Zaza – sad and relieved that I was leaving, apprehensive and excited about what lay ahead. VSO kindly put me up in a lovely guest house in Kigali where I enjoyed overdoses of meat, fish and cheese which I hadn’t eaten for weeks and CNN broken record programming, while trying to find a new job and home!

The view from my new home

The kitchen

After leaving Zaza I visited two schools in the south-west near Butare, my first visit to the region. The region is so distinct from eastern Rwanda, so less harsh – it’s more mountainous and scenic, there is relatively less overt poverty, the roads have tarmac, the atmosphere is more relaxed and accepting when you’re wandering around town - I wasn’t muzungu-ed or harassed once - and Butare is lovely. The two schools were very different, one being a church school run by Catholic nuns, the other being a new school for children with disabilities. Unfortunately the latter could only offer me 6hrs of teaching plus the English club which made it slightly unviable! So I am moving from a school run by priests to a school run by an order of nuns! The school is lovely, I have been made to feel very welcome and I have a very interesting and diverse role teaching English language, business English, ICT (computers) and sport.

My new school!

So, a week after leaving Zaza I moved to Save, my new home. My new house is very compact but only a couple of years old and complete with incredible luxuries like a flush sit down toilet, running water and electricity! And I’ve found somewhere for Bristley, the lad who worked for me in Zaza to live so now without any persuasion he’s upped sticks and moved from one side of the country to the other! We’ve just spent the evening having French lessons with my new French tutor and discussing his career plans, something quite remarkable for a Rwandan (harsh but fair), and options for vocational training I’m keen to help make happen for him.

I had a week in Save before the theoretical start of my teaching commitments so that I could settle in, sort out the house, paint the house, hang up the hammocks, visit the other volunteers in the region, find the market, find a home for chickens – the usual house move stuff! The house is really coming together and I feel very settled here. The locals still haven’t adjusted to having a white person invade their little sheltered corner of the world and even the neighbours have been turning up at my door and back gate asking outright for money or food without even a pretence of polite introductions or a facade! But the kids are good fun, everyone in the village including a fully habited nun has learnt to play aerobie, the cattle which stroll across my front garden munching the plants are friendly, the view is great, the region is beautiful and the utilities are working remarkably well!

After two weeks I still don’t have a timetable. Well, I have a timetable of sorts which I made while I was waiting for the school to provide the official one, and so I am essentially teaching part time. Lots of clashes, kids turning up at my house for sports lessons on my day off, scenarios like that…Maybe next week…! The students I have taught are excellent and I’m enjoying myself and looking forward to the time I have here!

Unemployed, but not for long!

Thankfully, only 50% of teachers in Rwanda are in anyway qualified so I didn’t have any trouble finding a new job and within a fortnight of leaving Zaza rather bizarrely and conspicuously on a banana lorry, I arrived in another lovely village called Save (sar-vey) in the far South-West which thankfully is only 2kms walk from a main road.

I have a lovely little house, with electricity (except for Mondays and Tuesdays for some reason) and even a piped water supply which is rather exciting! The village has four little shops (by shop I mean a wooden cupboard with some random products in it), there’s a market twice a week 3kms walk up the road, and there are two small bars and a brochette man (a man who barbeques marinated goat meat on skewers for 15p each which are gorgeous!).

Teaching in Zaza

The teaching is okay. I have to say I am not giving my everything to it. I don’t have the energy given that my first 2 months here have been spent trying to restore the wreck of a house I have, and the next month was spent resigning.

And most weekends I’ve had to go somewhere which means waking up at 3am to catch the only bus out of here so I’m left feeling decidedly knackered for the next few days. Mind you, without all the resources I had in England to research lessons and to teach lessons with, it takes so much less time to plan.

I have one irritating student in S4 who keeps standing up and saying ‘I don’t think it is necessary for us to do this’. Yes it flipping is necessary you cheeky little git, you do whatever I tell you, I’m your teacher. Simon says sit down, shut the ?%$* up and do as you’re told.

Anyway, time wise it’s cool at the moment, at this placement anyway. I teach 22 50 minute lessons a week, Monday – Friday, between 8.00-1.15pm and have the afternoons spare to prepare lessons and mark. However, the afternoons are usually a daze of tiredness heightened by the midday heat so I usually spend it baking and eating cake, eating biscuits, staring at the walls, wrangling with VSO or trying to read a book.

Would be so good to teach something interesting in English to students schooled in English, rather than trying to teach boring English grammar in English to students who are schooled in French and don’t understand me. I enjoy the bit of teaching where you’re developing the students’ minds, questioning and challenging them, getting them to explore issues, getting their minds to think in new and different ways etc. I can’t do this to any great extent because their English isn’t good enough and I’m not yet a good enough teacher to compensate for that.

Trying to develop the minds of the languages and literature stream students so that they look for meaning beyond the literal meanings etc and so that they write with creativity and imagination is a hard slog. Did ‘de-stigmatise’ and impact of stigmas in society etc in a lesson today though with the science stream students and that worked, I think. Weird, sometimes you try and explain something, think you’ve failed, feel de-motivated and then the next lesson they’ll start using the word without any prompt! And then you say Alleluia and they chorus Amen.

False start...

It’s Thursday evening, we have electricity for now, and I only have three lessons to prepare for tomorrow so I’m leaving them until the morning and writing to you instead in anticipation of making the marathon slog to the capital at 4am on Saturday!

Currently watching a gecko prowl across my living room floor in search of crickets – to think I paid £40 each for our geckos at home and £2 for every box of geckos, and I had to look after them and clean them out!

This week’s been a momentous and tiring week – I resigned from my job, my second resignation in 6 months! Not that I had a choice – I either resigned or I gave up on having a life, sanity, a girlfriend and an MSc. VSO now have to find me a suitable new placement…who knows what that’ll be or where in Rwanda it will be. Shit deal – all the emotion, time, effort and money I have put into this placement from the moment I received it in May until now, all wasted and now I have to move and settle into a community, school, job etc. And find a new supplier of honey and fresh bread – harsh. Plus the poor school has to find another teacher from nowhere. Mind you, they should have thought about this before they contributed to the mass of misinformation and blatant lies that created this problem. Potentially homeless from 21st November when finish here until the start of the next school term. Feeling a bit better about the situation now. I’ve managed to detach myself from the house and have stopped working on it. I’m trying to convince myself that all the positives about this place aren’t exclusive and could be characteristics of other placements I’m offered.

Still not been ill apart from horrendous three days during in-country-training when was I quite the talk of the town. However, I am sure that I’ve slipped up somewhere along the way in terms of hygiene etc and there’s some bug brewing away inside me. I am also worried that the strange noise emitted from the electricity box in my bedroom is indicative of harmful magnetic fields or whatever it is that fries your brain and stimulates cancer. Not seem many conventional mosquitoes but I swear I have a concentration of albino mosquitoes in my house. Alternatively I am just going to fall ill due to over consumption of custard and orange creams – if I have a supply, I tend to consume a packet in about 10 minutes – I swear there is something addictive in the ingredients. There is no legislation or regulation here in Africa so you could get away with anything.

Two weeks to summarise in an e-mail

Two weeks of my life back home was fairly routine and uneventful. Here, well, it’s predictably very different. The electricity returned after nine days, once the new transformer arrived from Europe! With that came the telephones (the antenna is powered by electricity). For a week the electricity went on and off frequently. I haven’t had a power cut this week but I can only turn certain items on in combination and the bathroom and bedroom lights just flash like they have a vendetta against epileptics and are giving me a headache. Nonetheless, we now have a mobile signal in Zaza. I have one bar at my house, enough to send and receive a text, and if I stand with the cows and chickens in the school farm’s fields I sometimes have three or four bars, enough for phone calls. It is all very exciting!

The transport situation has not been resolved – no 4x4 and no donkey. Since my last e-mail I’ve had a 8hr round trip to the nearest town in order to spend literally 5 minutes in the bank withdrawing money so I can pay for food, and a three day trip to the city to spend an hour on the internet! And the placement description echoes in my mind: “it is not difficult to visit Kibungo or Kigali”….

Like the headache I must be, I have voiced further concerns with VSO about the nature of this placement having discovered that we only have rain water in my village and the last placement here was cancelled because of the water shortage, and having been told by my school director that “it is a problem that you are neither Catholic nor Christian, all our teachers must be”. Hurrah! Add this to being told that it was actually a boys school only one week before I arrived and the now inconceivably assurance that my school was happy with Angie, my unmarried partner who I ‘live in sin’ with, coming to visit and stay.

Balanced against all of these mistakes or oversights, are all the positives of my new life here: I have a good workload, the house is nearing completion, the landscaping of the garden has already commenced and I have recruited two goats to mow the grass out back, I have just negotiated for the school to cook me beautiful loaves three times a week, I have bought a Jack Daniels bottle full of gorgeous locally harvested honey, my ‘houseboy’ is excellent despite getting stranded in Kibungo last time I sent him to the market because there wasn’t room for him on the sole bus that connects us to civilisation, the surroundings are beautiful, and my class sizes are very reasonable although I’m not sure how much of this is due to so many being absent searching for school fees.

However, with VSO refusing to go beyond their rhetoric and tangibly demonstrate responsibility for this predicament and provide me with transport, I am left in the unfortunate position of having to consider resigning and finding another placement. When VSO provide me with the alternative placements then it’ll be a case of balancing them against the cost of buying my own transport and staying put. It’s difficult emotionally and mentally to deal with all this and the prospect of essentially having to go through the last five weeks all over again. And if I move mid term it’ll all be happening at the same time – no chance to settle into the community and house before work started. And this is all presuming I can find something that is more appealing than buying transport and staying put, which is a tough challenge. Frustrating. I feel like I’m burdening all the consequences of someone else’s failings.

Anyway, at least it has distracted from the common frustrations of most placements – jumping out of your skin when you encounter a herd of cattle with massive horns whilst walking down a pitch black track, the aggressive hollering of ‘muzungu’, the endearingly named but infuriating ‘African time’ which the professional and male elements of society frequently adhere to in order to justify inefficiency and unproductiveness, and the culture of making promises or giving assurances without any evident sense of obligation, consequence or consideration.

The ‘maleness’ of society is weird too. Women are de-feminised, in the traditional sense, by the hard labour they dominate and the shaved heads that the majority have, while the façade of urban society is de-feminised by the background role of women and the prevalence of men everywhere, just loitering aimlessly for hours on end, play fighting, involving themselves in every heated conversation that occurs in their vicinity… while women, children and male labourers are toiling and juggling far too many burdens. I’m actually embarrassed to be male here because the overwhelming impression I get of men is a negative one.

The daily sight of tens of children of 3,4,5 years carrying 10 litre water canisters, herding goats, carrying bundles of sticks on their heads and lugging their younger siblings on their backs, of children of 7,8,9 years carrying 20 litre jerry cans that I can barely carry for more than 20 metre and shepherding herds of cattle that are ten times their size, the references my students frequently and openly make to the genocide, living as refugees or being orphans, the pictures and accounts you see and read of the events of the past fifty years here …never fail to at least leave a lump in your throat.

I haven’t made too many blunders so far. My house boy returned from the market with a tool for cultivating when I thought I’d asked him in Kinyarwanda to get some clean jerry cans, I have been told off for not being sufficiently respectful of the bishop – I must say “bonjour monseigneur” not “bonjour monsieur” - and in moments of frustration I keep saying ‘Alleluia’ to myself when I finally make sense to the students but the attentive and religiously devoted students just look confused and respond in a loud chorus, ‘Amen’ – it’s only a matter of time before I get told off. Still no diseases or illnesses although I have all the incubation periods stuck in my mind so I am counting down the days. It’s hugely reassuring knowing that it’s so practical to get to the doctor at the Belgium embassy and Kigali hospitals that I am supposed to use in the event of an illness.

Back to basics...

I am charging every electrical item I have because I’ve had a power and phone cut since last Saturday. Got talking to some Electricity company man on the bus yesterday who said a part had blown (‘because we do not maintain it’ – surprise!) and it was going to cost them £2m for a new one and they would have to get it from Europe. He said the number of people using electricity in my region didn’t justify the cost of this so they were unsure what to do! Thanks I thought.

Quantifying life in Zaza

• Cake baking and consumption rate – 1.3333 per day (as with all statistics this is a bit misleading because I typically bake and consume within the space of 2hrs)
• Current record for number of people in taxi bus – 28 in seating for 15
• Number of times I have removed a bees nest from my front door only to have the bee return and start reconstructing it within a few days – 6
• Average daily rainfall (including the huge hail stones) – 1.37 metres (no official data - educated estimation)
• Number of horizontal surfaces in my house on which to cook, wash, prepare etc – zero
• Eyebrows left after first week using kerosene stove – 1 ¼
• Houseboy’s days off sick with malaria – 7 in 10 days of employment
• Days without electricity or phones – 7 and counting
• Cost of new transformer from Europe to repair the electricity - £2m
• Number of students missing from school during first week – at least 40 of the 240
• Proportion of students who trek to school one day and are sent home the next to get their school fees – c.25%
• Notice given of timetable – overnight (received Sunday night only because told them if I didn’t have a timetable I didn’t know what to prepare and I wouldn’t teach unless I’d been able to prepare)
• Days exposed to syllabus before term started: 1 day for S4 and S5 classes
• Average number of spelling errors in syllabus: 27
• Senior 4’s syllabus words per minute reading speed aspiration: increase from 300 wpm to 350 wpm (must first raise own reading speed to this)
• New career plan - Blue Peter presenter (can make anything out of anything at the moment although raw materials and products not terribly well suited to Blue Peter audience)
• Number of hours Rwanda clock is out – 6hrs (Rwandan day starts at 7 our time but since it’s the start of the day they call it 1 and so on – you basically have to read the clock face by looking at the opposite)
• Horrendously bad journeys since last e-mail – 1 out of 1
• Piritons taken in attempt to control cat allergy last night – 4 in 4 hours
• Percentage effectiveness of this dosage – 90%
• Number of side effects – 1. very drowsy, 2. serious hangover this morning
• Health and safety issues I have encountered in Rwanda – 681 and countingAddictions likely to have after living here for 2 years – 1. Kerosene (not good but stinks the whole house out), 2. Cakes

Zaza - the coolest place I've ever lived!

It’s been an eventful time here so far. I headed off to my school in a small village called Zaza to discover that my house which I’d been assured was ready and habitable was actually derelict because the school didn’t have enough money to repair it and VSO hadn’t checked it. After a few heated discussions I returned to Kigali for a few days.

When I returned to Zaza I miraculously found a dozen workmen working on my house! For three weeks we worked dawn to dusk, concreting the floor, putting windows in, painting, putting electricity in, fixing locks on the doors, digging pit latrines, putting a fence up, repairing walls etc.

Once they’d finished and I’d spent another couple of weeks painting, building surfaces to cook on etc and bamboo guttering to collect some water, and planting my vegetables it was really coming together and feeling like home. Even if it there wasn’t another house in sight, my garden still had three exposed old pit latrines and there was a mass grave of genocide victims 100m away!

Zaza is a beautiful tiny village on a hill top overlooking a gorgeous erratically shaped lake. However, you can’t buy anything there (except honey from the bee man, fresh milk from the cows and bread I got the school cook to bake for me), it has no market, the only water supply was the sky which was fairly unreliable, the electricity would disappear for a week and then return in short spats and spurts, and the only transport out of Zaza was a solitary taxi-bus which left at 4.00am every morning during the dry season, and only carried 19 people (plus whatever livestock would fit in as well), and returned at 4.00pm. I had to hitchhike a couple of times and it took me 5 hours on one occasion and 8 hours on the second occasion before a car passed!

Something unpredictable and odd always happens here – it’s freeky! A herd of goats stormed through my front door the other day, freaked out by a storm, and knocked a can of paint all over the floor. I’ve turned up at school twice to find there were no students because there was a public holiday which was announced at the last minute.