February-Now!

MURAHO! So, anyone who visits my page often has probably noticed that I have fallen off the face of the blogging earth… but I’m back, with many stories of a busy first term, a fun vacation, and the start of a new term!

My very first trimester as a real-life teacher was definitely a learning experience.  In general, it went very well.  I got much more comfortable with my eight classes and had a lot of fun with them.  We has some memorable lessons, including teaching my fifth-year students “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton during our fact and opinion unit, which happened to fall around Valentine’s Day.  The girls absolutely loved it and continue to request it any time we have a few extra minutes in class.  Also, in my sixth year classes we spent a couple weeks reading news articles about the upcoming Olympics, so I divided them into teams and they had to choose a country to represent for “Class Olympics”.  Every reading exercise and activity then became a competition, either to be the quickest team finished or the team with the highest marks.  At the end of the unit, we had a ceremony to award the gold, silver and bronze medals, which I made out of paper, as well as some candy and extra credit for the exam.  I think the girls really enjoyed it, especially considering that I still spot a student wearing her medal from time to time around the school campus.

There were of course, a few challenges to my first trimester as well.  For example, I found that procrastination can be a bit more of an issue when it comes to grading three hundred papers rather than writing just one.  Hopefully I learned my lesson and will do a better job this term!  Another thing I realized is that in Rwanda you can’t expect the authorities to just tell you everything that your job entails, or much of anything for that matter.  I am referring to the fact that with about five days left before the end of the term, the head teacher asked me where all my homework was, and when I told her that I had returned it to the students after recording the marks, she informed me that I was supposed to have re-collected all of it, organized it and brought it to her.  So, I had to scramble around to all my classes, interrupt the students who were studying hard for exams, and ask them to dig through all their notebooks to find every piece of homework I had handed back to them throughout the term.  Needless to say, I was not able to recover all of it, but I did my best.  Then, two days before vacation, when I had all my grades totaled and ready to hand in, I was asked if I had collected all of the students’ discipline cards and subtracted points from their English grades for every instance when they had gotten in trouble for speaking Kinyarwanda instead of English at school.  So again, I rushed around to all my classes to take their discipline cards and then set to work changing all three hundred of the final grades.    All of this on top of the exam-grading made my last week a bit rough.

Apart from teaching, life in Shangi during the first term was great too.  After our teachers vs. community leaders volleyball game, the executive secretary decided that he wanted to make sector volleyball and basketball teams to travel around and play against teams from other sectors.  So I was recruited to the SHANGI ONE TEAM basketball squad.  It has been a great way to get to know some people from the community, because it consists of teachers from several schools, sector leaders, priests, and other sports enthusiasts.  Any time I see any of them around the village, they greet me by shouting “ONE TEAM”.  We had two official games last term and it sounds like we have another coming up sometime this month (although you never can tell how set in stone things are in Rwanda), so I’m looking forward to that. 

I have also gotten a lot of enjoyment out of hiking around beautiful Shangi.  When I first told some of the teachers that I was interested in walking down to the lake, six of them volunteered to accompany me, so we had a wonderful afternoon hiking to Kivu, a little over an hour-long journey.  At the lake, we met an awesome old German man who has lived for years and years on what used to be a German base camp.  He hires Rwandan kids to help him care for the land and to give tours when visitors come, and he seems to just love his lakeside life in Rwanda. 

Aside from that afternoon excursion, my relationship with the other teachers at my school has continued to grow and has been an awesome support for me here.  Many of them will drop in for tea or just to chat at my house.  Also, the English conversation group has really picked up.  Over half of the teachers have come at least once, and there are six who have come just about every single week.  Tuesday nights are often the highlight of my week because the conversations are so great.  We listen to a news story and then discuss it, and I learn so much from just sitting back and listening to them debate on different topics, because they are all so intelligent and well-informed.  And they truly value my opinions too, which is a nice feeling!

I began to do English lessons for the nuns who were interested as well.  They are at a more beginner level, which is what I was more accustomed to teaching before coming to Rwanda, so it feels good to be back in my comfort zone, with basic grammar and vocabulary contexts, even just for one hour a week.  I love having the nuns as a sort of family for me in Shangi.  They are so happy any time I show up to share a meal with them or just come by to say hello.  They are also good resources to have to continue practicing and learning more Kinyarwanda.

After the first term, there were three weeks of vacation.  I spent the first couple weeks hanging around Shangi and going into Kamembe, the nearest city, a couple times to visit friends and other Peace Corps volunteers there.  It was a relaxing couple of weeks.  I spent a lot of time with a couple of families from the community, did a lot of hiking and got some lesson planning done.  Two other volunteers, Tim and Meredith, also came to visit my site, which was fun!  After Meredith’s visit, we went together to visit our host families in Kamonyi.  It was really good to see my family!  The girls were all home from school so I got to catch up with them and we had fun remembering all of our fun times together during training.

After the trip to Kamonyi, I spent a wonderful day eating burgers and pizza in Kigali before heading to Kibuye for Peace Corps In-Service Training for one week.  It was the first time I saw most of the people from my training group since Pre-Service training, so it was great to hear how things were going for all of them.  Also, Kibuye is a gorgeous place and our hotel was right on the lake, which could only have been better if the water of Kivu was not shisto-infected, causing Peace Corps to ban us from swimming.  I got a lot of good information to take back to site with me at the training, but being stuck in morning to evening meetings again was a bit torturous.  I also found myself really missing Shangi since I had been gone for almost two weeks. 

Getting back to Shangi felt so good—it really felt like I was coming home.  All of the teachers had returned from the vacation and it was wonderful to see them again.  I returned right before the official genocide memorial day for Shangi, so I spent my first couple days back in mass and meetings to commemorate all those who were killed in our area.  It was a difficult time, but it was very moving to see how much Rwandans have come together and how strong they are, and I felt very privileged to be a part of their memorial.

For my first week back in classes, I decided to ease back into things and to have some fun with my students so I taught them the song “Lean on Me” which was another hit!  My students love talking about their friends so I knew they would like to learn some terminology we use for friendship in the US, and they certainly did.  I explained all the lyrics to them and by the end of the class they were all singing loudly and having a blast.  It was awesome!

We also have big things happening for the GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) Club.  A couple of the other Peace Corps volunteers in our region and I are organizing an official camp for them to attend during the break after the second trimester.  This will be a great way to motivate the clubs to get more involved in their communities and to motivate the girls to take on leadership opportunities.  I announced the news to my girls and they are super excited.  We are also starting to write a skit about HIV/AIDS prevention to present at the school and hopefully to the community as well.   

I think my last story to share is about the events of last weekend.  There is a hugely popular singing competition in Rwanda called Primus Guma Guma Superstar, which consists of all of the biggest singers and musical groups of the country.  People vote for their favorites until it is narrowed down to the top ten, who then tour the country together until the winner is chosen and gets to perform and record a song with Jason Derulo.  Well, I was determined to stay at my site for a while since I was away for so long, but all that went out the window when one of my friends in Kamembe called to tell me that Primus Guma Guma Superstar was in town!  Now I have been keeping very up-to-date with the competition so that I have a go-to conversation topic with young Rwandans, plus I really enjoy Kinyarwanda music, so there was no way I could pass up seeing it live!  So I dropped everything and headed in to Kamembe on Saturday and had a ton of fun singing (the like one line I actually understand of each song) and dancing with the huge crowd of Rwandans at the bus station, where the concert was held. Afterward everyone headed to one of the hotels in town where the dancing continued well into the night.  It was a blast!

So in conclusion, life is good!  I never imagined that I could be this happy in my Peace Corps service, but I have truly been blessed with amazing people supporting me, both in Rwanda and from afar!