Good Afternoon Teacher!

“Good Afternoon Teacher, how are you?”  Oh, to be a teacher in a Rwanda.  



Nyamata South



Today I made it out of my town and got to go, as my boss says, into the heart of the country.  It was fascinating and I feel like the driving part ended well as I still managed to keep all my teeth in my head after the driver decided to take the shortcut (read, “goat path”) back to Nyamata.  Up until today I had only been in Kigali, the capital city, and Nyamata, my home base.  Nyamata is a town which reminds me a dusty Western frontier town or one of those crossroads towns that just exists and you pass through and quickly forgotten you have.  Although I am sure I am being just a tad hard on Nyamata, it just seems to be one of those towns that charm, beauty, or quaintness forgot.  It does, however, promise to be an up and coming town as the airport is slated to be built down this way in the near future, and more importantly the people are extremely friendly, kind, and helpful.

Anyway, back to the point.  The point being that I have been here for over two weeks to work with schools and hadn’t actually gotten to any schools I would be working with yet.  I did visit a very lovely private school in Kigali where I was blown away by the level of academics the students were doing.  Very impressive.  However, this was my first venture out into the Bugesera School District and really my first adventure off the main roads.  As could be expected it was a feast for the eyes, with so much to take in. The vegetation, the variety of homes, the myriad of activates people were up to, and the hundreds of bicycles plying up and down the roads that the driver was continually swerving to avoid.  Bikes definitely outnumber cars here.  I will be sure to write more about all of this in the future and hopefully get some nice photos of the countryside, but for now I’ll stick with visiting this first school.



First, I should say that I was not there on any official business, but rather along for the ride.  Bugesera District has a lot of schools and a lot of teachers, and I will only be working with a handful of them trying to create model schools in order to, hopefully, build sustainability throughout the district; CUSO-VSO volunteer or no CUSO-VSO volunteer.  Therefore, I was not expected.  It seems, perhaps, I was the first non-Rwandan visitor they had ever had-perhaps, as there are a lot of NGOs in these here parts.  However, I think it would be a safe bet to say that they do not get a lot of visitors period as remote does not begin to explain where this school is.  At one point my boss asked me what I would do if I was left at the side of the road, “Could you find your way?”  And while lots of girl scout thoughts ran through my head about climbing the nearest peak, etc, I got his point about “being out there.” 

Pulling into the school yard I was impressed by the tidy grounds, neat basic brick buildings, and the smartly dressed teachers who stepped out of their rooms to see who had arrived.   I was equally amused by the 50 or so students that first ran directly at the truck when we pulled in and then with one word from their teacher even more swiftly in the opposite direction.  All barefoot, girls in simple blue uniforms, and boys in gold.  



Now here is the amazing part.  Evidently, because I was such a rarity, the teachers all came out to have a short chat with their visitor while 40 to 50 students in each class sat quietly waiting.  No raucousness, no misbehaviors, just patient waiting with necks craned to best see out the window.  Several of the teachers spent a good 20 to 30 minutes talking to me and still the students waited.  The teachers were quite pleased to see me, they said, and extremely honored to have a visiting teacher from America.  Ah, the undo kudos, eh?  I was equally ego boosted, through no merit of my own other than being an American, an adult, or maybe just showing up, when after being greeted beautifully and respectfully in each classroom they would cheer and clap for me after my short visit.  I guess I can now finally stop feeling badly that I never learned to play guitar.  Did I really start bowing my way out of the classrooms?  Hard to tell.

I did not have my camera with me for this first school visit, but I do have a few photos of Nyamata.



Nyamata West





Nyamata Central