"Teacher, so a gang is like a group of punks?" -G

Last weekend I got on a bus to go to a nearby town, and one of my students was sitting on the bus. She was sitting with her son, who looks to be around 6 or 7. She was dressed in the clothes that only women wear (to be a woman here is to be married, especially with children) and had her arm around the boy just like a mother would. My student. Keep in mind, I am teaching Senior 2, which is about 8^th grade. In Rwanda, because you can go back to school whenever you’re able, it’s perfectly common for the youngest student in a class to be 10 years younger than the oldest . I have students who are 12 and 13, and I have students who are older than me, married and with children. And sometimes their children go to the same school. Imagine me, 23 years old, asking a married woman with children why she doesn’t have her homework.

Age also affects credibility. In the States, while we don’t necessarily expect recent college graduates to be wise with experience, there is a certain level of respect for someone who has finished university and has a Bachelor’s degree, even if they are only 23 years old. In Rwanda, being 23 years old and having finished university is essentially unheard of, and except to the well-educated themselves it certainly doesn’t mean a person knows anything. So it’s understandable, then, that to my colleagues, I am basically a child. And I don’t mean the kind of child that just made my mom say out loud, “But you are a child.” I know I’m young. But here I am a child.

Needless to say, this is frustrating on too many levels. When my colleagues can hardly even fathom that I could possibly teach them anything besides the English language and how to physically use a computer, it makes it difficult to make any significant changes within the school system. And when they’re not required to have university degrees to teach at the level we teach, why would they appreciate the fact that I do?

As frustrating as it is to be considered a child, I must admit it comes with its advantages. For one, I absolutely love playing with children. For an adult to do that here is pretty out of the ordinary, so the fact that I’m technically still considered a kid myself means that I can get away with a lot more playtime than I could if I were an adult. And if being so obviously not Rwandese isn’t enough, being a foreign child carries me a long way through those inevitable cultural faux pas.

And, to be fair, my colleagues are in no way disrespectful or condescending to me. It’s just that they sometimes casually avoid trainings or workshops. No big deal, right?