"If I were pilot I would eat banana in atmosphere." -J

I have officially taught for an entire academic year in Rwanda! The hours and days have crawled by but somehow the year has flown.

Reflecting on the past year, I can say without a doubt that I have learned more than I have accomplished, as I’m sure will be the case for the rest of my Peace Corps experience. I feel like I know more with every day that passes, which of course means I still probably know essentially nothing. Nonetheless, it’s really incredible to think about how different next year will inevitably be with what little knowledge I do have going into it.

On one hand, I’m absolutely ecstatic about the ideas I have for improving my school next year and the possibility of seeing any of them manifest into real, effective projects. On the other hand, I have so many of these ideas that part of me reacts to it the way some of us do when our to-do list is too long to finish: retreat and do nothing. I can’t get away with that, of course, neither personally nor professionally, but I’d be lying if I said it’s not all incredibly overwhelming. It certainly makes me appreciate even more the value of being here two years as opposed to one; I didn’t know anything when I got here and I can’t imagine how defeated I would feel if this experience were ending now, right as I’m scratching the surface of how to potentially have an impact.

As much I’m pinning my hopes and dreams on next year, though, this year certainly hasn’t been without its exceptional moments. I did end up having the reading stations that I mentioned in a previous blog, and I feel like I can’t even express what a pleasure it was to watch so many of my students relaxed, with books, learning from each other and enjoying reading.

I’ve also seen a number of my students become more confident in speaking English, whether or not they know as much English as some of the other students. When we were doing reading stations, one group had a book about wild animals. They wanted to discuss what the book said about hunting, so I asked them to think about whether it would be good or bad if people started killing the gorillas here in Rwanda. One of the boys, among the lowest in the class in terms of grades, exhausted what seemed like every expression he could think of to be a part of the discussion. I am so proud of him not only for trying to speak English, but also for thinking seriously and critically about the question I asked – a task that has been more difficult than expected with these students.

Overall, I couldn’t have asked for an experience that asked more of me. I know here in Rwanda I’m not on either of the extreme ends of the Peace Corps spectrum, but I am in a place where my skills, patience, and compassion are stretched constantly. Every single day I am forced to analyze what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and, most importantly, how I could be doing it better. And, in the end, isn’t that really what it’s all about?

One group of students at a reading station. This book was a big hit with every group because it has a pair of pop-up 3D glasses to examine the insects.

"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?

"Please, I speakn't English." -H

We’re into our third week of the last term of the year and so far everything has been significantly better than both previous terms. A variety of things at school are finally starting to fall into place, and I’m feeling more comfortable teaching than I have since I’ve been here.

Because it’s difficult for students to find time to go to our new library (and because, let’s face it, they’re frightened) I decided I want to try having book stations in my classroom next week. In preparation for that, I’ve been taking my students to the library in small groups this week to give them some time to choose books they would like to see in the book stations.

I cannot even begin to express what an absolute joy it has been watching them look through the books. For one, books and libraries are so new to them that they have no real concept of trying to keep books in order or even of putting them on the shelves with the spines out. When I noticed this and did a mini-lesson on the importance of the books’ spines, they refused to trust the front cover as an acceptable place to find the name of a book. Again, because books are so new and their English is so basic, even my oldest students felt absolutely no shame in writing down Baby’s First Colors as a book they would like to read. Boys were writing down princess books, and girls were writing down tractor and machinery books. One student found a book with dialogues and speech bubbles and I watched as she recited the entire dialogue to herself, complete with facial expressions and everything.

I’ve also been doing exercises with my students in class to work on determining and improving their reading speed, and it’s been really exciting to see their enthusiasm and eagerness to beat the highest words-per-minute rate in the class.

Even with these gratifying improvements in the classroom, though, the system as a whole is certainly not without its frustrations.

Today, for example, I arrived at school a few minutes before 7, which is when classes are supposed to begin. I had planned a jeopardy-like game to review the verb tenses we’ve covered so far and had to wait 15 minutes to get tape from the office so I could tape the game cards onto the chalkboard. When I walked into class 15 minutes after it was supposed to have begun, only half of my students were there. Nonetheless, I began to divide them into teams so we could start the game. Shortly after they started moving to sit with their teams, I noticed that almost every student at school was actually standing outside of the classrooms. A few minutes later a teacher came into my classroom and either made an announcement or gave some orders. Since the teacher said everything in Kinyarwanda and either didn’t think or didn’t bother to tell me in English what had just been said, I had no idea why all my students were suddenly picking up their desks and taking them outside the classroom.

Several minutes of confusion later, I was able to find out from a student that they had been told to leave the classroom so a few students could clean it-which is why most of the students in the school were standing outside. Of course, not one of the students chosen to clean any of the classrooms was a boy. If you’re asking yourself whether or not this was really an appropriate time to stop all learning and clean, I’m right there with you.

Needless to say, the entire first period was lost. At that point I was down to one hour to teach this class a game they had never played before, as well as to make sure what little time they had to play actually did prepare them for the quiz at the end of the week.

Inevitably, a few minutes after teams were established and all the game cards were on the chalkboard, another teacher came to do a uniform check. Since half of my students were wearing jackets in the frigid, rainy weather, they had to leave. Perfect. We began the game with about half the amount of students each team had a few minutes before, and about halfway through the game the rest of the students, clueless about rules, points, and procedures, were allowed to join their teammates.

Later in the day when I stopped by a class to make an announcement about an after-school meeting, I walked into the classroom to find that the students were being read their rights. Which rights, I’m not completely sure. And why their rights are being read to them nine months into the school year is absolutely beyond me.

Here’s to a great third term, and almost a year in Rwanda!

"The student who sit behind me try to cheat every time."* -D

Exams. Sigh.

Students here don’t have pre-made answer sheets, scantrons, etc. They also don’t write their answers on the test, like we usually do in the States. Instead, they write their answers on regular, blank sheets of paper. In order to avoid cheating, each piece of paper has to be stamped with the official school stamp before it’s given to a student. This way we know they aren’t turning in something they wrote before the actual exam. Each student (there are about 1,000 of them at my school) is required to contribute one clean notebook to the school for us to stamp and give to students as answer sheets.

This term (and last term), nobody began stamping the books until the Monday that exams started. Each notebook has about 96 pages. This means that even if only 10 students brought notebooks, we would still have 960 pages to stamp before we could start exams. And for most exams, the students need 2 or 3 pages to record their answers.

We have three levels at my secondary school: 1^st form, 2^nd form, and 3^rd form (basically 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grade). Again, in order to avoid cheating, students are divided for exams. So room 1, for example, will have approximately 25 students from 2^nd form and approximately 45 students from 1^st form. There are more students in 1^st form than in any other form, so many classrooms have twice the amount of 1^st form students as 2^nd form students. Due to the number of students per room they are often required to sit 3 to a table, almost completely defeating the purpose of dividing them to avoid cheating.

As teachers, we are assigned a different room to supervise every day. To find out which room we are supposed to supervise, we consult a document that has a list of our names with our room numbers. Then, we have to find the one teacher that has the one document that says which students are in which classroom. Once we know which and how many students we have, we have to find the teacher whose exam the students are taking and ask them for the number we need.

This term, the director of my school decided that students who hadn’t brought notebooks couldn’t take exams until they did. Naturally, that sent more than half of the students into a frenzy, some of them choosing to try to beg their ways to forgiveness, others leaving school to go buy notebooks. Students who did bring notebooks were fighting to make sure they got their stamped papers, or at least that their names were on the list. After about 45 minutes of this, the director rescinded the new rule and announced that all students would be able to take exams. We started exams about 2 hours late.

As for the students, I really feel for them. Imagine how you would feel if you had to take at least half or your exams in a language you weren’t comfortable with, crammed between two other students on a wooden bench, with primary school students coming to your classroom window for no reason other than to distract you. I’m honestly surprised (though grateful) that I haven’t had any students storm out in a fit of rage. Not that that’s what I would do.

*The quote for this post is from a student's quiz. I asked them to write sentences with certain prepositions, and that's what one student wrote for 'behind.'

“I can see on your bag and your shirt of Texas that you love very much the head of cow.” -G

The babies are changing. I have officially been here long enough for babies who couldn’t really walk or talk when I got here to waddle over to me and call me by name. And long enough for babies who weren’t even born yet when I got here to laugh and hold their heads up. Obviously I knew that would happen, but it just hit me that it’s been long enough now.

We start exams at school next week, which marks the end of my second term of teaching here in Rwanda. Although I do feel confident enough to say that the second term was a pretty solid improvement from the first, I still have moments when I feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing. Of course, that’s not actually true and I am undoubtedly my harshest critic. For example, I have made a little progress on the ‘l’ and ‘r’ front. In order to drive home the concept that in English l’s and r’s cannot be interchanged without changing the meaning of a word, I decided to teach the difference between clap and crap. Now, despite my insisting that crap is not a word to be used in school or with people other than close friends, my students have permanently modified “Teacher, may I leave the room?” to “Teacher, may I go to crap?”

*Ironically enough, on my way from writing this blog entry to the Internet to post it, about 100 birds went crazy and Ryan and I got crapped on about 5 times.

On a more serious note, though, I am consistently surprised at how difficult this job can be. I’ve started giving my students more notes to copy to make it easier for them to study for quizzes and exams. But inevitably, no matter how much I try to simplify them, half of the class doesn’t even understand the notes. This makes me wonder how they ever learn anything in their other classes that are taught in English, which definitely have more complex vocabulary than mine. One difference, though, is that they are usually tested on concepts and rules rather than application. For example, many English tests would ask what an adverb is (a definition they could memorize without actually understanding) rather than require a student to identify or use one. This isn’t the case across the board, of course, but it’s been a struggle for my students to learn to think critically about the information as well as to actually use it for communication.

Nonetheless, I’m proud of my students and teachers for the progress they’ve made and am looking forward to one more term with my students!

Penny, Katy and I showing our love for the red, white, and blue. USA!

"Well I had pet ducks at the time, so it must have been freshman year." -K

A few days after my last blog post, my friend Shelby took 10 days out of her already jam-packed summer travel schedule to come all the way to Rwanda to visit me! It was so great to see and spend time with somebody from home, and very interesting to see my environment and job through completely new eyes.

Shelby spent a month in Ghana last summer helping to build and create a library, so she was an enormous help to me in the library I’m trying to start at my school. She also came to class with me that week and helped me do a couple of projects I’ve been wanting to do with my students but have been afraid to try alone. (Did I tell you that my student-to-teacher ratio is about 50 to 1?)

One of the projects we did yielded some very interesting and entertaining results. Shelby and I took about 100 pages from the magazines I have (thanks Colleen, Mom, and Mandy! And anybody else who sent me magazines that I haven’t gotten yet) and passed them out among the students. I told them to look at several of the pages and write 5 things they saw in the United States that they like and 5 things they don’t like. Naturally, there were a lot of students who liked kitchen appliances, good-looking movie stars and musicians they know, and the few foods they recognized. Dislikes included people with too little clothing, ugly shoes, and foods they didn’t recognize, among others.

One thing that was interesting about this project was how hung up the students got on knowing the names of the people they were writing about! They were constantly asking Shelby and I for the names of every single person they saw, so I paused the project to do an impromptu mini-lesson on reading captions. After that a few of the students got brave enough to write their sentences without our help. One student in particular had a paper full of gems-both in terms of caption reading and general thought processes. Enjoy a few!

I like Trident White because she has a long hair.

I do not like Victoria Beckham because she is hungry.

I do not like BL Golden Wheat because I do not know what is it?

Shelby and I did get to go to Nyungwe National Park, and although exactly nothing went according to schedule and we didn’t get to see any chimpanzees, it was still a beautiful hike and I’m glad she got to see the Rwanda that lies beyond my classroom.

The following week was our IST, or In-Service Training, in Gisenyi. I’m only about 40 kilometers from Gisenyi but somehow this was my first time there. It certainly won’t be the last, though; it’s absolutely gorgeous there! It was so good to see my group again, and a huge relief to hear that I’m not alone in the things I’m struggling with at school and site. We had a number of really great sessions, one of which was by two representatives from the Project Wet Foundation, a great non-profit that specializes in water education. They gave us a handful of excellent materials and activities to bring back to our schools to help encourage healthy water practices and they gave us candy!

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks but things are starting to settle down and I’m slowly getting back into my routine. I do find it almost unfathomable, though, that it’s June already.

Love and miss you all.

Shelby and I in Nyungwe National Park.

A few volunteers swimming at IST in Gisenyi.

"I like so much the work of the Americans. When you interfere, it is very interesting to me." -V

In early March all of the volunteers in my education group received an email from a USAID representative regarding books for primary school students. She said that USAID had decided to fund an entire shipment of books from Books for Africa and wanted us to have the opportunity to put our schools’ names on the list to receive some of them. Of course I responded immediately, as I work for a poor school with absolutely no library or books to speak of.

A few weeks later I was told that my supervisor was working with USAID to choose a school for the official “Handing Over Ceremony” and that my school was on the short list. About a week after that I was informed that because my school is a 9-year basic education school, has no library system, and is severely lacking in teaching resources in general, we were chosen to host the ceremony! All of our students were absolutely thrilled to receive the United States Ambassador to Rwanda on our campus, along with other guests from USAID and the local media. We received over 600 books, and students and teachers alike are showing an incredible eagerness to visit our new library.

I spend most of my time now between and after classes working to create an entire library system from scratch. I’ve stamped all the books with our official school seal and am trying to establish a catalogue system, timetables and rules, and most importantly, training programs that establish a reading culture and show teachers and students how to use library books most effectively. It’s a daunting task but one that I am ecstatic to take on.

I have to acknowledge, though, that my school and me were extremely fortunate to have been given these books at absolutely no cost. Books for Africa is an amazing organization that sends books from the United States to Africa after you raise 25% of the shipping costs in your African community and the other 75% from donors in the States. However, for this particular shipment, USAID and the U.S. Embassy covered 100% of the costs!

This won’t happen again, though, which is why we need your help! I’m working with a group of volunteers to get another shipment of books here to Rwanda so that our libraries can continue to grow. This time, though, we’ll have to raise the money ourselves. If you’re interested in donating to our book project through Books for Africa, please let me know so I can get you the information. Our students are so eager to learn and read, and the more books we have in our new library for them to explore the grander their ideas about their futures become. You should see their faces when they see pictures and read about things they’ve never even heard of - dolphins, space ships, even snow!!

Here a couple of excerpts I particularly enjoyed from thank-you letters I had my students write after we received the books:

…is the first time we have library at G.S. Mukamira. When they are in those books what you sent to us I’ll know more. I’ll read the books to increase my experiances and I’ll teach my brothers and my sister those experiances.

…because those books are help me to known English. God Bress you for those books. Rwanda is in East African Community so English is very good for me. When I finish university I will go in America and know very well English.

…because every day you think to me and you send books for help me know English also English is my favorite language.

I tried for an HOUR to upload a picture of kids with books. I'll try again next time!

On a totally unrelated note, thanks so much to all of you for your sweet birthday wishes! I celebrated with friends in Kigali and couldn’t have asked for a better birthday in Rwanda.

Love and miss you all.