October - Starry skies and volcanoes

http://vimeo.com/57465392

This week one of my friends asked me what a typical day is like for me…and I found it impossible to even begin to answer! October flew by in a whirlwind of work challenges, social invitations, end of term celebrations, travel, and my continued wonder and amazement at everyday experiences that leave me completely blown away.

 

  
I have been incredibly busy at work with writing training workshops, planning and delivering Writing Workshops to TTC students and Primary School teachers, travelling to Kigali for meetings at the University, work-shadowing at other TTCs and supporting the students at my TTC to prepare for end of year exams. My students always make me laugh and come out with classics lines, like 'There are some talkatives', 'Is your hair real?' and 'Some students are suffering from fatness'! I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to be involved in such a variety of work, some at a national level, as well as to be based in such a lovely TTC, yet still get to do outreach work with local Primary Schools. It’s also been a pretty good way to get to know lots of people from my village and local area.

We had Teacher’s Day where Rwanda celebrates teachers…though we had to work for the morning! But the afternoon was spent at the local stadium with a football match between the Primary School and the Secondary School/TTC.  It seemed the whole village turned out to watch – lucky for us, they mostly watched from our goal area…a bit of an unfair advantage! We won! I was very impressed by the female players who played in their everyday shoes and got properly stuck into the game. The second half lasted three times as long as the first half, the ref joined in and the ball exploded! We then spent the afternoon in the church listening to speeches celebrating teachers (in Kinyarwanda), drinking Primus – the local beer, and finally dancing! I think I danced with everyone in the village and was home before 7!

 

I started Kinyarwanda lessons which I was very excited about having spent several weeks searching for a teacher, asking around everyone for recommendations and trying to decide who to ask. I finally settled on someone but the lesson didn’t go quite as planned… after spending the first 25 minutes with my teacher getting over the shock that I hadn’t blessed the tea I made her, we said Grace for a significant amount of time, and then finally got onto the lesson.  We decided to create a  dialogue to discuss the different times of the day that I do different things to help with  learn times and daily activities… but again, another 25 minutes was spent with my teacher trying to decide what to call the people in the dialogue and my suggestion of 1 and 2 didn’t go down well! Finally we got onto what happened and when, but again my teacher was too caught up in whether the logistics of the day worked and insisted on telling me that I couldn’t possibly undertake tasks in a particular order because it wasn’t possible – but I just wanted to learn the vocabulary! I also wanted to say that I enjoyed my journey to work each day because I love walking, but again she didn’t understand – no-one here walks if they can help it, and in the end I had to settle for ‘I like my walk to work because it is short’! Needless to say, I didn’t have a second lesson and have since picked up plenty of language lessons from keen students who also love to chat and practice their English.

I have since had a couple of Kinyarwanda lessons with  an ex-student after she finished her final year in my TTC…and we mainly learnt the lyrics of Rwandan RnB tunes… so I’m not so bad at asking ‘Where have you been all my life?’ and ‘I’m walking in your footsteps’ which go down pretty well here!

My travels have also continued to make my journey to work every day a wonderful experience. From blue misty hills to sudden rainstorms where I have had to shelter under a nearby porch with my moto driver, to roads so muddy that are impassable apart from by foot (in sandals). As I arrived back in my village one day, there was the brightest rainbow arching across the valley over Nzige, from one hill to another, like a magical welcoming gateway!

 

I also had a trip up north to Gisenyi where the scenery was stunning and the hills looked like they had been crocheted together from green and brown wool, mist hung between the mountains, and the sky glowed red at night above the volcano.

There have been plenty of opportunities for socialising in my village too. We have 16 KIE interns at our TTC and they are very lovely indeed. Some of them invited me for dinner which was such a special evening and we also had a huge birthday party celebration in our village where we put up scarves and banners and silk sheets to make an outdoor marquee, I entertained guests by introducing my favourite ‘School Christmas Party’ games (the Newspaper game and the Balloon game) – hilarious! We ate and drank and danced through the night, surrounded by banana trees, under the stars. I walked home under the most incredibly bright moonlit sky, remembering to look down occasionally so I didn’t fall down holes or tread on toads and arrived home to a garden full of fireflies.