Rwanda – Part I

Today was my first day back to school for the start of term 2. (Yesterday should have been, but there were storms and I had to finish grading like 50 exams from the PTC… more on that later… so today was my first day back.) Edited to add: I wrote this a few days ago, so no… I don’t work on Saturdays. Ugandan culture is all about thanking and congratulating, so I got congratulated on traveling like ten times. It was weird. But everyone was excited to hear about Rwanda. After all, from what I’ve experienced, basically every Ugandan thinks that Rwandan is an amazing place. I mean none of them have been there, but they all have super positive things to say about it. It’s so clean, they’ll say excitedly. They don’t even have plastic bags!

I’m happy to report that Rwanda lives up to, and exceeds, all of the rumors. Rwanda is awesome. Rwanda is just like Uganda, but better and nicer in nearly every way. (Sorry Uganda, but you know it’s true.)

Our trip to Rwanda started in Kampala. We spent the day before we left in Kampala because it’s super hard to get there the day of in the morning, no matter where you’re coming from. The trip to Kigali is somewhere between 8-10 hours on a good day, so we wanted to get an early start. Also staying in Kampala means we can eat good muzungu food, so let’s just say it wasn’t that rough.

Four of us went to Rwanda after IST in our group (another three people went a few days after us), which was nice. When we first started talking about going a ton of people were interested. However, when the first budget of like 500 dollars per person came out a lot of people dropped out. Which was nice. If you haven’t traveled with a group of ten or more people, you wouldn’t understand. Just… never do it. You’ll never even eat because you’ll never be able to come to a consensus. It’s miserable. So four was perfect. It was myself, my site mate Eric, and our two friends Mary and Matt.

>Anyway, we were at the bus stop in Kampala by 8:30 on Saturday morning. Since the next day was Eric’s birthday I treated him to a trip to Rwanda. (Everything else was on him, I’m not that nice. But now I can lord it over him for a long time… oh yeah, well remember that time when I took you to the greatest country ever??) The bus was scheduled to depart at 9:00, and luckily we had no issues getting seats. The trip was 40,000 shillings – or about $16. Not too bad for a trip to another country!

It took a long time for us to figure out which bus company to take, as everyone has some piece of advice (most of it being along the lines of ‘I’ve never taken them, but I hear…’) and this being Africa, none of the bus companies that go to Rwanda (and there are a lot) have things such as websites or you know, contact information or actual hours of service. Mere details. We ended up going with Jaguar, as we heard some good things about them (however, if you Google them one of the first links is an article about one being robbed by bandits on the way to Kigali… the usual) and they happened to have a VIP bus. And as people who make the equivalent of $250 a month we’re obviously VIPs.

The VIP bus was a good choice. We were towards the back of the bus, which meant it was a bit bouncy – especially before we got out of Kampala, where it’s stop and go the whole way. And since Rwandans were involved the bus actually departed on time, and we didn’t have to wait until the whole bus filled up. There were actually a lot of empty seats until we hit Mbarara which meant that we could all get a few seats to ourselves to nap on. There was a ton of legroom (especially when compared to taking any other kind of transport in this country) and it was pretty comfortable. It was a strange, and nice feeling to be comfortable. I wish it happened more often.

The bus ride wasn’t too bad – just really long. The first two legs of the trip, from Kampala to Masaka and Masaka to Mbarara weren’t too bad. The highway in between Kampala and Mbarara have been recently upgraded so they’re pretty smooth (other than the random areas that aren’t finished and are just gravel) and we could go pretty fast. Once you get past Mbarara, however, it’s a whole different stories. The roads haven’t been upgraded, although it appeared like they might be doing work on them? Maybe? I made up a game – guess whether the bus was driving on a road, or the dirt. It was surprisingly difficult. Eventually we made it to the hills, and then to the mountains of southern Uganda near Kabale. It was really pretty as we wound up and down the sides of the mountains – one minute looking down on a valley and soon finding ourselves in it.

The border crossing is maybe a half an hour from Kabale. It was, no surprise, the most chaotic border crossing I’ve ever been to. As soon as we stepped off the bus to go through border control there were men grabbing at us and offering to exchange our money to Rwandan francs. Saying no just meant that they would begin to rattle offer other currencies they could exchange – dollars, Euros, pounds. People were walking bicycles through with matooke strapped to the back, others were selling juice and soda to one side (if you even looked in their direction they would immediately start yelling at you), and men were wandering around offering pens to everyone. Naturally, there was no sign or anything to direct you where to go but we figured out the line pretty quick. Some guy from customs was passing out forms to those of us in line. I tried to explain he was passing us arrival forms for Uganda, when we needed exit forms. He told me it would be fine, and I started to fill mine out – I was nearly done when he came back through with the correct forms and tried to grab the wrong one from me. Ugandan efficiency at it’s finest.

Anyway, I hate customs so I went through pretty quick. I just hate that they always seem like they distrust you. I don’t want to answer your stupid questions and then have you do the ‘Oh really’ thing to me. I’m visiting, not planning an al-Qaeda cell. As I waited for the rest of the group, I had my heart broken. You see, Uganda drives on the left just like the British (thanks colonialism!) but Rwanda drives on the right. I was hoping, hoping, hoping for the transition to look epic. I know in some places they have big four-leaf clover ramps to change you over. I mean I didn’t expect that, necessarily, but I expected more than one dinky sign that says ‘Drive on the Left’. So disappointing. Step it up, Uganda.

Let. Down.

So when we were done we kind of looked around. There weren’t any signs pointing where to go next and our bus was gone, so we kind of walked on. Seriously, a sign or two wouldn’t be the worst idea. There are semis, bikes, people, cars, and motorcycles all converging on the same place and moving around at once. It’s… confusing. We finally found the Rwandan customs, stood in line a bit more, and got our stamps. We were in!

Or sort of. Next came the bag search. Now, in America when you go through the bag search they’re looking for stuff to charge you for. Or bombs. In Rwanda, they’re looking for something a little less… sinister. Plastic bags. Like I said earlier, plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda. Matt had one for the snacks he had bought before we left, but they confiscated it. Seriously. However, I sneaked in two because they were inside something else. HA. Come at me Interpol.

From the border it took about 2 hours to get to Kigali. I tried to look out the very tinted windows on our bus, but it didn’t look wildly different than Uganda. More hilly than where I live, certainly, and the hills were pretty much all terraced which was cool. They have buildings painted as advertisements for Tigo, instead of Orange. The biggest change was that both of my SIM cards texted me to welcome me to Rwanda and then immediately stopped providing data service. Lame. The biggest surprise? Apparently Rwanda is in another timezone! This makes no sense because Rwanda extends all of like ten inches further west than Uganda and is directly below it, but we somehow jumped back an hour. We were now at the easternmost part of whatever timezone we were in, which meant it gets dark at 6pm in Rwanda. Weird.

We made it into Kigali right as the sun was setting. Luckily the bus park has a pretty legit forex (foreign exchange) so we were able to get our money exchanged pretty quickly. We even got the woman to tell us how much we should expect to pay for our taxi to our hostel. Naturally the taxi drivers tried to quote us twice that much, but we knew to walk away until they came down. Next stop: our hostel. Or so we thought. We arrived at a dark building next to a church. After scoping it out, and having some guy come out in his towel, we concluded that it was not the place we were supposed to be. Luckily, our hostel was pretty much around the corner so no harm, no foul.

In the next edition: Kigali!

The Other Side of Training

I’m not even going to give excuses – I haven’t updated in forever, and that’s a fact. I’m here now, so let’s move on. You’ve missed a lot of my story in Uganda, and that’s my own fault. I’ll try to back up and give a recap, but not in this post. This post is about today. Suffice to say, I’ve survived basic training, teacher boot camp, homestay, language training, giardia and more matooke than one should ever see in a lifetime. And I’m officially a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I swore in on January 22nd at the ambassador’s house, making me a super official volunteer. I had to swear an oath and got a pin and everything! I moved with my site partner to our house on January 24th, where I’ve been ever since. Let me tell you a bit about my life!

First off, let me take a moment to officially introduce my site mate: Eric! Eric is from Minnesota and is a Gopher, which means he’s Big Ten which is good enough for me. Plus his team usually doesn’t put up a fight in football so we won’t have tension during football season – a real plus. Eric actually grew up in Taiwan, so he has some pretty cool stories of working in a sweatshop and being beaten in the rice paddies (or maybe that’s what I make up…) and has tons of travel experience. He’s a real unique find – he majored in plant biology (but has yet to identify nearly any of the plants I quiz him on… awkward) and minored in Norwegian (seriously – he now speaks English, Mandarin, Norwegian, Luganda and some Arabic). He’s studied abroad in Norway, Italy and Morocco and has a shirt that apparently makes him look like King Muhammad on the beach (or at least that’s what the salesperson in Morocco told him.) We’ve been besties since the beginning – we sat near each other at dinner in Philadelphia and every day at Kulika. It works out pretty well that we’re site mates (we also requested it, so there’s that). We live together in a house on his primary teachers’ college’s campus, which is kind of weird in Ugandan culture, but it works for us just fine. I’m introducing him to so many things – like Arrested Development (he thought it was a crime drama) and West Wing. He’s slowly trying to introduce vegetables into my diet. (I’m winning that battle.)

As I said, Eric works at a primary teachers’ college. He’ll be teaching ICT (computers) and science (hopefully that doesn’t include plant identification). I work at a demonstration primary school associated with his PTC. Basically what that means is that his school’s teaching students do their school practice at my school. I’m eagerly looking forward to observing and mentoring some of Uganda’s future teachers in the classroom.

I guess I should introduce my school, too, since it’s the reason I’m here! For security reasons I’m not going to name it until after I’ve left Uganda, so I’ll just call it Saint’s. I work at a Catholic primary school (bet you never guessed that after I called it Saint’s!) Primary school is the equivalent of elementary school, and we have grades P1 – P7, roughly equivalent to first through seventh grade. Most of the students at my school come from the villages in the area, and some walk several kilometers every day to get to school. The school population fluctuates somewhere between 400 and 500 students for 8 classes (2 classes for P1 and 1 class for each of the other grades). If you’re as good at math as my calculator, you can figure out that means an average of 60+ kids in each class. Class sizes in Uganda are out of control – last year there were 107 students in P2 at my school. And one teacher. And zero textbooks. TIA – this is Africa.

So far I’ve been having a really good experience at Saint’s. My head teacher (principal) has been very receptive to the training he’s received and is very responsive to my needs and the cultural differences between us. He seems interested in learning about America and different ways of doing things, and understands that I might have a different outlook on some things. The other teachers at school seem very kind so far, and frequently drop in to my office just to check up on me (yes, I have my very own office!) I even had a Valentine at work – one of the other female teachers bought me a soda for lunch!

My official role at my school (and with Peace Corps Uganda) is to be a literacy specialist. Specifically, I’ll be working with students in P4 and P5 to get them up to snuff in reading. Students in my area learn in the local language, Luganda, until P4, when they make the dramatic swing to English only education. It’s at this critical time when a lot of students fall behind and never catch up. To go on to secondary school (high school) and future success in life students must pass the Primary Leaving Exam in P7, which of course is given only in English. Students have to be able to read in English to succeed. That’s where I come in. Anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely love literacy and really enjoy (or at least have a strong love-hate relationship) with teaching basic literacy and phonics. There was no question in what I wanted to do while I’m here, and I’m excited to get started.

In the first three months at site we are working hard to complete something called the school profile tool. It’s basically a super long getting to know you quiz about the school. Each week we have different tasks – make a map of the school, interview the deputy head teacher (vice-principal), determine the school’s disciplinary policy, etc. – to get to know our school in depth. It might sound a bit odd that our first three months are spent mostly doing paperwork and asking questions, but it really helps inform the rest of the two years. If I were to jump in right away, I would never know that my school started a boarding section this year and already has nine boarding students – but does not have a place for them to live, and as of now all nine students are sleeping on the head teacher’s floor. I now know that we have 10 computers donated a few years ago (incredibly rare – I have a friend at a primary teachers’ college with only 3 computers), but doesn’t have electricity to run them so they sit in storage.

When I’m not trying to track down the information for the school profile tool, I’m completing something called the EGRA – Early Grade Reading Assessment. If you’re a teacher, it’s similar to DIBELS. I have to have 100 P4 students complete the EGRA three times a year. It’s pretty awesome that so much actual data is going into our program – it’s being well structured by Peace Corps and USAID and I think with actual assessment and analysis we could make some big strides. However, I can already tell my students will need a lot of help. I have yet to have one student properly segment a two sound word (basically, break a word into it’s component sounds ‘pot’ = ‘p’ ‘o’ ‘t’) and almost none of the students have been able to name the sounds of even a few letters. While they can read CVC words well, their spoken English and reading comprehension are atrocious. It’s going to be a long road.

I’m also doing research. I’ve completed reading The Daily Five (a book about effective literacy instruction for elementary students) and hope to put some of the things I’ve learned from it into practice when I get my small literacy instruction groups going (although it’s hard when there are no books for students to read). I’m reading through Teach Like a Champion now, which has awesome strategies on how to make teaching most effective. I’ll be leading some professional development for the 16 teachers that work at my school, and I’m hoping to pass on simple things that can make their classrooms more dynamic and effective. I’ve finished two books on building a school library, and I’m hoping that in the next year I can have a functioning library at our school.

Outside of school I fill my time with lots of things, some fun and others… not so much. I’m trying to read as much as I can (and let me say, I appreciate all of the e-books I’ve received so far – it’s basically the most exciting moment when I wake up and have an email telling me someone sent me a new book!), and I’m keeping a log of all the books I’ve read on this blog. I’m hoping to hit somewhere between 200 and 300 through my service. Eric and I have been blowing through West Wing, and watch a few episodes every evening with dinner. Sometimes I take naps (awesome, until I wake up unable to see properly… not really sure what that is… TIA) and sometimes I play some games on my laptop. Mainly the not so fun includes laundry, which never seems to end and takes forever. (I even have abrasions on all of my knuckles from hand-washing!) Sometimes cooking is fun, but frankly cooking from scratch every night gets a bit tedious – especially right before market day when we’ve run out of basically every ingredient.

A lot of my time is spent getting places. Peace Corps has a rule that we can’t ride on boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) because they’re incredibly dangerous, which is fair enough because they terrify me. Unfortunately that’s the only type of vehicle available where we’re located (except for the school vehicles that sometimes take us where we need to get) – which means we walk. It takes 30 minutes of walking for me to get to school each day, although the trip is very peaceful and beautiful. It takes Eric and I 45 minutes to get to the nearest trading post, or village with things to buy. We can get the basics like bread, butter and milk there. For anything wild and fancy (like tomato paste or vegetables) we need to make the trip to the nearest town, Masaka, which is an hour and a half walk. It’s fairly hilly here (despite what some of my friends in more hilly places would say it is not “flat as a pancake with a few bubbles on it”) and being from Ohio, I’m not used to elevation changes of more than a few inches. Also I have a permanently sprained ankle so that slows me down a bit. I’m definitely getting my exercise, that’s for sure.

Eric and I are lucky that we live so close to a rather large town (Masaka – you can even find me on Google maps!) with basically everything we could need. There are two great ‘muzungu’ (foreign/white people) restaurants – one Belgian, one Danish – that serve amazing food. It’s not something we could afford regularly, but it’s a nice treat. We also live near two other volunteers from our group (one about 45 minutes away by car, one about 15 by car) and we can meet up with them regularly. We haven’t really been lonely yet – the first full weekend at site we ended up hosting people all weekend at our house, two weekends ago we attended a Chinese New Years party at a friend’s house in Mbarara, and this weekend we had two guests. As you’d imagine, after going through 2 months of training together we’re all pretty close. It’s nice to get to see everyone, especially people who live further away. There’s lots of squealing (okay, only from the girls) and hugs all around when we meet up. This upcoming weekend we’ll be headed back to Mbarara for an HIV workshop with nearly half of our entire training group there (it’s gonna be a blast!) and then a lot of us are immediately heading to Entebbe for a welcome weekend hosted by volunteers who have been here for a while (this also coincides with my 26th birthday which means PIZZA ON MY BIRTHDAY – nothing could be better!)

I know this is short and boring, but I had to update you a bit about my life. It’s both incredibly hectic at times (like the time I came home from school, shower and pack for a weekend away in 30 minutes) and incredibly slow paced (try and fill just one evening without any electricity or the ability to go anywhere outside of your house after 7pm). It’s sometimes incredibly insulting (like when boda-boda drivers make sexual comments at you when you’re walking down the street) and incredibly fulfilling (walking down the road and having a conversation in Luganda with a P2 student from your school who excitedly tells you that her name is also Ndagire – and you understand!) I’ve had incredible highs and incredible lows. And I’m so glad I’m here.