Site Visit

          We had the opportunity to spend a week at our sites. I have been placed in the Southern Province, in the district of Gisagara.  I will be living and teaching in a small village called Mamba, which is about 15 kilometers from Burundi and a little over an hour Moto ride from Butare. I am the only volunteer and the only white person in my village.  Visiting my site was a bit of a culture shock, during training we have been living in a decent sized city, we have large houses, our meals are cooked for us and we always have instructors to assist us with language or cross cultural problems. The site visit was the first time being alone in Rwanda and it was definitely an eye opener to what the next two years are going to consist of.  Upon my arrival in Mamba, I discovered that my house is not yet complete so I spent the week with my neighbors who graciously opened up their house to me all week.

I also got to spend time with my head master, who showed me around my village and school. My school is a secondary school that has senior 1, 2 and 3 which is the equivalent to 8^th,9^th and 10^th grade.  The school is set up with two wings with a large dirt courtyard in the middle and the school offices in the back. Only one of the wings is complete and the other is still in need of doors and windows. The town of Mamba has no electricity or running water so the school has no computers,  photocopier, printer or running water.   After visiting the school the concept and difficulty of teaching with limited resources has really hit home. I will have myself and a blackboard as resources. The Rwandan school schedule runs in trimesters, the school year begins in January, and ends in October.

Seeing my village rejuvenated my reasons for being here, it enabled me to see a sliver of the difficult living and working situation that I am going to be in but it also instilled in me a renewed bona fide effort for training.

In training we are going to begin model school next week which will enable us to teach our own class. We are broken up into groups and will have three other Peace Corps Trainees watching and observing our teaching.  We will have children from the community of Nyanza as our students and we will be teaching at a local school.  The classes will last for an hour and there will be about 40 students per a class that we will be teaching for three weeks. Along with model school training is also going to incorporate intensive language training, where we will increase the number of language classes a day, we will have three, two hour language classes.  Kinyarwanda is an extremely difficult language; it is a Bantu language that is spoken in the entire country of Rwanda. The language has many long words and strange sounds as well as a complex grammar system that has nouns, verbs and adjectives divided into 16 different noun classes. There are also tonal words that look alike but have different intonation that is difficult for an English speaker to hear. Here is an example of Kinyarwanda:

Ndi Umukorerabushake wa Peace Corps, Ndi umwarimu ecyongereza. Mfite makumyabiri na biri imyaka.

(I am a Peace Corps Volunteer English teacher. I am 22 years old)