Celebrity Status

My students along with many of the people in my village treat me as a celebrity.  Many of them have not seen a white person before and so I am constantly being followed around and stared at. “Muzungu” is the Kinyarwanda word for white person and almost always when I leave my house someone sees me and screams “muzungu” which is followed by the little pitter patter of small feet and I soon have a small parade of children following me. The majority of the children just stare at me in amazement but some are afraid. Parents always want to show their children the “muzungu” that lives in their village so many children are brought to look at me, and although most seem to enjoy looking at me  their have been a few that have burst into tears at the site of this strange white person.  Because of my new infamous status I am constantly having visitors or being invited to peoples homes. The invitation normally consists of a glass of milk or tea and a few minutes of my broken Kinyarwanda followed by staring and sitting in silence.  When I run in the mornings I slowly gain more and more children and by the time I finish and arrive at my home I normally have to turn around and wave bye to about 25 children that I collected along the way.  

The first trimester of teaching

I have just finished teaching my first trimester of “school”, although it technically started January 10th it seems as if things started off at a slower pace then expected.  Around six weeks into the first term was the time that things began to get serious.  On my first day at 7:00 am the time that school starts, I showed up to find the school grounds empty, a few minuets later a few students trickle in and the headmaster came. By 7:30 a few more teachers had arrived and some more students but it did not look like any class was going to take place. I found out that the first three days are for the second sitting of exams, all the students who failed their final exams get to take them a second time. Also the students who are just entering into Senior One (the equivalent of High School) must pass a national exam taken at the end of Primary Six. Although January 10th was the official first day of school as announced by the Ministry of Education, that same Ministry of Education had not given the results to the Senior One students so no students who would be entering Senior One could attend school yet. The first week I taught a few classes of students from mixed grades/classes and we also worked on the class schedule. By the end of the second week the students in Senior Two had a class schedule and where organized into different classes.  It wasn’t until about the 5th week of school that I got to meet my Senior One students. Once the Senior One students arrived at school the school decided to finish building their classrooms so it took about another two weeks before I was able to teach them any lessons. Once things seemed to be following a schedule and both students and teachers were showing up on a regular basis, the surprise days off began. School would be canceled for many different reasons, the students put on a play, their was a soccer game, a holiday, or the grass was getting too long so they pulled the students out of class and gave them machetes to cut the grass and called it agriculture. The school had no set calendar of days off or days when class was canceled for a school activity, at least to me it always came as a surprise. 
 Although teaching is very challenging and the students do not speak English at the level that they should, they try and seem happy to be at school. The children’s attitude toward school seems to reflect that going to school is more of a privilege than something that they have to do, such as the attitude of many students in the United States.  The children would love for the opportunity to learn more and many students stay after school and study and also organize clubs to study. I teach two Senior One classes, and two Senior Two classes so I have a total of a little over 150 students, they are all required to wear uniforms to school and also both boys and girls must have shaved heads, so I have been attempting to learn names but it is very difficult, it is even hard for me to tell the difference between a boy and a girl because everyone has the same white blouse, khaki pants/skirts and no one has hair.  The school has very limited resources; because the village that I live in does not have power the school doesn’t have power either there are no photo copiers or computers. The students all have notebooks and pens and as a teacher I have chalk and the chalk board. There are a few textbooks in the teacher’s office that I can use but the students do not have their own text book, therefore they treat their notebooks as text books they write everything down that is written on the board and study their notebooks as if it was a text books. Any assignments, tests, quizzes, texts that I want the students to do must be written on the caulk board. The school is composed of rooms, desks, chalk and a chalk board.