This Time: Learning to Teach, Exploring Kigali

This is the first photo I took in Rwanda. It is my host brother's shoes drying in the sun.

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Training droned on monotonously for weeks. More language classes, technical training and endless hours of training/lecturing about health and safety. I’m sure you can guess how I felt about the latter. We had a mid-term exam in Kinyarwanda to gauge our progress in the local language. I bombed it big time, and it put me into a serious funk for about a week. I have never been a natural at picking up languages, but this was embarrassing. But let’s stick to the positives, shall we.

Towards the end of training, we had two weeks of “model school”. This would give most of us our first chance to instruct an entire class on our own. This terrified me. Although I didn’t realize it until Peace Corps told me, I actually had a lot of experience in the realm of education. But I had never had to plan lessons or be in front of a classroom, acting as an authority on the subject matter. I knew very little about English grammar, and what I did know was through my study of Spanish and French. I really worried that I would crash and burn every day.

When it finally came time for our model school, I was both disappointed and relieved at the student turnout. We didn’t have enough students show up to the optional classes to simulate a real Rwandan classroom environment, let alone to give all of us a class of students to teach. Most classes were between 5 and 15 students, and some people taught classes of 1 or 2. I was glad that it would be easier than I had expected, but also knew that teaching a Senior 1 class of 8 students would not be the same as teaching a Senior 6 class of 40 students.

As far as my teaching went, it went better than I had expected. In fact, there were times when I really enjoyed being in front of the class, and it brought me back to my days when I was regularly speaking or performing in front of large audiences. It is strange how a few years away from that can bring back stage fright. I got a lot of good critiques from my fellow trainees, staff and volunteers. By the end of the second week, with a whole eight hours of teaching under my belt, I felt slightly more confident about going to teach at my site in a couple months.

My buddy Luke teaching a class on the parts of speech.

Teacher Shannon, teaching a lesson.

On the walk to model school.

***

Somewhere in the middle of training, we were taken on a field trip to Kigali to visit the genocide memorial. After leaving a flower on a mass grave, and walking through the museum I think the biggest thing that I learned was that the horrors of 1994 are for too huge to comprehend for someone like me, who grew up so removed from the realities of African violence. The museum provided little new information beyond what I had gotten from the several books I had read on the subject. Seeing the pictures from the scenes of massacres and portraits of those that had died, however, were very powerful. Parts of it reminded me of the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh, although much more sanitized and not as gritty as that museum with its crumbling prison setting. The most overwhelming part, however, was a hall labeled “Children’s Room”. Foolishly, I thought it was an area for kids to play while their parents were exploring the museum. Then I saw there were a couple dozen portraits of Rwandan children. Each portrait was accompanied with a plaque that gave information about the child. For example, name, age, favorite food, favorite sport, and, finally, method of death. You would fall in love with the 4-year-old and how their favorite food was boiled cassava, then learn that they had been killed by being slammed against a brick wall, or with a nail-studded club. It was shockingly grim compared to the rest of the museum.

After we left the museum, we were given a few hours on our own in Kigali. At the age of 26, I never would have thought that I would be so excited to be allowed to have a few hours on my own in the city. Most people were going out to nice restaurants for pizza, burgers or Indian food. I didn’t necessarily to want to be alone, but I knew nobody would want to forgo American food for what I had in mind, nor did I want to be with a crowd of gringos. I left the center of town and hopped on a bus to Nyamirambo, a neighborhood with a large presence of Muslims and West Africans. It has the reputation of being unique in that it is typically un-Rwandan. It has a rough around the edges feeling of an up-and-coming artsy community. Supposedly some of Rwanda’s biggest hip-hop artists live here. The buildings are painted loudly and stylishly. Music booms from storefronts. Word is that they have great night life and even street food! If I haven’t mentioned it before, Rwanda is the only place I have ever been to that does not have some sort of street food. It is very taboo to eat in public here. My host brother explained that in Rwandan culture, if you see someone eating in the street it is like they don’t even have respect for themselves. This has obviously been a tough pill to swallow for me, as street food, at times, provides my soul reason to travel. Anyway, I was glad to find a neighborhood with some style. What I had really come here for, though, was that they had West African restaurants. There were two that advertised themselves as Malian restaurants. I asked around and was disappointed that there was no Ghanaian food. I settled for Malian, which turned out to be more Senegalese. I got a huge plate of red rice, yassa poulet (chicken in awesome sauce) white beans and Rwandan-style cooked greens. In essence the food was not all that much different than Rwandan food, however, this had flavor! It was far and away the best thing I’d eaten in Rwanda at this point. Rwanda is just behind Mauritania for most boring food countries I have been to, and that is debatable since Mauritania has Senegalese food in the towns. This plate of West African food was a godsend.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around to the shops, meeting some Senegalese people and practicing my French. At one point I heard a song blasting out of a CD stall that was saying, “Nyamirambo life, Nyamirambo life”. How fitting since that was the name of the neighborhood. I went to the stall and asked who was singing the song. A guy standing next to the stall said, “It’s me.” He said his name was DJ Sam. I talked to the guys for a while, and they sold me a mix CD with a variety of Rwandan rap songs, including “Nyamirambo Life”. I moved on to the Nyamirambo market. At this point I was just wandering. The market was nothing spectacular, but at the same time, few things put me in a better mood than African markets. Finally, I had to get back to town before our vans took us back home. I wanted to hang out in Nyamirambo for the rest of the day, and I wondered if I would be missed if the vans left without me.

***

During our last few weeks at site we were allowed to go into Kigali on Sundays all by ourselves! I found it interesting that they were letting us go out alone, the only information given to us was what we weren’t allowed to do, and almost no advice on the logistics of getting around Kigali and back home. I mean, I felt totally fine about it, but it seemed odd that they had given us literally no information about Kigali.

I left early in the morning so I could get into town early, and before everyone else. As I walked toward the nearby town that would have buses, a shared taxi passed by and offered me a ride. They had one more spot and the price was the same as the bus. Ok, let’s go! As we neared the next town, I could see one of my fellow trainees waiting for a bus to pass by. Then an explosion. Somehow this no longer startles me, as I think I am constantly expecting a flat tire. As he fixed it, a whole car load of trainees arrived to wait for the next bus. When our tire was changed, one of the trainees decided to squeeze in with us, putting five in the back seat. We still seemed like we would be the first ones into Kigali. Then, when we got to the main road, our driver sold us off to an empty minibus. I knew this was bad. We would have to wait for it to fill up before we could continue. Nobody got in for twenty minutes, so the driver decided to try his luck along the way. We were constantly picking up and dropping off people. It was the slowest ride imaginable.

Kigali, near the bus station.

I had a lot of errands I needed to do in Kigali. Get two phones fixed, visit markets, eat lunch, buy a bag, etc. I wanted to use this time to start buying things I would need at site, so that I was not rushed later. The first thing I found, though, was that Sunday morning was the worst time to get things done in Kigali. Everyone was at church. One of the bigger markets, right next to the bus station, was a ghost town. With the help of a friendly young man eager to speak English, I was shown to a man that could fix my old phone from Ghana. Then, I got on a bus to the center of town, which took the most elliptical route I could have imagined. When I realized that our bus had passed the center long ago, and we were right next to a market, I decided to get off and try this random place out. It was livelier, but it was mostly a produce market. I got back on a bus and realized that if I would have stayed on the previous bus, it would have eventually taken me back to the center. But the center had little to offer me, so I headed back to Nyamirambo. I found another West African place and enjoyed a quality meal of what I would describe as African fusion. Half Sahel, half East African. Luckily they knew how to use spices, or at least Maggi cubes. I had given up on a lot of my tasks, and by the end of the afternoon fond myself in a grimy little bar tucked away on one of the back roads of Nyamirambo. Compared to the countryside, Kigali gets hot, and a cold beer sounded lovely. The seedy clientele gave me a mix of drunken smiles, skeptical glares and indifference as I walked in. I ordered my beer, sure to mention that I wanted it cold. Then she broke my heart by telling me the power was out and the beer was nothing resembling cold. Well, I thought, I still have nothing better to do with my last thirty minutes in the city and I accepted their filthy, hot, tasteless beer. The only spot to sit was a single chair next to the bar, so I took it. A man in his thirties sitting nearby greeted me in French. He turned out to be Congolese, but had moved to Rwanda to work as a bus driver. This is exactly the reason I like to end up in these kinds of places. I would later notice that the bars of choice for the older volunteers were the more upscale and expat-oriented ones. The kinds of places where you would never have an interesting conversation with a sweaty Congolese bus driver.

And now some photos from my life in the village.

The cistern at the church where I went to fetch water.

A neighbor that came over to visit.

And her husband.

Our courtyard with some laundry out to dry.

These sandals, which have a long history, are still going, still breaking. They've been repaired in at least five countries.

A view from my village. A typical Rwandan landscape.

Luke on a walk.

In my courtyard on a foggy morning.

One of my host brothers, Byishimo.

Our firewood chilling in the rain. Somehow my host sisters are still always able to make a fire for cooking.

My room.

My siblings' rooms, and kitchen to the right.

My host sister, Immaculee, and I.

Rwanda and I.

My little host brother hanging out in the foggy morning.

One night when I was telling my host sisters about traveling in north and west Africa, one of them asked to see my turban. I showed her how to put it on. I don't think our pastor father was too amused.