First Day of School

3 January 2013

Back at site, it was time to start getting ready for the school year. I visited the school again as somebody from the ministry of education was touring to make sure we were ready to open. I was hoping that I would no my teaching schedule at some point, but I later learned that I wouldn’t get it until the first day of classes.

Later in the day, I planted some jalapeno seeds that a fellow volunteer had given me. I was excited because there is only one variety of pepper in Rwanda. It looks a lot like a habanero, and packs almost as much heat. Unfortunately, it has almost no flavor; just fire.

On the way back from our New Year’s celebration, I picked up a wedge of locally made gouda. I had never bought it before, but it was in almost every major town. That night, I made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. It was perhaps the first time I had cooked something that could be called “American food”. It was almost perfect. The only thing I was missing was a cold, rainy day. I had gotten the milk fresh from a nearby cow, and with the leftovers, I made chai. I have to admit that it was actually better than any other cup that I had had in Rwanda so far.

One day when I was walking into my door, about eight little kids snuck past me and into my house. I tried to control them, but they went wild, running around and rubbing their immaculate hands all over everything. One kid spotted something on my desk and went straight for it. It was a box of seaweed that somebody had gotten in a care package and passed along to me. We had joked that I could give it to all the kids that chase me, yelling, “chinois, bonbon,” thinking that I am a Chinese man with candy to give them. The kids started asking what this box was. I guess it was the most interesting-looking thing in my room. I told them it was Chinese candy and started passing out the dry strips, assuming this would send them running. They just stood there, seaweed in hand, wondering what to do with it. I told them it was food and that they should eat it. They slowly started slipping it in their mouths, all looking at each other with weird faces. I started to shuffle them back out the door. Sure enough I would later find little bits of seaweed spit out in front of my house.

I was always getting invitations to church, but I did not keep track of them. I knew I had been invited to three different services one Sunday, so I decided I would go with the first person to get to my house. I was shocked when my friend and barber Mwizerwa was the first to arrive at 7:30 AM, 90 minutes before the service began. He had been calling me, and I was in bed ignoring the calls, until I realized he was probably outside my house. I would say that half the time people come to my house they call me on the phone from outside, and the other half they just try to open the door. I don’t understand why they rarely just knock. Anyway, I saw that he was dressed very casually, so I didn’t shower or put too much effort into my look like I normally would for church. On the way to his Pentecostal church we stopped at a tea shop for a quick breakfast. Then we went to his house, where he showered, brushed his hair, and put on his nicest clothes. The events of the morning started to make a lot more, and a lot less sense at the same time.

We left his house and basically sprinted uphill for thirty minutes. Mwizerwa lives life in fast-forward and I can barely keep up with him most of the time. His church was actually in the next town, up in the hills. I probably never would have found it if he hadn’t taken me there. The church was old and dilapidated. It was made of brick, had dirt floors and backless wooden benches. It had great air circulation, though, which I was grateful for. The thing that will always amaze me in Rwanda’s more basic churches is that they do not skimp on the sound systems. They always have big speakers, sound boards, keyboards and electric guitars. And they are all of high-quality brands. I have mixed feelings about it. Initially I feel bad for the people that give their hard-earned money to the church every week, and they spend it on unnecessary sound equipment. Why can’t their choirs go a capella? To me they sound better without accompaniment anyway. At the same time, though, if you take the religion aspect away from it, a lot of the community would probably still come here on Sundays for the music. The majority of the three-hour services are music, and it serves as one of the few forms of entertainment for people that live in the villages. It is not odd, then, that a community would, even without the religion, decide to chip in on a band, choir and their equipment once a week.

During the service, the pastor acknowledged me as a visitor and asked me to stand and introduce myself. I gave my little spiel about being a Peace Corps volunteer from America. Being on the spot like that with no warning is nerve-wracking, but pulling it off even a little bit is very satisfying. Earlier in the morning I had meant to ask Mwizerwa what time the service started. Instead I asked when it is finished, because those two words are almost identical. He had said 11:30. When 11:30 rolled around, he looked at his watch and said, “ok, let’s go”. The service showed no sign of wrapping up, but he was a man of his word. On the way back to town, we stopped at his dad’s house. We sat around and at raw, lightly grilled ears of corn and mangos. That kind corn has a good flavor, but it is difficult to eat. Turbo speed Mwizerwa was finished with two ears when I had barely finished his first. He kept telling me to hurry. For what, I don’t know. Finally I broke my cob in two and gave half to him. Before leaving, he gave me some eggs, fresh from his dad’s chickens. I was very flattered. Eggs are expensive in my part of the country. I really liked this guy, and not just because he was so generous. He had a good sense of humor and his energy was something to marvel at. Still, I couldn’t understand most of what he said because he talked as fast as he did everything else.

Later that day I went to visit a nearby family that I had been introduced to by Jeff. I played basketball on occasion with one of the sons, Baya. That day we played Checkers on a board that Jeff had made for him. It didn’t seem to have the right number of spaces or pieces, but that was a minor detail. He played with some pretty crazy rules that I had never seen before and he beat me four times in a row. His mother brought us a couple of Fantas. That in itself was a very nice sign of hospitality, but then Baya insisted that I take both of them. That felt a little awkward, but he would not accept anything else. I stayed for one final game of checkers, because I needed to win just once. And I did. I wouldn’t be surprised if he let me, though. He had always seemed about four moves ahead of me in the other games.

That night I started to plan lessons for the first day of school the next day. It was hard since I had never been formally told what classes I would be teaching and the schedule had not been posted. My counterpart had said not to worry since I would not teach the first day. Supposedly at boarding schools, which mine was, most of the students don’t even arrive the first week. I was beginning to worry though. I had had ample time to get ready for the school year, but it was impossible since I had no idea what to get ready for. I had almost no structure when it came to what I had to teach, and even worse, I realized that I had no concept of English grammar. As I struggled to figure out what I would teach, I felt like I was having a little bit of a breakdown. So I cooked a big pot of mustard curry beans with mango. 

The next morning, I went to school, expecting to be sent home after being given a schedule. The schedule was posted about two minutes before the school year actually started. I was first confused to see that my name was nowhere to be found. Then someone pointed out the teachers assigned to the upper level English classes were not qualified to teach English and that they were all mine. I was shocked to find that I would be teaching more than twice the amount of hours as I was expecting, and more than Jeff ever had. That day I was supposed to teach seven hours. The other teachers had their subjects’ textbooks and started planning their lessons immediately. The first two hours of the day were designated for the students to clean their classrooms. So there was a little time to prepare for my first classes. I was highly disturbed by this situation. I was to be teaching more hours than Peace Corps had told us we were allowed to teach our first term. Plus, I knew I would have after school clubs to lead, which Peace Corps had also wanted us to delay for the first term.

In the end, several things prevented me from even teaching the first day. There was the cleaning, the fact that my senior 4 classes didn’t exist yet, for unknown reasons, some of the other classes combined because they were small. The next day I was only teaching Senior 4 classes, and again, they weren’t there. It wasn’t until a few days later that somebody told me that they wouldn’t be arriving for another month, since they were still waiting for their results from the national exam. That was a small relief. I did not want to make a big deal about my hours, but the last thing I wanted was to be overwhelmed from the beginning, and get an even bigger workload later. Plus, I wanted to shape the focus of my service towards side projects and after school activities rather than just teaching English. Nobody was able to address my problem though, because our headmaster was in Kenya, and nobody knew when he would be back.

My first few classes were, expectedly, a little rough. No matter how slow I talked and how simple I made my English, the students seemed to have no idea what I was saying. And these were the two highest classes of secondary school. I would regularly leave the class thinking that I was the worst teacher of all time. Their level was a lot lower than I had expected. Although they were older, the level of English in the S5 and S6 classes seemed lower than the level in the S3 class I had taught during training. I was glad that I had not planned any lessons yet. We would have a lot of reviewing to do.

Before my schedule got too thick, I tried to make the most of my free time. The neighborhood boys would always ask when we were going back to the river. It wasn’t hard to convince me to go back there. On the way back from swimming and kid-throwing, I passed a woman sitting outside her little shack, husking her rice. She called me over and gave me a couple of handfuls of rice. Then she asked if I knew how to cook. I said I did, and she sent me on my way. I don’t know why she felt the need to be so nice to me, but it was very nice. One of the kids went and grabbed a big leaf from the cassava plants for me to hold the rice in.

I was starting to play basketball more often. It looked like there would usually be some going on after school. The skill and age range was huge. One day I was chasing a loose ball and bonked heads with Baya. I was dizzy and had to sit down for a while. Some weird yellow liquid (brain?) started pouring out of my nose. The rest of the day I felt like I was hung over.