During the second week of school we had or first day of
“English Club”.
I had not expected to run the after school clubs so soon. We
had been told not to bother with them until the second term. The students,
however, were ready to begin and it didn’t look like I would have the power to
stop them. And why would I? If there was the interest, who was I to deprive
them?
The president of the club had taken charge in a big way. It
seemed that I would only need to supervise the meetings. They were trying to decide
which day they would hold the two-hour meetings. They couldn’t decide between
Tuesday and Thursday, so they chose both. The club, I learned, was just as much
and Anti-AIDS club as it was an English club. They already had sketches and
songs about AIDS that they wanted to perform at different schools to promote
AIDS awareness. I was very impressed.
Then I started leading the GLOW Club. GLOW stands for “Girls
Leading Our World.” It is a Peace Corps program to promote women’s empowerment
in countries that lack gender equality. The previous volunteer had started the
club. However, it was still very new, and when I got there, they had only met
three times before. During training, we were not taught anything about how to
run programs like this. We would learn more about how to run secondary projects
during our “in-service training” after the first term. The girls, however, did
not want to wait. They wanted their GLOW Club, and they wanted it now. So I
used the little bits of resources I knew of and brought the club to their first
meeting of the year.
The president of the club helped introduce the meeting. We
did introductions and she led a song. I proceeded to lead the girls in a
feel-good activity to promote self-confidence as well as the open expression of our feelings. This is the
kind of project that I feel people (myself included) would not expect me to be
right for. This might be true, but during that first meeting I really felt
myself rising to the occasion. Our group was small, and what we were doing was
so simple and seemingly trivial. However, the camaraderie that I could see
developing seemed very important and valuable.
The previous volunteer had also started a girls basketball
club, which was an extension of the GLOW Club. I am not sure how new that club
was, but the girls were also expecting me to pick up where the previous
volunteer had left off. I was not quite ready yet, but again, if they were
ready to get started with it, I would have to go along. Half the job of leading
the girls basketball club is getting the boys to respect the girls’ space on
the basketball court. I felt it was easy for me to get the boys off the court
for the girls, but what I think will be important in the future is for the
girls to get their space without me. Having their space is important, but their
ability to stand up for themselves to get that space seems far more important.
That will be one of my informal goals while I am here.
In school the following week, I started to review the past
tense. The students had struggled so hard to apply it to their papers that I
felt they needed a serious review. I was surprised to find that they seemed to
know it very well, and were pretty good at the many irregular verbs. I guess
one of the biggest challenges is trying to get them to apply these grammar
points to their actual writing and speech. Again, there is a lot of work to do.
Because of all the clubs starting, I had lost most of my
after-school basketball time. I found myself protecting my Friday because of
how precious it was. It was the only day of the week now that I would get to
play basketball. The first time I got to play a full-court game was more fun
than I could have imagined. A lot of the players were pretty good at
basketball, and I was having trouble understanding how they had gotten so good.
Many of them had obvious athletic ability, but there were certain aspects of
running a zone defense that I felt like would have had to be taught. There was
a designated ref, as well, who was more perceptive of minor violations than one
should be in street ball. I had never seen basketball on television, and there
was not much of a culture of it here. However, I was glad to see what I was
seeing. There was definitely more of a culture of basketball in my village than
most places I had ever been. In fact, the only countries outside of America
where I have seen anyone care about basketball are Spain (and it’s still
subservient to soccer) and the Philippines, where it reigns the most supreme.
So, good for Rwanda, and good for my village, because this is making me a lot
happier than soccer usually does.
That weekend, my favorite married couple, Luke and Caitlan,
came to visit me. They walked from their site, for 3.5 hours, down the hill to
my site. That evening I enjoyed my first beer since I had ever been at site.
There are a couple of decent bars in my town, but I had never been to them. I
was still trying to protect my reputation. Plus, I had not made any friend that
would have the right religion or money to go to a bar.
The next day, I decided to show them the river by my site. I
had been there a few times before. Usually I had followed the local boys
through the rice paddies on little elevated trails. Today, though, there had
been too much rain, and we were basically walking through a swamp. Caitlan
seemed hesitant and worried, but she soldiered on and we finally arrived at the
river. I showed Luke how much fun it is to throw children into the river. He
really took a liking to that activity. He threw kids for maybe thirty minutes straight.
Again, I was impressed with the swimming abilities of Rwandan kids. They are
far more comfortable in water than the kids I had thrown in West Africa.
Having Luke there made me more convinced that I would need
to tube this river. Tubing is usually for lazy rivers, which this is not. This
would be like white-water tubing. I think it would be a great adventure, and I
know I can find tubes.
That night we made a big pot of chili with pineapple and
summer sausage. They had gotten another summer sausage in a care package, and
decided to bring it on their visit so we could cook with it and use it in all
of our cooking. We had put it in our peanut sauce the night before and with our
eggs that morning.
When they left, I had a lot of leftovers to eat. So worked
on that for a lot of the day. I also pickled some of the jalapenos that they
had brought me from their garden. Their previous volunteer had jalapeno plants
and they were producing more than they could use. I was glad to have these,
since my peppers wouldn’t be ready for a quite a few months.
I feel that the peppers could revolutionize my cooking, but
at the same time, I am still impressing myself on a regular basis. One night I
made a revolutionary vindaloo and figured out some secrets to good curry.
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