recently nomadic

Hate, fear bigotry…

2010-08-30T20:19:00.001-05:00

With the economy in shambles, unemployment way too high, a recent oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and state budgets in disarray all over the country, what would you say should the most important issue being discussed on political campaigns this year? If you said fixing the economy, creating jobs or developing green infrastructure… you’d be wrong. Obviously the most pressing issue out there is who we should hate! There are plenty of candidates out there, minorities that can’t defend themselves, people who are a little different then the rest of us, groups that we can score a few political points off of and maybe scare enough people into voting for one party or another. Hate, fear, bigotry – these have been part of campaigning since the country began, mostly because they work! But why should we let them? Recognizing these tactics as the pathetic election tools that they are is a good way to render them ineffective, so let’s take a look at who’s destroying America this year.

Hating on the gays is so 2004. Not a lot of anti-gay ballot issues this year, at least, not that I’ve heard of yet. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people are still bizarrely frightened of the idea of two people who love each other getting married, and there have been a number of examples of openly gay candidates being slurred against, but it no longer seems like the issue that guarantees getting out the bigot vote. (Maybe I’m being overly optimistic. Let me know if you hear of the “gay agenda” being played around a lot by candidates.) Hmm, who else is out there we can hate on…

OMG! Have you heard? Muslims want to destroy America by building a mosque on Ground Zero in New York! Except, it’s not really a mosque, it’s a community center with a place to pray, and it’s not really on Ground Zero, it’s actually a couple of blocks away, only 2 blocks closer than an actual mosque (not to mention some strip clubs), and the Imam, one Faisal Rauf, is on record saying that he is not only a Muslim, but also a Jew and a Christian, as all three believe in the same things. So, it turns out to be a lot of fake outrage directed at the… you guessed it, the bigot vote! And don’t tell me it’s the placement of the mosque is why it’s a problem. There are active protests of soon-to-be mosques in Tennessee and other places, and a church in Florida had a Koran burning party to show their, what’s the term, stupidity? Racism? Outright idiocy? Something like that? Muslim fundamentalists talk about how the US and Islam are incompatible and thus are at war, and here we are doing are best to prove them right. Awesome.

Immigrants, of course, are an easy target for election hate, after all, unlike the gays, many of them can’t vote! Immigrants have been bashed in this country, by one party or another, since elections began. Of course, in the beginning it was those dirty Irish and the lazy Italians, and don’t get me started on the danged Germans! Speaking German and trying to hold on to their customs and culture. They’re takin’ our jurbs! Lately, of course, Hispanics have been the target of our hate and fear. Arizona’s famous “Show me your papers” law cost that state over $6 million in tourism revenue, and now South Dakota and many other states are considering similar legislation, as my friend Matt Hildreth detailed in an excellent blog a couple weeks ago. (As an immigrant myself, let me tell you, the idea of carrying your immigration paperwork with you everywhere you go is pretty ridiculous. You keep them at home, in a safe place! I almost lost my work visa at a beach once, and I will not let that happen again!) Stepping up the insanity ladder is the claim made by Texas Representatives Debbie Riddle and Louie Gohmert about Terror Babies. Let that sink in for a second. Terror Babies. Evil pregnant terrorists climbing over desert border fences to give birth to evil terrorist babies that will destroy this country in 20 years time. Facepalm.

This blog was supposed to be about some awesome undocumented kids that I know (don’t worry, they aren’t terror babies, or even terror teenagers) and how they are improving the community here in Houston, but one thing led to another and I got distracted. Maybe I’ll get to it at some point. Anyway, keep your eyes open for hate and fear being bandied around the political discourse. And please don’t ever fall for it!

Iowa is the worst state ever. So is Kansas. Nebraska's pretty horrible as well. Also Missouri. South Dakota and Texas, you're not so great either...

2010-08-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

When this was posted as my Facebook status a few days ago, one of my “friends” commented that I had my “cranky pants” on. I suppose it was true, having just completed the 20 plus hour drive from Watertown, SD to Houston, TX for the second time in 10 days. I’d made that trip once before (alone, in January) but even with two people it isn’t a trip to be made by the faint of heart or in vehicles with low gas mileage.

The drive North to South Dakota went surprisingly well, other than the usual obscene amount of traffic in Houston and a bizarre freak-out at a Super 8 (if you ever stay at the Super 8 in Norman, OK, do not, I repeat DO NOT attempt to start the 6 AM continental breakfast at 5:59 AM). My girlfriend and I arrived in Brookings with more than enough energy to head straight downtown and close down O’Hare’s and Jim’s. Brookings was its usual self, full of people I hadn’t seen in way too long, but SDSU looks quite different with all the new construction. The week was filled with catching up, running into old high school friends, meeting the girlfriend’s parents for the first time (eep! gulp!), drinking, Shark Week and a wedding where I didn’t really know anyone. You know, the usual.

All in all, the whole week went pretty well; the cranky pants didn’t come on until the drive home. You see, the wedding was Saturday night and my girlfriend needed to be back at work Monday morning, so we needed to cram all that driving into a short period of time. We left Watertown at about 8:30 PM after the reception dinner and planned to stop in Omaha/Council Bluffs sometime around 12:30 or 1:00 AM. We pulled off the road about on schedule, ready for a short night’s sleep, only to find out that the hotel had no vacancies and according to the night desk guy, none of the other hotels in the area did either. Writing Omaha off as a loss, we got back on the road and proceeded to stop in Nebraska City, Hamburg, Mound City, St Joseph – 11 different hotels in all, excluding the places front desk clerks called to check for us – until we found a Travelodge with one empty room in Platte City just north of Kansas City. It was 5:00 AM at this point and we were about ready to pull over and sleep in the car (energy drinks and gas station coffee can only take you so far). Fortunately the nice desk clerk pushed back the checkout time for us and we were able to get a good morning’s sleep before heading out again around noon.

Now, I love South Dakota, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t know if it’s worth it to make that drive again. The Sturgis Rally (started that week), some Nebraskan rodeo and the Kansas City Chief’s training camp (shudder… yet another reason to hate that team) all conspired against us. The construction on I-29 in Iowa alone made me question humanity’s merits, while the desolate nothingness that is Kansas is enough to drive anyone to madness. What truly frightened me, however, were the billboards threatening a “New American Revolution” (surprisingly, the teabaggers usually spelled “revolution” correctly).

I don’t think we’ll be making that drive again any time soon. We’ll definitely be flying up next time. Look on the bright side – I’m sure the airports will be crazy enough over Thanksgiving that I’ll get to write about that trip too!

Burnt, sore and coated in salt; PLUS a little taste of home.

2010-05-31T22:25:00.001-05:00

We had an amazing day this last Sunday. It was Memorial Day on the 31st, so we had a long weekend and decided to head down to Galveston Island for a day of kayaking and swimming. We signed up for a tour of Galveston Island State Park with Artist Boat, an organization that combines kayaking, science and art, and headed into the estuary/marshes of the park for a 4-hour excursion. If you’ve never gone kayaking, give it a try. I feel that kayaks are not only faster and more maneuverable that canoes, but the paddling motion is more natural on a kayak. I had only gone kayaking a couple of times before, and this was Alisha’s first time, but we totally rocked the two-person kayak. I’m proud to say that we were faster than anyone else and we never got stuck in the mud!

Next time we go kayaking, we’re going to just rent them and go out on our own, but it was nice to have a tour guide this time around. She pointed out the egrets, great blue herons, black skimmers (awesome birds – their lower beaks are longer than their upper ones and they fly along “skimming” the water with their lower beaks), turns, sea snots (like jellyfish, but just the jelly, not the fish part) and the places where stingrays live (unfortunately did not see any and fortunately did not step on any). During our lunch stop we even got a lesson in watercolours and had a chance to paint the scenery to help us remember the adventure. My painting looks like it got wet and was ruined on the trip back, but alas, it did not. It was just poorly done.

After the kayaking, we headed across the island to the Gulf side for a little bit of swimming and ended up playing in the surf for a good 3 hours. By the time we headed into Historic Downtown Galveston for some lovely Mediterranean food, we were sunburned, exhausted and quite salty. It was quite the day, and we are already making plans for our next kayaking trip.

“Home” in the title refers to Canada. Generic Canada, not really any particular place. We’ve found a spot here in Houston where we can get a little taste of Canada: the Maple Leaf Pub. Located in Midtown, the Maple Leaf is a fun little bar with a small selection of Canadian beers. I hear it gets quite busy when a hockey game is on (especially Houston Aeros or NHL playoffs) but we went on an off night and it stayed busy, it was never over crowded. I loved the atmosphere; there were people playing board games, there was a table hockey game in one corner, a map of Canada on the wall and jerseys and flags for Canadian sports teams (including quite a few for my favourite, the Leafs!) all over the room. You could also get a good selection of Canadian beer (unfortunately not my favourite, Dead Elephant Ale from Railway City Brewing Company) including a beer from Quebec that tasted like potpourri. Seriously. It was quite florally delicious.

Things I should have blogged about sooner…

2010-05-19T21:23:00.002-05:00

Some of you might recall hearing about a series of immigration rallies that took place across the US on May Day (May 1st). The rallies were in part to call on the federal government to enact comprehensive immigration reform and in part to protest Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law (SB 1070). I could probably rant for several entire posts about that racist piece of work, but I’ll restrain. If you haven’t heard of it, basically it attempts to legalize racial profiling by allowing cops to pull people over for “looking illegal”. So, as an immigrant, along with other prominent immigrants to the US including Steve Nash (of Los Spurs) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me,”{please read that quote with a Terminator accent}) I felt I needed to do something to in protest. Hence the immigration rally.

Honestly I had no idea what to expect. I’ve tried to go to other protests before, only to find just one or two people waving signs. Plus, I hadn’t heard much advertising about the rally, so I wasn’t all that hopeful, but we made our signs and headed over. When we saw two helicopters hovering over the area, we figured it was a good sign, but I was still impressed when I saw the crowds. Media estimates put about 7000 – 10 000 people at the rally, quite a big event (although we were dwarfed by Dallas which had around 20 000 turn out). We parked a few blocks away and ran over to join the march. Emerging as we did from a crowd of grumpy looking white people at the sidelines, we received a few apprehensive looks from the mostly Hispanic marchers, but once we pulled out our signs, they welcomed us quite warmly. One older lady even complimented my horrible mangling of the slogans we were chanting: “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” (A community united will never be defeated!)

We had a great time and marched a good distance and fortunately, only saw a few teabaggers. One idiot had his rallies confused and was holding a “No socialism” sign (not sure what immigration reform has to do with socialism) and another ‘bagger had one proclaiming the sacred border/language/culture of the US. Psst, dumbass, Texas used to be part of Mexico. As the saying goes, they didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. My least favourite sign read “Immigration is ruining this country. Look what it did to the White House” which was all kinds of stupid and offensive. It was heartening, however, to note that there were only 20-50 teabaggers (of the ones I saw most were old and all were white) along the entire route, and set against at least 7000 marchers, I think makes us look pretty good.

In other news, thanks for the advice in the comments from the last post. The websites had good tips, Sara’s was the most appealing and Greg’s was, well, the most practical. To get rid of the fruit flies, we used a mixture of red wine vinegar and dish soap in a glass. We left it out on the counter overnight and the next morning, there were about 30 dead flies in the bottom of the glass. I guess the smell of the vinegar was irresistible and the soap broke the surface tension so the flies would sink and drown. We left a couple of glasses out for a couple of days and killed off almost all of the flies. My only worry is that we created a new race of flies that don’t like vinegar by killing off all the ones that do. Natural selection and all that. Or would it be artificial selection? Anyway, we’re still trying to find a way to deal with the millipedes. Normally I really don’t mind them; they’re some of the least threatening of bugs. However, we found one in bed the other night, and that is crossing a line.

Oh, and we have some sort of heron hanging around our apartment pool. This is one of those things that would be more interesting if I was still overseas. It would be an ostrich or a monkey or maybe a crocodile.

The immigrants are stealing your low-paid internships.

2010-05-09T18:28:00.001-05:00

Hello all! I’m back at work and hopefully back at blogging!

I’ve been away from the blogging pretty much since getting back from Rwanda, other than a few random posts, but I’m going to try to start doing it regularly again. Ironically, I had plenty of time to write while I was unemployed and yet did very little of it. Now that I have a job and much less time, I decided to restart the blog. Not sure I understand myself sometimes.

First main point: I have a job! Hooray! Actually, I ended up getting three interviews all around the same time and ended up getting offered all three jobs! When it rains, eh? Fortunately, one of the jobs starts in September, doing after-school enrichment programs, so I accepted that one. I had to decide between an hourly job at Te House of Tea and a short-term internship at the Student Conservation Association (SCA). After taking everyone’s advice into account, I decided to go with the internship, mostly because it seemed like less of a downgrade than serving tea, even if the pay was worse. After two weeks, I still believe I made the right choice, especially since there could be a slight chance of it turning into longer-term, better-paid employment.

The SCA is an environmental non-profit that has been around since the 1950s placing people in internships at national parks and the like to do conservation work (habitat restoration, trail building, invasive species removal, population studies, environmental education, etc). In the last decade, it has also expanded to programs that get urban youth involved in conservation efforts. My job is to recruit people for internships in and around Houston (including Galveston), or as a friend put it, a non-corporate headhunter. I’ll also be helping to build partnerships with other organizations, running the intern program for the summer and helping out with the high school summer program. So far, so good!

That’s all for now, but I hope to post again in the near future. Keep an eye out for posts on my attempts at becoming more environmentally friendly, an awesome immigration rally we attended and our recent infestations of fruit flies and millipedes. (Alisha found an ingenious way to annihilate most of the fruit flies, but does anyone know how to get rid of large numbers of millipedes?)

Employment

2010-04-01T15:51:00.000-05:00

Jobs I want and think I would be good at:

- Cartographer
- Xenoethnographer
- 2040 Olympic Croquet course designer
- Hero (although I would probably need some super powers. Or maybe just powers. Even some skills would be nice…)
- Coffee snob (is this a job?)
- Harrison Ford
- Death panelist
- Talking head (either the kind in a jar or the kind on TV, I’m not picky)
- English gentleman-adventurer
- Robot

If you can think of other jobs I might be good at/want, leave a comment!

Unemployment leads to much reading of the BBC

2010-02-26T16:06:00.000-06:00

Has anyone else been following the news out of Niger? I’m guessing not, but it’s an interesting story. At first glance it looks like any one of a dozen stories that have come out of Africa over the years, but some people, myself included, are hoping it’s different. Basically, a military coup has overthrown Niger’s government, a uranium rich but extremely poor Saharan nation with a history of rebellions. This is unfortunately all too common in this part of Africa (see Guinea in Dec 2008). The new junta is now promising democracy and reform, something else frequently done by juntas across the world. The question is are they telling the truth? I’m guessing most people would answer no, or if they’re feeling extremely optimistic, maybe yes but it won’t happen. As for myself, I’d like to believe.

Here’s what I know: former President Mamadou Tandja was not democratic. He was one of many African leaders who rode into power on a wave of democratic revolutions but overstayed his welcome. Like many such leaders, he pushed through constitutional amendments to allow him to stay in power longer than previously allowed. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe Velez are other such leaders. Some also fear that in Rwanda President Paul Kagame will do something similar, but I have my doubts. Anyway, Tandja ended up a dictator. Fast forward to February 18 of this year: military coup ousts Tandja. As you probably know, I don’t usually like militaries to have any influence at all in governance, but there have been a few promising signs out of this. For one, elections have been promised, but of course, these promises are easy to break, and they usually are. For another, members of the military junta AND the transitional government will not be allowed to run in the new elections. Again, it’s just a promise, but it’s a good one to make. Finally, although Tandja is being tried for treason, the junta is not seeking the death penalty, even though that would be permissible by law. I find that last one interesting. It could be just a smart move to prevent making a martyr out of him, or it could be something different, something promising. If nothing else, it shows that the junta is not planning a purge, which would a sure sign of trouble.

Will this coup lead to anything other than another dictatorship? If history were our guide, it would look like a resounding no. However, this does not mean we should immediately condemn the coup in Niger. Tandja’s government was not a good one, and this could be an opportunity to create a new functioning democracy in Saharan Africa, a region that desperately needs good role models. The governments of the US, Canada and the EU should reach out to Niger and offer to help them through the difficult process of building a new government. Will any of this come to pass? Who knows! But one thing is for certain: I’ll be following the news out of Niger.

Sad news out of Rwanda. There were recently three grenade attacks in Kigali shortly before French President Sarkozy’s visit (or due to the upcoming 2010 elections). One attack took place in front of a bar/restaurant I used to frequent, Chez Venant. They had cheap beer (for Kigali) and a nice atmosphere. I’m hoping the restaurant remains open and that there are no further attacks like this one.

Other random crap:

Now, I’m sure that the hats I purchased in Rwanda were probably made in China, like many of the things you could buy there, but I still think of them as my Africa hats. (You may have seen me wearing the brown one in many of my Rwanda photos.) They weren’t extremely common in Rwanda, but I’d see them every now and then, usually being worn by musees/old men. So when I saw an old man wearing one here in Houston, I smiled. A lot. And almost greeted him with a Mwirire!

So, small world, eh? I tend to have these moments quite often, like running into my parents in DC or meeting a guy I went to high school in South Dakota with in a random bar in Kigali. Or meeting a nice American in a hotel in Butare who know a friend of mine from SDUS. This latest incident is not nearly as interesting, but I have little else to write about. I met a fellow at a meeting about census jobs and we got to talking. He went to school in Iowa and when he found out I formerly lived in South Dakota, he happened to mention that the father of one of his friends ran for governor there! This would be Jack Billion of course, whose campaign I volunteered for and whose children I met while campaigning. I love being reminded of how interconnect the world is.

Finally, HOCKEY! Canadian women took the gold and I’ll be watching the men’s game tonight. NBC isn’t doing a good job of covering hockey, and I can’t seem to find it online to watch. Solution? My dad is going to set up his computer in front of his TV in Ontario and I’ll be watching it over Skype. Aren’t technology and parents awesome!?

Update attack!

2010-02-11T15:34:00.000-06:00

So, it’s been quite a while since my last post, hasn’t it? That’s probably because my life now isn’t nearly as interesting as it was just five months ago. I’m currently living in Houston, the fourth, possibly third largest city in the US. I’m unemployed, looking for work and in the meantime, being a houseboy.

The problem with keeping up my blog is that, well, who is going to read it? When living in Rwanda (or as several friends have pointed out, anywhere overseas) even the most mundane event is worth blogging about. That’s probably because what’s mundane in other places is still strange and new to us Westerners. In Rwanda, I could write about the awful intestine brochettes I was served, or the live chicken in a paper bag under my bus seat, or the funny English problems I encountered. Other examples given to me by friends include “I waited for a bus today… in front of a castle!” and “I almost got hit crossing the road today… by a camel!” Now that I’m in Houston my life isn’t all that interesting to the rest of the world. Writing about putting together a bookshelf or job-hunting probably isn’t going to keep readers’ attentions.

Of course, this isn’t to say I’m not having a good time! Houston is a great city with so much to explore and see. Plus, my relationship is finally not a long distance one, which after more than a year is definitely a good thing! I’m beginning to get settled here, working through all the change of location stuff (though a little annoyed that I need to get my car inspected at an office this is only open from 9 am to 9:30 am on Mondays – and of course I found this out Tuesday morning) and job-hunting is keeping me busy. There are jobs out there, but having no real skills is a bit of a detriment to getting interviews. I’ve been finding a lot of them on Idealist.org, a great website for finding (generally) progressive jobs, volunteers, programs, and other opportunities.

I’m starting to get back into the politics I missed while in Rwanda, and frankly, I’m annoyed. Annoyed at the Republicans for doing nothing by saying no and at the Democrats for misplacing their collective spine. Again. Health insurance: I need it and I need it to be cheap. Jobs: also need it! The Repubs seem to have forgotten their economics: spending creates jobs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s private or public, but seeing as the average person doesn’t have as much spending money as usual, it’s up to the government to do that spending. I know the deficit is huge (and I also know it got that way under Bush by getting into two wars we couldn’t afford while cutting taxes) but now is not the time to try to fix it. Get the economy back on track, lower unemployment, THEN worry about the deficit.

Oh, and I may have found my new Cottonwood. If you know me, you’ll know how much I love coffee shops. I’ve been missing Cottonwood Coffee in Brookings. It was pretty much my home senior year at SDSU and need to find a replacement. I’m sitting in Salento Café in Rice Village right now, and it just might fit the bill. I need to try a few alternatives before I settle down, but this place has a lot going for it. It doesn’t just have coffee, it has wine…

That’s all for now. I think I’ll keep this up, more as a means of staying in the writing habit then anything. I don’t expect to keep readers, but meh… this is for me. Oh, and in case you didn’t guess, it’s also something to do when I should be writing cover letters and following up on applications…

Zanzibar!

2009-11-09T00:53:00.002-06:00

Hello all! I accidentally paid for an hour of internet rather than a half an hour, so i decided to do a quick post.

I am in Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. It is paradise here. Amazing. I have been snorkeling and swimming in the Indian ocean, drinking cocktails, eating delicious seafood (octopus, squid, barracuda, shrimp, etc) and generally having a great time. While snorkeling I saw dolphins, flying fish and all sorts of other beautiful fish and corals. The only negatives are the heat and the fact that I had to walk for about 45 minutes barefoot through a bed of sea urchins, sharp rocks and broken corals. Long story.

Stonetown, the largest city is beautiful. It is full of narrow winding alleys that i constantly get lost in. The architecture is pretty cool and there are towns of old forts, churches, mosques and museums to visit. Later this week I'm planning to take a "spice tour" to see and sample all sorts of fruits and spices.

When i'm done here, my friend and I are heading to the north of the island for more snorkeling, swimming and partying.

We're leaving Zanzibar on the 14th for Dar, then on the 15th taking the 30 hour bus ride back to Kigali. I can't bring myself to think about it, so i'll have to fill you in on those annoying details later.

Be jealous!

Saying Goodbye

2009-11-02T06:19:00.001-06:00

I have finished with Worldteach and Rusumo High School. I am no longer a teacher. I am unemployed. I have pretty mixed feelings about that. It was very sad to say goodbye to a lot of people like my English Club, my students and some of the other teachers, but at the same time, I’m happy to get moving again. After 10 months I’m looking forward to getting home.

But first, Zanzibar! I am leaving tomorrow at 5:30 AM for a 30-hour bus ride to Dar es Salaam. From there I’ll take the ferry to Zanzibar, a tropical island complete with beaches, reefs, ancient Stonetown, snorkeling, seafood and all that. It should be pretty amazing and you should all be jealous!

After that I will take another 30-hour bus ride back to Kigali and after a couple days fly to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for about 3 days before flying back to DC then Toronto. That means I’ll be back in North America in 3 weeks. See you then!

More pics!

2009-11-01T10:10:00.001-06:00

DRC and less than two weeks to go

2009-10-19T10:17:00.000-05:00

So, first of all, I have less than 2 weeks left in Rwanda. Crazy! I’m going to travel around for about a month before I get back to North America, so it’s still a little while until you can all see me again, but still…AHHHH! I’m in the process of saying my goodbyes and figuring out what I’m bringing back and what I’m leaving here. I’ve finished grading the exams and I’m almost done with the report cards, and that’s all I have left.

When I first came here I made it my goal to visit each country that borders Rwanda. I went to Uganda in April and Burundi a couple of months after that. Two weekends ago I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you don’t know much about the country, you should look it up. It’s got an interesting story, though pretty depressing, and have been locked in a series of rebellions and civil wars pretty much since it was created. It currently resides as No 3 on the UN’s list of most failed states, behind Somalia and Afghanistan. I tell you that so I can brag that I visited a country with less of a government than Iraq and Sudan.) Anyway, we only spent one night there (in Goma) but spent a good deal of time walking around the town. Let me tell you, it’s not in good shape. In 2004 the town was destroyed by/covered with lava from the volcano just to the north and even now the streets and alleys are covered in piles of volcanic rock. There are UN troops and aid workers everywhere, severely driving up prices making it more expensive than Kigali (which is very expensive compared to other parts of East Africa). There was also a lot more obvious poverty than you generally see in Rwanda. It’s definitely a rough place to live.

We did try two new beers though, both darker than the Rwandese beers. Tempo is quite good, but Turbo King (yes, that is what it is actually called) is disgusting. It tasted like they tried to make an energy drink/beer combination.

The craziest part of the trip though, is that we stumbled upon some illegal gorilla smugglers (not that any gorilla smuggling is legal). The compound bordering our hotel had two baby gorillas in it (so incredibly cute btw!). We asked at the hotel and found out that it was “unauthorized”. The smugglers didn’t like the fact that we took pictures, but we had to get photo evidence, so we took quite a few and walked up a creepy little side street to get the address of the place, then got the heck out of the country. We’re also in the process of trying to report this so some sort of authority.

So, I’m only human, right? Is it so wrong of me to want to know what my students think of me? On their finals, many of them had to write essays or paragraphs about…me. The results were, well, interesting. Mostly a huge ego boost of course, but some strange answers too. Almost every student said that they loved me and that I was a good teacher/the best teacher they’ve ever had. Of course, I know that a lot of that might be fishing for points but I have to believe that some of it is the truth! As for the other things they said…

The extremely obvious:
I’m white.
I don’t like cheating. (I made this quite clear!)

The complimentary:
I have a pretty smile.
I am thought of as a parent of the school.
I am handsome.
I have strength in my arms.
I look like a boxer or someone who knows karate.

The contradictory:
I’m fairly fat.
I am very thin.
I am short.
I am taller than others.

The just plain wrong:
I studied in USA (Union of South America)
I went to Denver University.
I was a secretary for Barack Obama (or Black Obama as several kids think he is called).
I was a teacher of Barack Obama.
I’m going to teach in Tanzania next.
I like to pray to God (or play God – Ls and Rs are difficult) every day and night.
I’m married.
I have two brothers and two sisters.
I live in England.

And the strange/extremely screwed up English:
I have white hair and side beards.
I am brown.
I am yellow.
I have an 84% for weight.
I don’t wear a trouser to school (definitely not true, I just don’t know what he meant!)
I have a good tail.
I have a chocolate head. (WHAT?)

See y’all in a couple months!

Book Reviews

2009-10-15T01:20:00.000-05:00

A few of the books I’ve read this year. I wrote this instead of grading papers. I actually have some great stories to tell about a trip I just took, but I’ll have to post that at a future time.

Anna Karenina – My first Tolstoy. Anna is one of the most annoying characters in all literature, IMO. (Spoiler!) She should have jumped under the bus much, much earlier.

War and Peace – My second Tolstoy. Much better than the first. The story is quite riveting and non of the characters made me want to gouge my eyes out. The only problem was Tolstoy’s 100-page rant in the conclusion about how stupid historians are.

Great Expectations – This was a lot easier read than I thought it would be. Dickens genius may not be his stories, but it is definitely in his characters. All of them are such interesting portrayals of different aspects of the human spirit. I did figure out who Pip’s benefactor was after about the 3rd chapter though…

Lord of the Flies – I have read this before, but it was in the pile of books Dad and Sara brought for my school’s library. Always a great book.

The Road – An interesting post-apocalyptic story about a man and his son traveling a road in search of food and safety. Love the idea, but it gets a little repetitive. And there was very little punctuation, which after a year of teaching English bothered me.

Digital Fortress – Dan Brown. One of the worst books I have ever read. It was written like a bad junior novelisation of a bad movie.

Free Willy 2 – A bad junior novelisation of a bad movie, but it was better than Digital Fortress.

The Super Adventures of Wishbone – Awesome. Just awesome.

Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass – Very strange. I enjoyed the two immensely, but Lewis Carroll was definitely on some interesting drugs. As for the Walrus and the Carpenter song, I don’t really see the religion analogy. It seems like it fits on a very basic level, but if you actually read the poem, there’s very little connection.

Audacity of Hope – Quite good. I read this around the time of his inauguration so I was doubly happy. Doesn’t quite deserve the Nobel Prize for literature though, sorry.

The Poisonwood Bible – A great novel about a family of missionaries in Congo/Zaire. It pretty much exactly spells out my feelings about missionaries (not positive!) as well as covering a lot of Congolese politics around the time of their independence. Spoiler – The US screwed that country over pretty effectively.

A State of Blood – Covers Idi Amin’s time in Uganda, written by an ex-comrade.

Hitching Rides with Buddha – A hilarious story by Canadian Will Ferguson who lived in Japan for several years. The book covers his journey hitchhiking from the North tip of Japan to the South tip. Interestingly, much of the cultural confusion he experiences there is directly relatable to things that have happened to me here in Rwanda.

Zanzibar Chest – A good, but a bit pompous story about a journalist in Africa. He covers all the major events in Africa through the 80 and 90s.

The Long Road Down – Ewen McGregor and some other guy ride motorcycles from the UK to South Africa. Meh. Too much pompous actor dialogue.

Krakatoa – An extensive discussion about the Indonesian volcano. A lot of great information, but a bit too extensive.

I read a lot of other books this year but either I can’t remember their names or they didn’t deserve a mention.

Winding down or winding up?

2009-10-04T09:42:00.000-05:00

My time here is winding up (or down?)! I’m working on the exams that
I will give in less than two weeks and I’m starting review next week.
After that I’ve got to proctor (a word that always makes me giggle)
the exams and mark them, then I’m finished! In less than a month, I
will be finished at Rusumo High School. In less than two months I’ll
be back in North America! I don’t even know what to think!

I still have a fair amount of traveling to do before I leave. There
are still a couple places in Rwanda I haven’t visited, like Gisenyi
and Byumba that I hope to see soon, plus I’m going to be spending a
week in Zanzibar, a tropical paradise. You will be jealous.

Unfortunately, the final debate of the year was cancelled. It turns
out that the Tanzanian school actually had exams during the time we
were planning on going. This was a huge disappointment for the
students and for me. We lost the previous two debates, but I thought
we really had a chance to win this one, and I had been hoping to end
the year on a positive note. We have continued to meet, just to
debate for fun, and the club seems pretty enthusiastic about
continuing next year. We elected club officers and I’m compiling a
list of debate teacher’s phone numbers from around the province so
they can set up debates next year without a volunteer’s help. They
are great kids, and I’ll really miss them.

Things I didn’t want to find on my toilet seat: mating cockroaches, a
giant spider building a web across the hole. Fortunately, that is all
so far.

For some reason, I’ve noticed an increased number of Toronto Maple
Leafs jerseys around Kirehe district. It always makes me happy to see
them until I remember that there probably wouldn’t have been donated
to Africa if they actually won once in a while. Oh, and apparently
the new restaurant, Kirehe Modern Center, has satellite TV and I saw a
clip of a Bruins game on ESPN. The first hockey I’ve seen in over 8
months. It was strange.

Here we go again…

2009-09-12T11:13:00.000-05:00

So it looks like the rainy season is starting again. I was hoping the
dry season would last another couple of weeks but oh well. Back to
the wet, cold and mud, not to mention canceling class because your
students can’t hear you/are getting rained on. Not ideal, but it’s
life!

No big news with the computer lab besides getting a projector set up.
Oh, and that with the wet season back, the solar panels produce a lot
less power and we are expecting even more cuts in the time students
can use the computers.

We had our first debate! It was a success, despite our loss to our
opponent. Both teams did very well, but the English is definitively
more advanced at the other school, and they’d debated four times
already this year. I am extremely proud of our students for how they
did. For most of them, it was their first debate and for the rest,
their second. We had two Francophones on the team, and it is a huge
accomplishment for them to give their arguments and ideas in English.
We also had three Senior 1s and two Senior 2s, so our team was a lot
younger. With some more practice they could be excellent.

The day after the debate, my friends and I went on an epic hike around
the falls. We climbed a mountain, then climbed all the way down to
the river, walked along the river, had a fisherman ferry us up river
in a little canoe when we hit an impassible cliff, then climbed most
of the way back up the original mountain. It took about 5 hours, and
when we finally reached the end, we were exhausted, sun burnt, filthy
and bleeding from several cuts and scratches caused by rocks and
thorns. In other words, it was a great hike! There are some pretty
good pictures and when I get good enough internet, I’ll post a few.

Finally, just a note to any perspective Worldteachers who have found
my blog, don’t join this organization. I know it’s not great form to
be bashing the organization that I belong to, but there is something
very wrong with WorldTeach. We had a few hints at the beginning by
the way they treated us and the lack of information we received during
orientation. We discovered a bit more throughout the year as we
consistently were left hanging when we needed support. (Field
Director leaving the country on vacation during our first two weeks of
teaching is just one example.) Now though, we are fully aware of the
problems that through this organization all the way to the home office
in Boston. Let me be clear: I love my placement, despite the problems
I face, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to be here,
but I would not recommend WorldTeach to ANYONE. Find a different
organization. Please

Debate the 2nd

2009-09-11T08:59:00.000-05:00

New pics - Epic Hike!

2009-09-11T08:48:00.003-05:00

My life is computers, debates and moto rides with strangers.

2009-09-06T11:30:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve been online, too long. I haven’t
been to Kigali for several weeks now, and the Internet at the District
Office is consistently down whenever I’m around. I’ve felt pretty
disconnected. I’ve almost forgotten how to use the tubes!

I have had some successes with the computer lab! My first attempts
were frustrated by the fact that the wiring in the lab didn’t work and
by administration blowing it off by saying we didn’t have the money to
fix it. All it took though was one call from the District Education
Office telling us that if we weren’t going to use the computers,
they’d take them away, and miraculously we “found” the money to fix
it! (Turned out it wasn’t really broken, the wiring just didn’t
connect to anything). I immediately set up four of the new computers
and began testing all the old equipment to see what works. I’ve now
tested almost everything and we’ve got 9 working out of the 18 or so
that we had, and we’re a little short on mice. And power cords.
Everything here has a different set of plugs, so it’s hard to find
cords that fit in the right places. Anyway, students are now using
the computer lab in small groups, so I consider it a success! Sonya
(VSO) has also been a huge help and is making great visual aids on
rice sacks for the walls of the lab. My next big hurdle concerns
(surprise surprise) the administration again. I think they want to
only let students use the old computers, to which I asked “what about
the 18 brand new computers? What are we going to do with those?” The
reply was, of course, that the teachers can use them! I felt like
crying. What’s the point of having all those computers if they barely
get used? I’m going to have to put my foot down on this one.

I’ve also been busy with debate. We’ve got a lot of good students who
are interested in debate, and we set up two debates this term with
other schools. The first one is this Friday with Kayonza Modern,
another school in our program, and later in September we have a repeat
of our debate with our sister school in Tanzania. This time we are
going there, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to go as well! The only
problem is the expensive visa, but since I’m going in November anyway,
I might as well buy it now! Or, if possible, just get in for free…

Here’s one for you: have you ever gotten on the back of someone’s
moto, thinking that you knew who there were, and talked to them for
the entire 10 minute ride, only to discover that you don’t actually
know who they are? That’s my life! (Note: he seemed to know who I was,
so it was probably my fault that I didn’t recognize him. Nice guy,
though!)

Happy Birthday Aunt Carol!

Oh, and I’ve got less than two months of teaching left, plus less than
a month of traveling until I come home!

2 terms down, 3rd term to go!

2009-08-18T18:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve started my third and final term here in Rwanda. Hard to believe it. There’s still so much that I want to do and see. It’ll be hard to fit it into less than 4 months, but I’ll give it a shot!

The first week of the term is now over, although it was supposed to be the second. We had the usual confusion, with neither students nor teachers showing up on time, plus changing the timetable without telling anyone. About on par for most term beginnings I’d say. I’ve got big plans for this term. There are lots of things I want to cover in my classes, plus the Teachers’ English Club and the Debate Club. On top of that I think I’m about to take on another load of responsibility. Now that the library is up and running, and doing pretty well, if I do say so myself, I think I’m going to attempt to revive the computer lab. The solar panels are working again, so we have some power, and considering our students never get to touch a computer, I think I need to do something about that. Not sure how much I’ll get accomplished before I leave though. A lot of what needs to be done needs to be done by the administration, and all I can do is pester them until they do it. We’ll see though, it needs to be done.

I think I’m on my third generation of house lizards now. Possibly the fourth. I’ve just spotted a new tiny baby and will now have to try to protect him from the adults.

Oh, and I found a snake in my room the other day! Ok, after doing some research I figured out that it wasn’t technically a snake, but a different type of reptile called amphisbaenidae. Or something. It was about 4 inches long and it looked almost like a millipede except that it didn’t have any legs. They aren’t dangerous, and I doubt if this little guy could have bitten me if he tried! I did get a photo (not great) that I’ll attempt to post here at some point.

Random thought as I was listening to Tupac and reading War and Peace: I lead a very strange life.

The "snake" I found in my room...

2009-08-15T07:11:00.002-05:00

See upcoming post for explaination...

More pics!

2009-08-08T08:19:00.003-05:00

The End is near (of the holidays)

2009-08-01T19:19:00.001-05:00

The holidays are almost over, and we are all getting ready to head
back to school for the last term. Mixed feelings of course. The
holidays were great; with monkeys, dead car batteries, new friends, 2
kilos of pork, blisters, a king’s palace, numerous instances of being
ditched, walking until my feet bled, good food and surprisingly little
beer.

For the last couple of days of the break, I’m staying at a friend’s
house in Kigali. It’s kind of a strange situation; there are two
spare bedrooms but no spare beds. Plus the couple that lives there, 3
of us are crashing in the living room. There is a couch and a
loveseat, neither one is big enough to sleep on comfortably. I let
the girls sleep on them. The floor is concrete and horribly
uncomfortable, so I sleep on “chair-bed.” Chair-bed consists of 6
dinning room chairs pushed together, two by two. It is neither
comfortable nor stable, but it’s better than the floor. Oh, and last
night I couldn’t find two of the chairs, so it was just 4 chairs. I’m
quite sore today. The mosquitoes are pretty bad too. Oh, and they
haven’t had water since Sunday. Now, I don’t have running water so
some guy on a bike brings jerry cans full of it. They “have” running
water, so when it goes out, they have no idea where to find some. We
are in the middle of the dry season and water is getting scarce
everywhere in Rwanda except the Northwest, so lots of volunteers are
out of it. Thus we are all pretty grimy and smelly. I’ve showered
twice in the last week and a half.

Anyway, just a short post. I’ll maybe expand on some of the good
stories in later posts, and hopefully I’ll get back to my once a week
schedule once classes start up again. Murabeho!

Holidays

2009-07-25T19:57:00.001-05:00

I’ve been enjoying a great holiday! We have a three week break between the first and second terms and I’m making the most of it.

The term ended well. The students did relatively well on their exams, and grading papers didn’t drive me completely insane. I finished up early and headed for Kigali for a couples days of relaxing before Dad and Sara came. Their plane arrived at 2:00 am, but I met them at the airport anyway (the coffee shop was still open!) and had a great week!

The gorillas were amazing! It was an hour hike up the mountain, which would have been fun in of itself, but to see those creatures, and to be in the middle of their family was fantastic. The guides told us we were close and I looked up and saw a small gorilla sitting in a tree watching us. We then entered a small clearing and found the second in command silverback. The guides spoke to it in grunts to let it know that we were not a threat and it allowed us to stay. You could see them staring at us and you could see their intelligence in their eyes. They evaluated our presence and decided we weren’t a threat. We had an hour with them and we got so close! There was a young one that was totally hamming it up for the cameras, climbing on the silverback’s back and running by us. We got some amazing photos, a few of which are up know, and hopefully more will follow. It was an experience that I’m so glad I was able to have. Unfortunately these majestic creatures might not be around much longer.

Later we went to Akagera National Park, which was also great, except for the tsetse flies. We got really close to some giraffes, monkeys and buffalo, and saw all sorts of other animals as well. Still didn’t see the elephant though.

Nyakarambi was next, where we went to the falls (my 5th time), toured my school, bought some cow dung art and chilled at home. Had some bad experiences with restaurants (like how the entire town of Rusumo was out of food on a Tuesday afternoon) but overall it was fun! Pretty sure Dad and Sara enjoyed it, but I was very glad to show off my town and school and give them a taste of my everyday life.

We returned to Kigali for the last couple of days, went to the memorial and the Natural History Museum (which was interesting as we had to interpret the exhibits which were in a mix of English, French, Kinyarwanda, Latin and German). It was sad to see them off at the airport, but I had a great week!

Now I’m truly on vacation. Shepherding a couple of tourists around is tiring (no offensive guys) so I’ve been taking it easy the last couple days. I went up to Musanze to visit a friend and went spelunking (which is almost as fun as saying the word spelunking) and narrowly avoided getting guanoed on. I had some delicious burritos to celebrate St Burrito Day, and have been spending a lot of time in coffee shops. Tomorrow I’m heading down south to do who knows what. Plans are for the weak…

Monkey!

2009-07-23T08:42:00.001-05:00

Gorilla Pics!

2009-07-23T08:03:00.001-05:00

pics...

2009-07-20T08:35:00.002-05:00

Shaving incident. Apparently this is what I'll look like in 30 years.

Quick Check-In

2009-07-20T08:26:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone! I’m still alive, despite the lack of posts here recently. I’ve been quite busy. I promise that I’ll write a full post soon, but for now just a quick check-in.

School’s out, with one week of my three-week vacation over. Dad and Sara came and went, and I’ll be traveling around the western part of the country for the next two weeks (with plenty of R&R time in Kigali).

The week with the fam was amazing. We visited the gorillas (saw a three-week old baby, plus hot gorilla sex!), we had a short safari, hung out in Nyakarambi and spent some time wandering around Kigali.

Buj and back

2009-06-28T20:08:00.000-05:00

Wow, Bujumbura was an amazing idea, and an even better trip! Who says US State Department travel advisories should be trusted? Actually, Burundi can be a very dangerous country, but we were very careful and made sure not to put ourselves into any unnecessary risks. Well, for the most part…

There are many adjectives that one could use to describe the bus ride to Bujumbura, but I believe the best one is TERRIFYING. Take the usual Africa roads (filled with all sorts of vehicles, bikes, pedestrians, animals, potholes, etc) and worse than usual driving and add that to narrow, winding mountain roads and you’ll get some sort of idea. I spent much of the ride staring out the front window of the bus as we careened towards a cliff then swerved away from it, usually into the path of an oncoming truck which we’d then swerve away from back towards the cliff, and so on. Eventually, however, the mountains ended (rather abruptly, actually) and we came into Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, situated on the shores of beautiful Lake Tanganyika. Really, the only real problem we had with the transit was the Burundian border guard who tried to force us to bribe him by almost denying us entry. Much arguing, some harsh words, the help of the other bus passengers and shear stubbornness got us through the border sans bribe. There was no way that we’d support corruption!

We found a pretty nice place to stay for only a little more than we had hoped and in the process met several extremely nice and helpful Burundians. I was a little nervous, due to our experience with a “nice and helpful” Ugandan, but fortunately, they were good people. One important thing in Bujumbura is to stay off the streets at night (take taxis if you do need to go out), so the first night was spend enjoying our hotel, street bread and Burundian Primus (tastes the same).

Interesting fact: automatic weapons and grenades are not allowed in Bujumbura. At least that’s what the sign said. One of the first things we saw upon entering the city was a giant banner in Kirundi (very similar to Kinyarwanda) with a No Grenades and No Automatic Weapons picture (silhouettes of both x’d out). Apparently this didn’t apply to army, police or security guards, because they were everywhere and were always touting weapons.

On the second day we took a trip south of town to the spot where Stanley uttered those famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”. Actually, this was not the real spot. All evidence points to their meeting taking place in western Tanzania, but seeing as this is really all Burundi has in the way of touristy things, I’ll let it slide. The spot was marked by a large rock just off the highway, with names and dates carved into it. We took some pictures, talked to the soldier with the huge automatic weapon that appeared out of the bushes, then headed off to the beach, blowing past cops who tried to flag us down for more bribes.

Let me say, I always enjoy swimming, but there is something quite special about swimming in the Africa Great Lakes. Maybe it was the warm water, maybe it was the possible threat of schistosomiasis or biharzia, maybe it was the beer that I’d had, but jumping off the boat into the water felt amazing. If you are keeping track, that is the 3rd boat I’ve jumped off so far this year, the 2nd being into Lake Kivu and the 1st being onto the sandy beach of Lake Victoria. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll be able to make it to Lakes Malawi, Turkana, Edward, Albert or any other African Great Lakes. Then again, I’ve never really been to Lake Superior either. Anyway, I’ll be swimming in the Indian Ocean at Zanzibar in November, so I shouldn’t complain.

The bus home combined the same terrible driving and windy roads with an intense smell of vomit. Strangely, the vomit smell permeated the bus before any of the passengers actually started vomiting, and it certainly didn’t get any better afterwards. With the help of some incredibly cheap oranges and strong will power, none of the four of us puked and we all made it safely back to Rwanda.

Like last time, I was glad to make it home. It could be said that Rwanda has less character than it’s neighbours, and there is some sort of forced orderliness and discipline here, which makes the country seem less “African”, but it really is much safer and cleaner, and despite all the complaining I’ve done in this blog, it’s a pretty darn good place to live!

To Buj!

2009-06-21T20:34:00.000-05:00

I’m back in Kigali for the night. After an expensive weekend in the
city last week, of course I decided to spend more money and head off
to Bujumbura, the capital of neighbouring Burundi. It’s just a
weekend trip, but I’m going with a couple of other volunteers and it
should be fun! Plus, it’s another country to explore! If I spend a
year living in Rwanda without visiting each of the countries it
borders, I’ll feel like I wasted an opportunity. Let’s hope the next
post is filled with delightful stories of a wonderful trip, not woeful
ones of getting robbed again.

This last week I was invited to take part in a football match with the
other teachers. (Remember all you North Americans, football is what
the rest of the world calls soccer.) Since I understood it to be just
a friendly match between the teachers and the students, I of course
refused. I also refused the next day, and the next. However when the
day of the match arrived, somehow I had agreed to play and was frog
marched down to the pitch. The start of the game was delayed for some
time due to the fact that the other team had not arrived, which
confused me, until I realized that we not playing students, we were
playing staff from the local hospital. For those who may not be
aware, my athletic talents are marginal, and limited to badminton,
ping-pong, croquet and lying to strangers about being a hockey player.
I was due to play in the second half, and as I watched the start of
the game, I realized that when the teachers said they “weren’t any
good either”, they obviously meant that they would not have been able
to beat Manchester United. Liverpool maybe, but not Man U.
Fortunately, the players decided they didn’t really want to switch off
at halftime, so to the disappointment of the other substitutes and to
my relief, they continued to play, leading to a 2-0 win for Rusumo
High School over Partners in Health/Kirehe Hospital.

Just to underscore how different life is here from back home, remember
that my high school has no electricity, and now that the rainy season
is over, no water. This doesn’t mean that we have no running water
(ha, obviously) but that we actually have no water. The school was
built on top of a hill with no source of fresh water besides the rain.
For the first year of operation there was a large pump down in the
valley that sent water uphill to the school, but sometime in the
second year (2001) it broke. Since then, the school has used a large
tanker truck to cart water up from the valley a couple times a week,
but this year, like our generator, it too broke. The only remaining
vehicle at the school is a tiny pickup that has to make quite a few
trips a day into the valley in order to supply the school with enough
water for drinking, washing and cooking. On Tuesday, the pickup broke
down. I did not realize this until lunch was effectively cancelled
because there was no water with which to cook the rice and beans. The
students were finally able to eat around 5:00 (almost 12 hours after
they had breakfast) when another truck showed up with a couple tanks
of water. I am continually amazed how things like this are allowed to
happen, by school administration (who despite being deeply in debt and
stuck with broken equipment and a poorly supplied library and
laboratory are having hand-made wooden furniture crafted for the
headmaster’s office), by the District (who also recently sent us
hundreds of Senior 1 biology, chemistry and physics text books – in
French!) and by the Ministry of Education (I shouldn’t share my true
feelings about the Ministry online for fear of being deported, but it
has something to do with being able to find its own ass with both
hands). Anyway, the water situation has stabilized, at least until
the new truck breaks down.

Hmm, I wonder; this post just might be seditious enough for me to
actually be deported…

It’s that wonderful time of year again…

2009-06-13T04:58:00.002-05:00

The sun is shining, the dust is flying and the smell of the hand crank photocopier fills the staff room. That can only mean one things: exam time! Yay! Ok, it’s not quite exam week, but it’s coming up. I’ve got one more week of teaching, one week of review, then a week of exams and a week of marking. That’s all that left in Term 2! And I am ready for the vacation! It’s been a busy and productiveish term – the library is up and running (and we’re on our second librarian already), I’ve started a debate club with the first debate to be this Sunday, I’ve finally visited Rusumo Falls (three times, plus setting foot in Tanzania, geographically if not legally), I’ve visited all of our volunteers in Eastern Province and have generally been my usual rabble-rousing self (like teaching my students the concept of civil disobedience, hehe). This time around we get three weeks of va-cay, with the slight exception that I might have to be teaching some classes during the second week (not a problem, it’ll probably only be about 4 or 5 hours tops). For the first week, Dad and Sara are visiting, for which I’m EXTREMELY excited about! I can’t wait to show off my home and country to people from home. Oh, and I’m excited to see you two… For the rest of the break I’ll probably just travel around Rwanda, especially the West, which is hard for me to get to on weekends. There’s a pretty cool rainforest which chimps and monkeys, some tea plantations and some beach resort towns (on Lake Kivu). Two weeks should be enough time to not really see everything, but to pretend I did.

I only have to get through the next 4 weeks. I’ve already got 3 out of my 4 exams written, so I just have a bit more teaching and some review, then I have to mark 330 some exams. Thankfully I have my computer back so music can soul my tortured soul as I drive myself crazy with the grading.

Also, this next week marks the mid point of my time here (or it’s close at least). Hard to believe I’ve been here for 5 and a half weeks and that I’ve got about 5 and a half weeks left. I’m working on planning my final month of traveling after 3rd term and have to have the flight home booked in about 2 weeks, so soon I’ll know when I’ll be back in North America (coming soon to a couch near you?) If anyone knows of must see attractions in Zanzibar (besides the beaches), Dar es Salaam or Addis Ababa, let me know.

On a sad note, I’ve had my first major illness of the trip: a cold. It’s been about 5 days and I think I’m just starting to get over it! And now I’ve just jinxed myself. Worms, amoebas and other parasites here we come!

I’m currently in Kigali for another weekend of errands and partying. My hunt for a key shop was much more successful than my computer charger quest and I explored a new suburb of the city with some great clothing stores and a movie theatre! Everyday I’m here I find another new gem! Or dusty sh*thole, depending on the day.

Oh, and Alison, I'm definitely coming to the wedding! I'm glad to hear that it won't be until after I get back. I'm missing Mark and Leslie's wedding next week and I'm pretty sad about that. BTW, congrats again Mark and Leslie! I'm sorry I can't be there!

Finally!

2009-06-07T12:16:00.000-05:00

So, great news! One of my dear fellow volunteers just returned from
North America and brought me a new charger for my computer! In case
you hadn’t heard, my last one was blown out in the Great Generator
Disaster of Nyakarambi, where the whole town was without electricity
for five days and when it came back on, half the light bulbs and one
computer charger had been destroyed. What followed was nearly a month
without access to my computer: no music, no movies, no writing blogs
from home. It sucked. I sort of feel like a whiner for complaining
so much, I mean, you can give me the whole “back in my day” speech and
it’s true, almost no one around here has a laptop, why should it be so
hard for me? Well, it was hard because I’m not from around here.
Everybody needs relaxation time, and for the first four months, mine
involved listening to my music. When that was taken away, all the
little things, the irritants, the annoyances, about living here began
to get to me and I could not just shrug them off like I used to. I
had no escape. Fortunately, it’s not a problem anymore! And just in
time too. With three more weeks until exams, I’ve got a lot of
grading and planning to do, and music makes it that much better.

I’d like to just comment on Rwandese radio for a moment. Not a big
fan. There’s BBC, which is great for world news, but not really for
music. Plus sometimes it’s in French, and it used to have a
Kinyarwanda hour as well (until it was ordered off the air by the
government for supposedly promoting genocide ideology (which in this
case meant a call in show where people questioned the cover up of
reprisal killings), Sketch!). There’s VOA, which can have really good
music, and pretty good world news, but again has other language hours,
plus can be a real tool of American propaganda. Plus, sometimes it’s
broadcast in ‘special English’
which------means------they-------talk----------really----------slowly---------.
I have found a few other good stations, but I can never count on one
actually playing music at any one time. There are a lot of call in
shows, a lot of talk shows, and most of it is in Kinyarwanda. When
they do play music, it tends to be the same 10 songs over and over, so
no matter how much you like them the first time, they cease to be
quite as enjoyable.

Lizard update 1: Sometimes lizards fight on my ceiling and them fall
to the floor, shake themselves off and run away.

Lizard update 2: Sometimes big lizards try to eat the tiny ones. The
sucker for the underdog that I am, I try to prevent this from
happening, usually just in the nick of time. Which means I have a
couple of tiny lizards running around minus their tails.

Lizard update 3: I saw an enormous lizard outside my house the other
day. It was about a foot long, plus the tail. So far I haven’t seen
it inside.

The rainy season has ended! Finally! I can dry clothes on the line
and walk to school without getting covered in mud. The dust is
starting to be a problem however…

So, I kind of blew up at a bus full of Rwandese a couple weeks ago
(notice I I said blew up AT a bus. Sort of a different meaning without
that preposition…) It had been a weekend full of being hassled for
being white, and I was having none of it. I got on a bus to head home
to the usual titters and “muzungu” comments and I started to simmer.
A woman sat down next to me and made even more comments. I laugh
right back in her face, but my tension was reaching it’s breaking
point (remember, no music=much more tense). I was sitting by the
window and had it partially open, with my arm hanging out since it was
a hot day and I decided to keep it open once we started driving. For
all you back home, you probably don’t realize that Rwandese generally
don’t like windows open on buses. So the man behind me tried to close
the window with my arm in it. He apologized but it was almost too
late. Seconds later the woman beside reached over to also try to shut
the window (not asking me to do it) and I lost it. I smacked her hand
away and started yelling in 3 different languages “My name is not
muzungu, that’s so rude, I hate it, I don’t go around calling you all
blacks!” The whole bus (probably even the driver) were staring at me
in disbelief. Finally, I ended my rant, yanked the window wide open
and sat there with my arms crossed, just daring someone to say
something. Nobody did. The next hour was actually quite
uncomfortable with the wind blowing right in my face but I didn’t
care. I felt so good!

Now, this probably wasn’t a good way to handle the situation, but with
the language barrier it was about all I could do, and I had to do
something. I have decided to take a stand against the term “muzungu”.
First of all, categorizing people based on race is not something
anybody should do. It’s not like they are calling us Europeans or
Americans, they are calling us whites (or whitey). Rwanda is
undergoing a massive drive for modernization and investment, and part
of this should be not using racial labels for guests, outsiders and
visitors! Second, Rwandese, of all people, should know better. This
is a country that witnessed the horrible consequences of racial
categorization and it’s forbidden to label people has Hutu or Tutsi.
Why is it ok to label people as whitey?

Of course, the term muzungu is used differently, and it doesn’t
always bother me. Very little kids use it only because they were
taught by their parents to say it when they see me, and they when they
say it you can tell they are just so excited! It can also be used as
a description, like “oh, he’s that muzungu over there.” This doesn’t
bother me. Rwandese will say similar things about other Rwandese,
like “oh, he’s the brown one” or “he’s the black one”, referring to
the different shades of skin colour that exist here. This is fine!
The problem comes when the term is tinged with something else, scorn
maybe, or sniggering. This is when the word becomes Whitey or Honky
instead of white person. I hear this constantly: “Hey Whitey! Where
are you going?”, “Whitey! Give me money!”, “Ha, look, there’s a
freakin’ Whitey on the bus! Isn’t that hilarious?” It becomes a
label, and not a friendly one and it creates division, not the unity
that is such as buzzword here. So, if any Rwandse are reading this
blog, please, don’t call us muzungus. You’re better than that.

Next week I promise I’ll stop talking about such heavy topics. I’ll
go back to silly anecdotes and lame jokes.

2009-05-25T09:06:00.000-05:00

Sorry, it's been a while since I've last posted, but i wasn't able to
get online last weekend. Also, there have been some troubles...

It started last week when it rained on Tuesday (audible gasp). I got
back from school late and found that the power was off. No big deal,
sometimes the power goes off when it rains (although i don't
understand why since it comes from a generator about 50 yards away
from the house). However, it didn't come back on the next day, or the
next. Finally, after 5 days it was back. Considering that when I left
for Rwanda, i didn't think I’d have any electricity, it really
shouldn't have been a big deal, but I've come to rely on it, and 5
nights without it was tough. Also, i was going through about a candle
a night, which gets expensive.

Anyway, that's not the worst of it! When the power came back on, my
laptop wouldn't charge. A couple of the lights were also acting
strange, so i assumed the power just wasn't strong enough. Nope.
Apparently when the generator went it had surged, destroying a whole
bunch of the town's lightbulbs and my charger. Not happy! I have now
gone 2 weeks without being able to use my laptop and I’m on the verge
of insanity. I can't listen to my music (which was one of the only
things that kept me sane during the first couple months), watch
movies, do my budgeting (which i had in a word file) or write my blogs
before i get online. Hassle!

I spent all of yesterday wandering around Kigali, going in and out of
computer stores (and getting lost several times), and no one sells mac
stuff. No one. A lot of times when i asked people would just laugh
and tell me "good luck!" I do have a lead on a supplier now, and I’ve
sent a couple emails, so who knows. If all else fails, someone can
send one from home, but that'll mean about 2 months without using my
laptop and i'd rather not go through that.

In other news, two weekends ago i visited Akagera National Park with
some friends. I saw giraffes, zebras, antelopes, water buffalos,
hippos, warthogs, baboons and monkeys! We spent the whole day there
and despite getting covered in mud while trying to get the car unstuck
in close proximity to a herd of buffalo, it was great fun.

Last weekend Rusumo High School was visited by our sister school in
Tanzania, an all-girls school. The visit was an attempt to resurrect a
partnership between the two schools and was quite successful. Before
commencing the festivities, we all visited a model primary school and
the genocide memorial at Nyarabuye, a church in the district where
over 27,000 people were buried in mass graves. It holds rows and rows
of bones and some of the weapons that were used in the killings.

After lunch we competed in football and debate (although both were cut
short and volleyball was cancelled due to "lack of time". We had
plenty of time for numerous self-important speeches by pompous
officials of course.) The English department was in charge of
organizing the debate. This was a lot of fun! We worked with mainly
Senior 2s and 3s who had pretty good English and had expressed
interest in Debate. The motion, which we were supporting, was "mixed
sex schools are better than single sex schools." When it came down to
it, i would say that the Tanzanians' English was slightly better but
that our arguments were slightly better. Overall I’d give the win to
our school, but the judges gave it to our opponents. Our kids were
actually quite upset; there's definitely an attitude of "winning is
everything" encouraged here, and a couple of them are extremely
competitive, but they enjoyed themselves in the end. They say they
plan on starting a debate club and hopefully we'll be able to debate
other schools in the province before too long.

Depressing thought of the week: It's depressing how many of my
students spelled "English" wrong on their last tests. It makes me
wonder how good of a teacher i am.

Finally, a new installment of "What does the rainy season mean to you?"
- night after night with no power
- mud everywhere, EVERYWHERE (on my shoes, in my shoes, on my pants,
in my pants, in my nose (it only happened once...)
- cancelling class because it's raining in the classroom
- wet towels
- clothes taking the entire week to dry

Mélange

2009-05-13T11:35:00.001-05:00

Let me start out by saying it’s astounding how many of my students still spell English “inglish”. It kind of makes me feel like I’m a terrible teacher.

In other news, I’ve been trying to prepare my students for an upcoming debate with a school from Tanzania. It’s an all girls’ school that is coming for a Saturday and we are going to have sports competitions and a debate over whether mixed sex schools are better than single sex ones. We only really have a week left to get them ready, but they seem to be enjoying it! Of course, these are Anglophone students, not the ones who are misspelling English. A couple of our other teachers taught them all about debate theory and how to actually hold a debate, and now we need to help polish their arguments and get them ready for rebuttals. Step one: never say that teen pregnancy is a good reason to have mixed schools.

Lizard update! It seems I have learned the lifecycle of my household lizards. If you remember, when I first arrived I just had one or two tiny ones. Throughout the last couple of months I watched them grow up (and produce larger and larger amounts of lizard crap) and just the other day I spotted a new baby! It is less than 2 inches long and ridiculously cute! I was even able to catch it a one point and let it run around on the back of my hand.

I bought some Akabanga the other day (brand name pili-pili (super hot spicy flavouring)). Best purchase ever! It really makes gives mashed bananas a bit more of a flavour.

Last weekend we had a Cinco de Mayo party, which was a huge success! Not only did we do a book/movie/TV show exchange, but we had quesadillas, guacamole, margaritas and limes and salt with our beers. We’ve decided that we need more themed parties on the weekends, as it gives you something to look forward to if you’re having a rough week.

Finally, let me finish with a haiku entitled Full Moon:

Moon, you have saved me
From countless holes and puddles
When coming home, drunk

Back to the Grind Or, Mum should be proud!

2009-05-08T08:36:00.001-05:00

“C’mon Andy, it’s just a little dirt. It’ll be fine!” Things I
probably wouldn’t have said to myself before coming to Rwanda.

Well, classes are up and running again, and most of the students are
back (by the end of the second week of class). We’ve started up the
English Clubs again and most importantly, the Library is open! We
haven’t had any official opening yet, but the school hired a full-time
librarian and students are now coming in and reading! It’s so
exciting; I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something here! I’ve
noticed that the majority of students are pursuing the French language
math and science books, but there’s also been interest in the English
language math and science, the newspapers and the magazines. Again,
if anyone wants to put together a package for me, magazines are great,
both for me and for my students. I really want to take some pictures
of the students sitting in the reading room, paging through textbooks
and newspapers, but oh yea, no camera. Grr. The only problem so far
is that the librarian has virtually no English, so communicating to
her that she should put books back onto certain shelves, such as
putting the math books in the math section, is a challenge. But I’ve
been making labels for the bookshelves out of construction paper
(thanks Mum and Dad!) and I think that’s starting to help.

Oh and BTW, I’m totally sporting the pant legs rolled up halfway to my
knees for the rest of the rainy seasons. That or the pants tucked
into my socks look. It depends on my mood.

Mum should be proud of me. I recently fixed a pair of pants using
sewing skills that must have lain dormant for years! A hem started
falling apart right in the ass of one of my pairs of pants (the Tilley
pants, at that, which I believe are “insured for life”, and must last
me at least for the rest of the year) so I decided to fix them! I
found a needle and thread, and sewed them right up! The only way Mum
would be prouder is if I knitted myself a new pair of pants. (Is that
the correct past tense of knit? Or would it be “I knat myself a new
pair of pants”?) N.B. I actually wrote this piece before I fixed the
pants. I did actually sew it up though, and I think it will hold, but
I probably would have just found someone else to do it if I hadn’t
found the idea of having knat pants so freaking hilarious. Sigh, I’ve
become a slave to my art.

Have you ever been boiling water and have the kerosene stove run dry,
only to realize that you have neither kerosene or clean drinking water
and that it’s too late to go buy some? Yea, I didn’t think so.

Finally, Happy Graduation to Alisha and everyone else who is
graduating from SDSU! And I suppose to anyone else who’s
graduating from other institutions, I just don’t know who you are

Post-Uganda happenings

2009-04-26T20:50:00.001-05:00

I actually wrote this blog at the same time as the previous one, but I
didn’t want to bore you guys with such a long post, so I broke it up a
little.

After returning to Rwanda, I stayed in Kigali for a night then headed
up to Kibuye for our program’s Mid-Service. Kibuye is a town in the
West, on the shores of Lake Kivu. We stayed at a guest house called
Home St. Jean, which was built on a hilltop peninsula surrounded on
three sides by the lake. Beautiful, to say the least. Mid-service
itself was mediocre, though I got some great ideas from other
volunteers. The best part of the weekend was a boat trip to a place
called Bat Island (exactly what it sounds like). The island itself
was pretty cool; the guide took us on a little walk, then started
clapping. This caused hundreds of bats that had been nesting in the
trees to take flight and fly around us. It was pretty cool, but a
couple of us got guanoed (I won’t name names…) Better than the island
though, was that we stopped the boat halfway there and a bunch of us
jumped in for a swim. It felt so good! I hadn’t gone swimming in a
while, and the water felt amazing! We were far enough from shore that
we didn’t have to worry about bilharzias or other parasites and the
lake had been calling out to us since we’d arrived. The only problem
was getting back into the boat. None of us looked graceful doing
that, let me tell you!

I’m now back in Nyakarambi, trying to get back into a routine. School
has started up again, technically on Monday, but I taught my first
class on Thursday. So it goes.

Also, President Paul Kagame was in town today! (Today being the day
of writing – Friday the 24th. Who knows when I’ll post this!) The
VSOs and I went over to the District office where he was supposed to
speak. The place was packed! It looked like the whole province
showed up. We managed to finagle our way under one of the tents to
get out of the sun, and we waited for about 4 hours until he came. In
the meantime we were entertained by singers, dancers and drummers.
The drummers were amazing, the dancers, pretty good, and I could have
done without the “singing”. Eventually, his Excellency showed up, the
crowd went wild, and he gave a speech. Entirely in Kinyarwanda of
course, so I didn’t understand a thing. But now I can say I’ve seen
him!

Hmm, this post isn’t nearly as interesting as the last one…

Pictures

2009-04-26T20:40:00.005-05:00

Leaping photo! Thanks Dallas!

Dan and I on a boat on the Ssese Islands, Uganda. Thanks
Tina for letting us use your camera!

More Pictures

2009-04-26T20:39:00.011-05:00

welcome to my banda...

Puppy!

Dan, me and Kurt Vonnegut

On the Beach

flower pic Uganda!

Uganda: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…

2009-04-26T20:36:00.003-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted and a lot has happened.
went Uganda for a week and a half, I spent a weekend in Kibuye, school
has started up again and I saw Paul Kagame speak. Where to start…

As you may have heard, we didn’t have the best first day in Uganda.
We took a coach bus North from Nyagatare, crossed the border and
started off on the dirt road on the Ugandan side. It had been raining
all morning and the road had turned to mud. About 45 minutes over the
border the bus started fishtailing and we slid into the ditch. After
an hour of us standing around in the mud and the rain, they managed to
push the bus back onto the road. As we were filing back on, I made an
innocuous little joke about how long it would take us to go off the
road again. Turned out the answer was about 30 minutes.

Once again, we fishtailed and went into the ditch. This time,
however, the ditch was quite a bit deeper, and the bus tipped over,
the left side slamming into the embankment, leaving us slanted at
about a 45-degree angle. Oh, I forgot to mention that the woman next
to me had been vomiting into a plastic bag earlier, and now, as I
wedged myself against the seat in front of me, holding up both of the
women next to me, that bag of vomit was smacking my arm again and
again. Of course, the main door to the bus was stuck in the mud, so
we had to swing/crawl/climb our way up to the very front and out the
driver’s door, then leap into the mud/road below.

For some reason, until I exited the bus, I held onto some hope that we
could somehow right it and keep going, but I immediately saw that this
was not likely. That bus was not going anywhere. (I actually
wouldn’t be surprised if it is still stuck there.) This left us with
the wonderful option of finding our own way to Kampala, so myself and
a couple of others hopped back onto the bus to retrieve our bags. It
was at this point, when I was standing on the off kilter doorway that
I noticed the truck barreling down the road at us. As it tried to
swerve around the bus, it too lost control and from my vantage point I
couldn’t tell if it would hit the bus (i.e. right where I was
standing) or if it would hit the opposite side of the road (i.e. right
where about 30 people were standing). I fell backwards into the bus
with the door slamming shut on me, and the truck proceed to plow into
the opposite side of the road. Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt!
Everyone managed to leap back into the field behind them, and the 10
or so people that had been riding on top of the truck jumped off
before it head the ditch.

Anyway, with the news of the bus crash, the scene was soon mobbed by
alternate forms of transportation, and we were able to find a matatu
heading all the way to Kampala. It seemed like a good idea at the
time. It turned out to be 8 of the most miserable hours of my life,
as well as the worst bus ride I’ve ever taken, including the one that
had just ended by crashing into a ditch. The dirt parts of the road
were still a sea of mud, the paved sections could only loosely be
described as such, the driver was ridiculously erratic, and I was
sitting in a folding seat with no back support or legroom. There was
one rest stop (where I first tried a Mirinda Fruity (like a Fanta
Grape) which they don’t have here in Rwanda, much to my dismay) and we
finally pulled into the Kampala New Taxi Park after dark. We quickly
found a motel (the Taj Motel) that had been recommended by a VSO, got
a room and collapsed onto the bed. At least the excitement was over
for the night, right? Right? Wrong!

When our hunger finally got the better of our exhaustion (we hadn’t
eaten anything yet that day), we ventured downstairs to the motel
restaurant. Let me emphasize that – we went to the restaurant IN our
motel. We had a great meal of fried chicken and chips, and tried our
first Uganda beers (which are quite delicious, especially the Nile
Special) and decided we quite liked Kampala. Once our hunger and our
thirst were slated, we headed back up to the room, unlocked the door
(yes, the door was still locked!) and walked in. It took a second for
it to dawn on us that the room was not how we left it. The contents
of our bags were strewn all over the floor, obviously rifled through.
We had been robbed! All three of us had our cameras and iPods stolen,
and the other two lost a good chunk of money. My money, which I had
stupidly left on the bed, was untouched. I had thrown a brightly
coloured plaid shirt (my new fav!) over it, and in their haste, the
thieves hadn’t looked under it! I complained to the front desk, but
seeing as the door was locked when we returned, and the windows were
barred, it had to have been either the staff or that the staff had
been bribed for a key. Needless to say, they were a big help.
(Sarcasm! Yeah!) Being too late to find a new place to stay, we
barricaded the door and went to sleep, leaving early the next morning
for a backpackers’ hostel.

First impressions: Uganda = the suck! No camera, which sucked for the
rest of the trip not being able to document any of the cool things we
saw, plus I had some really good pictures on it already! Fortunately,
we ran into some VSOs who let us use theirs for a day, so there might
eventually be some photos of the trip popping up on here. The iPod
wasn’t as bad as a loss, but still not cool. It was extremely nice
for long bus rides and for working out, plus I really don’t look
forward to the 20 hour flight home without one! I had also been
planning on using it in class to play my students music and podcasts.
Alisha had just sent me some mini speakers to use with it and I was
going to start using it this term. So, small request…if any of you
have an iPod that you really don’t need anymore, consider sending it
my way! (Earbuds too?) But let me know first, incase someone beat
you too it. (Oh, and I’m getting a camera sent to me already, so
don’t worry about that!)

The rest of the trip went swimmingly, so I’ll skim through it. We cut
out a couple items due to cost, like white water rafting on the Nile,
and chimp tracking. We spent an amazing couple of days on the Ssese
Islands on Lake Victoria. Our camp (Hornbill) had monkeys, a pool
table, an amazing beach (that I didn’t swim in due to various
parasites that I can’t spell and don’t want) and plenty of beer. We
also checked out the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe, a holdover from the
colonial period. (It was actually very similar to the one I visited
in Ghana, both being created by the British to house plants from all
over the Empire.) It also had monkeys. In Jinja we saw the source of
the Nile and stuck our hands in it. By “source” I mean it is where
the Nile exits Lake Victoria and first takes on it’s name. I’ll say
this, I thought that since it is where the Nile starts, it wouldn’t be
all the big, but I was wrong. It’s freakin’ huge right from the
get-go! We ended the trip in Kabale, just North of the Rwandese
border, which is known (by the locals at least) as the Switzerland of
East Africa. Lots of mountains and lakes, quite pretty!

I’d have to say that one of the best parts of the trip was the food.
Uganda is a lot cheaper than Rwanda, and we ended up eating pretty
well. The fish (carnivorous Nile Perch, mostly) from Lake Victoria
and the Nile were amazing, and in Kampala and Jinja we gorged
ourselves on food we can’t get/can’t afford here in Rwanda: Chinese,
Indian, Thai, Mexican, American, Italian.

Overall, despite the bus crashes and the robbery, the trip was a lot
of fun, and was totally worth it. It did make me appreciate certain
things about Rwanda a lot more as well (not the food though). Kigali
is not a normal Africa city. It is safe, clean and not too crowded.
Kampala is exactly the opposite. It’s considered safe compared to
Nairobi, but it’s extremely dirty, and packed to the brim with people.
The roads are way worse than Rwanda and the motos (boda-bodas as they
are called there) are not regulated – no helmets and the drivers
usually try to cram two passengers on the back to make more money.
(This actually feels quite secure in practice, as you are wedged in
there so tight it’s much easier to keep your balance!).

To sum up: I recommend Uganda as a tourist destination. Just don’t
stay at the Taj Motel!

2009-04-04T23:25:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick note. I'll be in
Uganda for the next 10 days or so, visiting Kampala, game parks, the
Nile, Lake Victoria and who knows what else. Afterwards I'll be in
Kigali and Kibuye (on lake Kivu) for the rest of the holiday, then
back to work for term two. I'm pretty sure I'll have tons of stories
and hopefully pictures when i return.

Oh, and it's hard to believe, but I just passed the 3 month mark! Eep!

Miss you all!

Pictures

2009-03-29T22:36:00.005-05:00

Science training: In Kigali at the start of the year, being trained to
teach biology and chemistry. It was quite useful! And yes, I know I have a flower in my hair. Isn’t it pretty?

SCIENCE!!!

Close up!

Exam week

2009-03-28T11:32:00.000-05:00

Exam week is finally over. Who knew how exhausting it would be?
(Teachers, probably.) I supervised 8 different examination periods
and as of this writing, I’ve marked almost 200 exams. I’ve got about
another 130 to go. (When I said last week I had 140 exams to mark, I
was confused. That was just one class’ worth.) Whereas everything I
own is usually covered in chalk, now everything is getting ruined by
red ink. I’m also veering closer and closer to insanity. It probably
shouldn’t bother me so much that more than half of my students can’t
spell the words ‘holiday’ or ‘exam’ (or that I didn’t realize that
most of them didn’t know what ‘spell’ meant until the week before the
exams), but it does. There has also been some new information just
given to me by the head teacher about how I was supposed to structure the
exams and how many points I should have collected from the students
during the first term. Damn lot of good it does me when I find out on
the last day of exams. Oh well, I guess I know for next term.

On a brighter note, I got limes at the market! (Or Consol got them
for me.) I actually asked for two or three, but I ended up with about
10. Any ideas about what I can do with them? I’ve been squeezing
them into my water, but I still have more than I need.

Interesting fact for the week: When talking about music, some genres
are easy to explain. Others, such as Folk, Indie and Country and
Western, are a little harder.

One week until I go to Kampala! Getting very excited! The trip might
also interfere with blogging so don’t worry if I don’t post for the
next 2 or three weeks.

Thanks!

Oh, and Steve, I’m pointedly ignoring your inane comments.

Why are there always bug stories?

2009-03-21T21:46:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Rwanda for almost three months. I
still have no idea what is going on (about school, and most things in
general) and I feel like an outsider. At the same time though, I’m
getting into a routine and things have been going pretty smoothly for
me lately. Classes have been good, the library is coming along quite
well, and I’ve been getting by pretty well in Nyakarambi. With exams
this coming week, and then a two-week holiday, that routine is going
to be pretty well messed up, but it’ll be a nice change as well,
especially if the Uganda trip happens.

I had a good St. Patrick’s Day, hanging out with the Irish VSO.
Funnily enough, when I talked to them, neither one remembered that it
even was St. Paddy’s Day. Of course, I had to “take the piss out of
them” to use the Irish slang. (It means I made fun of them.) We ended
up at the Ikarezi, a hotel/bar where we enjoyed some Primus/Mutzig
(neither were green, unfortunately) and a nice dinner of brochettes
and chips.

I’m back in Kigali for the second weekend in a row. I wouldn’t have
needed to, except when I went to the post office to pick up my
packages last Saturday (and apparently I have two waiting for me!), I
found out that it is only open during the week. I guess you can send
mail, but you can’t pick it up. Needless to say, I was extremely
disappointed, as the packages reportedly contain some books, DVDs
(including the first episode of this season of Lost!!!) and most
importantly: candy.

Another couple bug updates: My home has been invaded by June bug like
bugs the last couple of nights. Now, I don’t like June bugs back home
(as I’m quite certain one will fly into my ear eventually), but these
are quite a bit worse. They still aim for my head quite consistently,
but when they get into my house, they fly around the room flying into
everything. Being very loud, my evenings are often interrupted by a
“BBBZZZZZZZ THUD. BBBZZZZZZ THUD. BBBBBZZZZZZ THUD,” until I get up
and swat it out of the air with an English textbook.

The other bug incident was quite strange. Last Sunday, I woke up with
the crows as usual and I decided to stay in bed and read for a while.
So I untucked my mosquito netting, reached for my book and got a
handful of slug. Remember, this is Africa, so these aren’t your
everyday, garden-variety slugs; these things are several inches long.
The real question is how (and why) it got through my door, across the
room, up the table and onto the book. Also, it was gross.

Let’s hope I am able to post again, and that I haven’t been driven
insane by the 140-odd exams I have to grade next week…

Happy Birthday!

2009-03-13T10:53:00.001-05:00

Post Haircut

I’d like to start off by saying Happy birthday Grandma! Hope you have
a great day, and that things are going well in St Thomas! Oh, and i
just saw two palm trees, so I suppose there are at least a couple here
in Rwanda.

Things are going well here in Nyakarambi. The first term is almost over;
in fact, I finished my classes this week. Next week is all review,
the week after is exams and the next one is for marking. After that,
I get two weeks holiday! I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for that,
but most likely traveling, possibly to Uganda.

During last couple days, we’ve been painting the library at my school.
I don’t mean just painting the walls white, or what have you, but
actually painting art/pictures onto the walls. It’s great! We got a
couple of VSO artists to come down, as well as a Rwandese artist from
Kigali. We also got the kids involved. We had about 10 students
working there yesterday, painting pictures of everything from cows and
pigs to microscopes and cells. It is going to look amazing when it’s
finished, and I’ll try to post some photos (if the internet lets me).

Last weekend I finally got to go see more of the countryside. We had
a muzungu party in Kibungo with Worldteachers, VSOs and a guy from
some health organization. After that I headed up to Nygatare to visit
some other people in my program. Nygatare is in the north-east part
of the country, pretty much my counterpart in the north: the
volunteers there can see Uganda from their house. It’s a nice town,
larger than here, and much flatter. It looks like it’s trying to be
what you would think of as stereotypical Africa savannah. Apparently
they also have monkeys. As you can imagine, I was quite disappointed
that I didn’t see any.

I guess that’s about it for this week. I’m heading into Kigali for
the weekend (in desperate need of hitting the bank and buying some
anti-malarials), so hopefully everything is open when I need it!

So I got in a motorcycle accident…

2009-03-08T13:44:00.002-05:00

The view from the library windows

Ok, so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. My usual moto driver couldn’t make it to pick me up on Wednesday, so he sent another driver. Only problem was, I don’t think this guy had his license. As we rounded a bend in the road, he saw the police up ahead, stopping cars and checking licenses, so he pulled a u-turn, and we headed back to Nykarambi. At this point I was wondering if he was just going to hand me off to another driver, but instead he decided to take a different route that would allow us to bypass the cops. He pulls off the road onto a dirt path, and from here on out we are practically off-roading it. Eventually we are driving down a hill on what can only really be described as a goat path when the driver loses control and we go down. I mean that literally. He swerved a couple times then the motorcycle just fell over on top of us. Of course, I landed in the mud, so I was quite muddy for class. I also landed on my shoulder kind of hard. It’s a little sore, but it could have been worse! Anyway, it makes for a good story at least…
Other than that, things are going pretty well. Classes are doing fine, only one week left, plus a week of review, before exams. With a couple of my classes it seems like I really haven’t taught them enough to give them an exam, but I suppose I’ll come up with something. The library is also coming along. A whole bunch of books showed up this week (from where? I have no idea!) and it’s a bit crazy in there now. I’ve spent the last couple days moving cupboards around and trying to figure out where to put the books. We still have virtually no literature, but at least we now have some textbooks!
Lizard update: I had my first confirmed sighting of two little lizards on my ceiling at the same time. Now I have to come up with another name…
I had a request that I talk a little about the food I’ve been eating. I suppose it can be mostly summed up by saying: bananas. Also plantains. I am getting so sick of bananas and plantains. The food is great, don’t get me wrong, but when practically every meal includes either bananas or plantains, it gets a little tiresome.
Breakfast: usually bread with peanut butter. I finally bought some Tupperware in Kigali, so I’m no longer fighting with the ants over my bread. I also sometimes have a couple passion-fruit, or an omelet cooked onto a piece of very flat dough or a banana.
Lunch: the school provides lunch for the teachers. Until this week it was free, but the teachers were complaining about the quality/quantity of the food so now we are paying an extra 1500 RFW a month to improve it. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the food, until I realized that for many of the teachers, lunch is the only meal they eat. Usually lunch consists of rice, beans (sometimes with cabbage mixed in) and ugali (which I believe to be pounded cassava). Lately they’ve also begun serving – banana mash.
Supper: most of the time, Consol, my house-girl (the easiest way to describe her, but not really accurate) cooks supper. She is an amazing cook, and there can be quite a bit of variety. Often there is rice or chips (French fries for you North Americans), and some sort of ....casserole? stew? I’m not really sure what to call it. It’s often made of some combination of beans, cabbage, plantains, bananas, potatoes, peanuts, a spinach-like vegetable and tomatoes (usually just two or three of these per pot). A couple times a week we also have a sauce with a couple chunks of meat to get our protein. For dessert there is pineapple, passion-fruit or, you guessed it, bananas! (Also, some assorted candy that I got in a package from home.)
Going out to eat here in Nyakarambi doesn’t provide a lot of options. There are two places that have good food, and they really only have one thing on the menu: goat brochette (meat on a stick) with a plate of chips and sometimes a small salad (made of cabbage) with mayonnaise dressing. It’s pretty good, but last time I ordered it, they were out of chips, so they gave me…fried bananas.
In my free time I’ve been on a bit of a Canadian Indie music kick. I’ve been listening to old CBC Radio 3 podcasts (available on iTunes if you have Internet) as well as listening to all the Canadian music on my computer. The Arcade Fire, Immaculate Machine and Broken Social Scene help me get through the night.
Side note: while I was writing this blog, two swallows flew into my room and circled it, squawking, for about three minutes.

When it rains…

2009-02-28T15:16:00.000-06:00

Ok, this has to be the quickest post I’ve put up yet! Using the
Internet two days in a row, wow! How decadent of me! Actually,
yesterday I used the free Internet at the District Office, and today I
came to Kibungo because I had some errands to run in town anyway.

It’s been an extremely busy weekend so far. I’ve been slammed with
grading, and with exams coming up in a couple weeks, lesson planning
is becoming difficult once more. I spent several hours yesterday
afternoon grading and correcting letters that I had my S5s write. By
the end I hated the English language and everything to do with it!
Pretty soon I’ll also have to start writing the exams themselves…

Also yesterday, I got a haircut! Fortunately, unlike what many people
thought, they didn’t completely shave my head. It’s pretty short, but
not too bad of a haircut. The barber did try to charge me 1000 RWF,
which was totally a muzungo price, so I asked why he was charging me
more because I was white (in broken French). The massive crowd that
had gathered to watch my haircut laughed, and I only paid 500 RWF
(still probably too much).

The title of this post refers to the fact that since February is
ending, we are entering the rainy season. I’ve started to see some
evidence of this, but I’m told it will get worse. That would be bad,
for several reasons which I will illustrate using two anecdotes.

So, early Thursday morning, I was awoken by an extremely heavy
rainfall slamming onto my iron-sheet roof. I was able to fall back
asleep until my alarm went off, but it was still raining. It was also
still raining as I waited for my moto (motorcycle taxi) to show up to
take me to school and it was still raining as I walked to the bus stop
when I realized my moto wasn’t showing up or answering my phone calls.
It was also still raining when I caught a new moto after being
dropped off by the bus and it was still raining when I got to class 15
minutes late, muddy and soaking wet. Actually, it’s quite surprising
that I was only 15 minutes late. I would have been about 45 min late
if I had walked up the river of mud/road from the bus stop in Rwanteru
to the school instead of taking the moto.

On that note, I feel I must question the judgment of whoever decided
that the start of the rainy season was a good time to “work on” the
road to the school. By work on, I mean they are using hoes and
shovels to loosen the packed dirt of the road, dig up stones, etc.
This is all well and good, but when it rains, the newly loosened dirt
becomes mud. Very thick and messy mud. I saw a moto get stuck in it
one day, and mine barely made it.

Another reason to be worried about the rainy season is that the rain
makes it hard to teach. I know to all of you back home it might seem
strange, but we have to stop teaching when it storms, or even when
there is a heavy rain. Remember, all the buildings here have
iron-sheet roofs, and when the rain comes down hard, the students from
about the 3rd row on can’t hear a thing I’m saying. It’s even worse
when it’s windy, as it was on Wednesday. My S1s had just finished
taking a test and I was trying to explain a writing assignment, which
was already next to impossible due to the sound of the rain. However,
the wind began to blow quite hard, and the rain began to come in
through the broken windows on one side of the class. It just kept
getting worse, until the rain was getting about halfway across the
room and the students and I were huddled up against the opposite wall
trying to stay warm and dry. (Did I mention it was also extremely
cold and about half of the students - and myself - didn’t have coats
or sweaters?) So yes, the rainy season could spell delays in getting
through the course material…

Libraries, birds and bugs

2009-02-27T17:29:00.000-06:00

This is actually a blog that I wrote a week ago, but I haven't had
time to post it, despite having Internet nearby...

Sorry I haven’t written much lately, but I’ve been quite busy. So,
here are the updates! I’m no longer teaching biology, only English to
Form 1s and 4s. However, I have also become the Head Librarian. This
actually presents quite the challenge, as we really don’t have a
library. Ok, so we do have a building that is technically called the
library, but most of the books are stored elsewhere. It is my job to
make that building ready to actually live up to its name, and to
catalog the books that we do have (there are very few) and devise a
system of running the library itself. I’m also attempting to get more
books for the school. I’m hoping that the District will pay for some,
especially the much needed English language science textbooks, but I
plan on also contacting various charities and NGOs to see if anyone is
willing to donate loads of books. On top of teaching and
building/running a library, I am also the Assistant Head of the
Language Department (or Assistant to the Head, I’m not sure which
yet), I’m running two English Clubs a week, helping out at a third and
I’m supposed to be starting up at least one more. So, if anyone has
any advice on any of these things, please, let me know!

I found an ant with a death grip on my shoe. Really. I was cleaning
the other day and when I picked up my shoe I found a large ant with
its pincer’s embedded deep into my shoe. I tried to flick it off, but
it wouldn’t come lose. I actually had to grip it firmly by the head
and twist a little. It made me thankful that I was wearing shoes when
I had to walk through that swarm of ants on the way home from school a
couple days before.

Random thought: I dread the day the crows lose their fear. The noise
they make on my tin roof is incredible. The first time I heard it, I
thought someone was breaking down my door, so I try to scare them away
whenever they land. Unfortunately, they are quite bold, and they
stare at me for a second, thinking “Is he really a threat?” I don’t
want to think about what will happen when they realize that, no; I’m
really quite harmless.

Also, I may have mentioned this in an earlier post, but something
keeps laying eggs on my walls. My map has been a victim several
times, but lately I’ve found them on my calendar and less than an inch
away from Dallas’ face (on a photo I put on the wall). I’m not sure I
want to know what is doing it, but with the moths, wasps, bees, flies,
ants and spiders, there are many candidates.

One piece of good news: I’ve found Internet nearby! The District
office on the other side of town (about a ten minute walk) has a
connection, and I will be able to use it on occasion. This is great,
as I won’t be restricted to going to Kibungo every weekend (and
spending 1200 RWF just to get there!).

I had a night without electricity the other, well, night. I couldn’t
charge my phone or computer, which was frustrating, but there was
something kind of cool about reading and writing letters by
candlelight and listening to the BBC World Service on a wind-up radio.

Camber, if you are interested in sending me books, I'd love it! Check
the price of sending them though, I believe it's expensive. My
address is on the blog somewhere, I think.

That's all for now, I'll try to get another out soon. I have more stories.

2009-02-17T14:47:00.001-06:00

Hey everyone! It has been an extremely busy week, so I had no time for an actual entry. I just wanted to post a couple quick details...I dropped biology and am the new Librarian at Rusumo High School! Only problem, the school doesn't have a library. Well, we have a room that will be used as a library, but it doesn't have any books in it. So I've got a big job ahead of me. I'm also still teaching 18 hours of English, and am working on organizing a couple different English clubs. So, pretty busy, but hopefully I'll get a new post up for next weekend! Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Why does it always rain when I do my laundry?

2009-02-09T10:50:00.001-06:00

I spent last weekend in Kigali, which was great! I met up with a lot of the other volunteers, got my mail (well, one letter - my first) and ran some errands. However, it's expensive going to Kigali, so in order to decide how often to head up there, I've complied a list of Pros and Cons about making the trip.

Cons
The wasps moved back in
A large spider found its way into my mosquito net and made a web in one of the corners
Something laid eggs on my wall map

Pros
Checked Internet
Got mail
Bought peanut butter
Spent time with people, thus held off insanity for another week

Hmm, it's a tough call…

In other news, it appears that there will be two volunteers from VSO living here in Nyakarambi! Both of them have been living here for some time working with primary schools in the district but have been gone the last three weeks. I've met one so far, and she has been incredibly helpful, pointing out which restaurants are good, which are bad, how much various things should cost, and she introduced me to a lot of the district staff and officials. They will be very appreciated!

I've been a teacher for three weeks now! Scary, isn't it? That I am trusted with shaping the lives and futures of so many youths? When I put it that way, it is quite frightening! The kids are great though. I'm met with all but two of my classes (two classes of biology that are still waiting for the kids to show up). They seem extremely eager to learn, and I've been enjoying teaching them, but their levels of English are never what I expect them to be, which makes lesson planning that much more difficult. And of course, I really need to stop calling them "kids" as a couple of them (in my Senior 6 English) are older than I am. That's more than a little intimidating – let me tell you.

Two random thoughts:
Have you ever been afraid of being crushed to death by about 75 6-12 year olds? I have.
Do you know the shelf life of a hard-boiled egg sans refrigeration? I do. It's not very long.

I spend a little time each week walking around the market (which is now every Tuesday and Friday), checking out what's available and occasionally buying stuff. For those of you that enjoy thrift shopping, the market has a huge used-clothing section. I've been tempted by a couple items, especially by their selection of hats – everything from bowlers to fedoras. They also do haircuts, which I will need eventually, but I'm putting it off as long as possible. The market also has a food section, a section with pots, pans, knives, tubs, etc and a section full of beautiful fabrics and people with sewing machines to make you an outfit on the spot.
Well, that's it; I guess it's been a relatively uneventful week. The rain looks like it might be easing off, so I need to go by some coffee. I ran out of it this morning and was quite sad

Of Ants and Men…

2009-01-30T16:29:00.001-06:00

Ok, time for my weekly update. Though calling it a weekly update might be a little misleading. Once I get into my routine, I have a feeling that I won't be able to stay interesting if I post every week. Whatever happens, I'll try to find the right balance between being an interesting, good read and just letting everyone know that I'm still here and the ants haven't carried me away yet.

That seems like a good enough segue into one of the latest happenings…

So the other morning, on the way out to take a bucket shower, I noticed a thick trail of ants leading into my house. "Strange," I thought, and since it was early in the morning, I ignored them. When I returned and tried to have breakfast, however, I was sorely disappointed. The ants had found there way into my cupboard and were in the process of devouring my bread. Others had attacked my pineapple (uncut fortunately, thus still salvageable) and a few had even got into the sugar, despite the fact that it had a lid and was quite well sealed. Breakfast was not entirely ruined, you'll be glad to hear, as the ants had left the bananas and passion fruit unmolested. I think I need to invest in some sealable containers. I can't afford to lose a half a loaf of bread every other day. It's too bad they don't believe in refrigeration here either, eh Europe Nerds?

It's too bad my resident gecko (whom I've named Chas) doesn't eat all the bugs. I'm not really sure what it is he does around here, besides hiding behind my calendar. He really needs to start pulling his own weight…

As for teaching, I've now received my new and possibly final schedule for the year. I'll be teaching 24 hours as week, with classes being either one or two hours at a time. I'm teaching English to S1s, S5s, and S6s (equivalents of grades 7, 11, and 12) and biology to S1s. Unfortunately, I've lost the class of S2s that I had been teaching for the last two weeks, which is very disappointing. I'd already become invested in it and was just starting to get to know the students and what level their English is at. Now I have to start all over again with several new groups.

In regards to language and communication, I've begun speaking a bastard-language that I've dubbed Franyarwanglish. As you might guess, it's a rough mixture of French, Kinyarwanda and English. A typical conversation with someone on the street (when they don't just start laughing) goes something like this:

Rwandese: Hello! Good morning.
Me: Mwiriwe. Amakuru?
Rwandese: Ni meza. Ca va?
Me: Oui, ca va. I'm good. Thanks.
Rwandese: Something in Kinyarwanda that I don't understand.
Me: What? Pardon?
Rwandese: Repeats Kinyarwanda.
Me: Desole. Laughs nervously. My Kinyarwanda very bad. Tres mauvais.
Rwandese: Something with the word Kinyarwanda.
Me: Yego. I try. J'essaie.
Rwandese: Peace.
Me: Peace. Umunsi mwiza!

I'm hoping that as time goes on, there will be less English (and less me not understanding them) and that I'll be able to switch to plain old Franyarwanda.

This weekend I've left Rusumo and headed off to Kigali, where I'm using the Internet as much as possible, and visiting some of the other volunteers. It's not too long of a bus ride, and it’s nice to get back to the city and see friends. I won't be able to do this all that often, but it's good to get out of the quiet, rural setting and back to an urban environment.

Well, that's all for now, thanks for reading!

Andy finally, a couple pictures...or not

2009-01-24T03:34:00.006-06:00

My Gecko friend at the mission in Kigali.

Ok, so I was only able to get this one picture to load. It just so happens it is the lamest picture I was going to post. Great. I guess I'll try again later.

My humble abode in Nyakarambi

Obama Watch Party – Still early in the night. By the end, we'd more than tripled the number of people in the room. It's definitely a moment I'll never forget – watching a candidate I'd worked for getting inaugurated President from halfway around the world. Rwandese see in Obama the same sense of hope and intelligent leadership that so many others see from across the globe, and the possibility of the US taking a positive lead in improving the lives of those in the developing world seems real once more.

Rusumo, or "I can see Tanzania from my house!"

2009-01-24T03:31:00.000-06:00

Many things have happened since my last blog post, so I’ll do my best to update it thoroughly. I’ve left the capital, and am now residing in a small village, which is called Rusumo by those in Kigali (referring to all the villages on the road from Kibungo to the Tanzanian border) and called Nyakarambi by its residents. We have a bus stop, a petrol station, a couple restaurants, a few stores and electricity from 6 pm to 10 pm. Every Wednesday, the population triples, as a market springs up right behind my house, bringing people and goods from all across the area. It’s a great time to stock up on fresh fruits and vegetables for the week (like pineapples, bananas and passion fruit) or to buy clothes, school supplies, kitchen utensils, anything. The closest internet that I am aware of is in Kibungo, the largest town in the area, but it’s a bit of a bus ride from Nyakarambi. I’ll have to get into some sort of routine with this so I can keep up on my correspondence and my blogging.

My living arrangements consist the back half on a house. I have two bedrooms (so I welcome visitors! Please!) and a living room with some chairs, a table and a desk. (Due to their respective sizes, however, the desk functions as my dinner table and the table is an acting desk.) Unfortunately, there is no running water, so the toilet is an outhouse (not bad during the day, but it swarms with cockroaches at night) and the shower is a small room with a bucket. (I’m actually getting quite proficient at the bucket shower, if I do say so myself.)

I teach at a high school in the next town. It’s a bit of a hassle to get to every day, but so far I’ve been taking a moto (motorcycle taxi) each morning and walking a mile to the bus stop, then busing back after school. It’s been working so far, but once the rainy season hits it’ll get a bit messier. Also, we almost hit a cow a couple days ago. This week I’ve been teaching English to S2s and S5s (the equivalent of Grade 8 and Grade 11), and I might be picking up an S1 biology class and possibly a class entitled “Entrepreneurship”, which I believe to be basic economics. The kids are great, as are the other teachers, who do their best to speak in English when I’m around. I’ve discovered that, so far at least, I really enjoy teaching, but I despise lesson planning.

Everywhere I go, lately, I’m followed by cries of “Muzungu! Muzungu!” You see, the children around here don’t see whites very often, so it’s a bit of a novelty for them to see me walking back from school or around town. On my second day here, I went for a walk from one end of town to the other, just to check it out. I got out to Eastern end, and all of a sudden about 20 kids materialized, saying “Muzungu!” and “Bonjour! Comment ca va? Amakuru? Good morning, teacher!” (They all just seem to assume I’m a teacher.) Then whenever I tried to answer them, in any of those three languages, they would bust out in giggles. Another time, I was walking back from school, on the phone with one of the other volunteers, when I noticed I had a group of about 10 kids following me, with their heads craned at an awkward angle. It took me a while to realize they were trying to listen to what the person on the other end of the phone was saying.

Of course, it’s not just the little kids that laugh at me. I always try to great everyone I pass in Kinyarwanda, usually saying “Mwaramutse” or “Mwiriwe” (Good morning/good afternoon). I occasionally follow-up with an “Amakuru?” (How are you?). People seem to really like this, and they usually crack a smile and return the greeting. However, little old ladies seem to find me talking in Kinyarwanda to be one of the funniest things imaginable. They tend to burst out laughing, reply in great detail (which I don’t usually understand) then say things to their friends (of which I can usually only pick out the words Muzungu and Kinyarwanda). I imagine the novelty will wear off eventually, once they’ve seen me around enough, but for now I’ll just have to get used to people yelling “Hey Whitey!” at me.

In regards to the modified Palin quote in the title, I can’t actually see Tanzania from my house, just from my classroom window. Does this still qualify me for national office?

Speaking of which, Tuesday night was quite interesting. I had planned on listening to Obama’s Inauguration on the radio (probably Voice of America or BBC) but a local restaurant with a generator hooked up their TV, managed to find CNN and invited people to come watch it! It was quite an event. We crammed 30 people into a tiny room, the Mutzigs and Primuses (local beers) were flowing and those who knew English were translating for those who didn’t. The room erupted into cheers when we first saw Obama, then again when Biden took the oath, when Obama took the oath, and several more times during his speech. Whenever Bush appeared on the screen, the crowd broke out into chuckles and jokes. Even here in Africa – pretty much the only continent where he is viewed more positively than negatively – his incompetence and uselessness is clear. All in all, it was a great night and it’s wonderful to be able to say “President Obama!” (And no, Jenny, Diane Feinstein is not Obama’s wife.)

(And did anyone count the number of times I used parenthesis? Is 15 too many, Dallas?)

Oh, and btw, just to make all of you who are stuck in the frozen climes of North America jealous, I had corn on the cob yesterday. And it was gooooood.

The Gang

2009-01-14T21:00:00.000-06:00

Here is the whole gang of us teachers (minus Scott who is the photographer) at the start of orientation. Look how full of hope we are!

Address

2009-01-13T13:17:00.000-06:00

Oh, and for anyone interested in sending me letters or packages, here is my address:

Andy Janes
c/o Jessica Smolow
Kigali Post Office
PO Box 4875
Kigali, Rwanda

Oh, and when I say this is my address, I mean it is a PO Box in Kigali. Apparently I will not be able to receive mail in Rusumo, and will have to either come back to Kigali for it, or rely on other people picking it up and bring it too me.

Please don't let this stop you from sending me things, especially letters...

Genocide Memorials

2009-01-13T13:03:00.001-06:00

Monday was a very intense day for us: we took in both the Kigali Genocide Memorial and the Nyamata Memorial. These were incredibly powerful Memorials about the 1994 Genocide, and are important symbols of Rwanda’s dedication against genocide and genocide ideology.
I’ve been to Dachau (a concentration camp in Germany), the Holocaust Museum in DC and a slave fort in Cape Coast, Ghana. Both of the Rwandan Memorials, being so much more recent and taken in one day, affected me more.

The Kigali Genocide Memorial is done in a similar style to the Holocaust Museum. It chronicles the factors that led up to the violence, as well as the violence itself and the aftermath. It included pictures and video footage, and vivid descriptions of killings. Near the start I noticed that the displays often used the word “we” rather than “they” to describe the victims, which made it even more personal and effective. The Memorial also featured a section on other recent genocides, portraying the Armenians, German Namibia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia and Serbia/Kosovo. Each section features information on how justice has or has not been served, emphasizing the importance of attaining justice here in Rwanda.

Nyamata is a town about 45 min outside of Kigali, and in 1994, as the violence was starting, people began to gather at the local church, thinking it a refuge. This was not the case. In a short period of time, 10,000 people were killed in and around the church. There were only 5 survivors, all of them children. The killers found the church an easy target, they threw grenades inside, they cut and shot and burned and buried alive.

Since the end of the Genocide, the church in Nyamata has been turned in to a memorial and a burial site, with over 41,000 people interred there. The mass graves at the back have stairs down into them, where you can see row after row of coffins, skulls and other bones. If enough bones could be identified as belonging to the same person, they would be given a coffin; otherwise they are lined up in rows on shelves. By the description, some might compare it to the Paris Catacombs, but I can’t stress how different it is. These people were deliberately and brutally tortured, raped and murdered, and it happened less than 15 years ago. I cannot describe how powerful and how sad the graves are. However, inside the church is even more moving. On all the pews and all over the front and back, virtually everywhere except the aisle, were piled what looked like rags. They weren’t rags though; they were the clothing of the people who were murdered there. Hats, shoes, shirts, pants, everything.

These Memorials are extremely important. It’s probably cliché to write that people need to see this most brutal of human undertakings, but it’s also true. We need to remember our solemn promise after the Holocaust: Never Again.

Butare

2009-01-11T13:28:00.000-06:00

Hello all! I’ve had an exciting few since I’ve last written. We celebrated my birthday here in Kigali, with Indian food and a cake, then partying and dancing at several places, including a club called KBC. I want to send special thanks out to some of my new Rwandan friends who took us around and made sure I had a great time!

On Friday, we headed off to Butare, in the South, our first trip outside of the capital. The bus ride itself was fantastic; I wish I could describe the scenery (or that I had taken some pictures...). It was hill after hill after hill, all with tiny farms and banana groves, and lots of little towns along the way. Butare itself is relatively large for the area, and home to the National University and the National Museum. I visited the Museum, and got to explore a bit of the area, but the most interesting time was spent at an orphanage just outside of Butare. It looks after 107 kids, many who are HIV positive, and it provides medicine, good meals and school supplies for them. We taught games to the kids and they taught us even more. It’s been supported by a group called R-VCP or the Rwanda Village Concept Project. It’s mostly a bunch of National University med school students who have set this thing up with various European groups helping out. They support the orphanage and some clinics, and you can find out more at www.rwanda-vcp.org. The guys from the med school are really great. They are really motivated, and are doing an amazing job. Plus, they took us out on Saturday, and showed us a very good time.

Random comment: Obama is huge here. Everywhere I look I see Obama stuff. Café Torero (the internet café) has Obama posters, and I’ve seen several Obama bumper stickers at various bars and hotels. I’ve also seen a bus with an American flag and Obama printed across it, several t-shirts, and an Obama mini-mart (although that might actually be a family name, not referring to the President-Elect). Everyone you talk to here loves him, and many of them stayed up all night on election night to see him win. BTW, I can’t wait for Inauguration Day. I’m going to where an Obama button to school and hopefully catch some of it on the radio (if I can’t find a TV).

I’m back in Kigali now, but not for too much longer. We head out to our schools on Saturday, so once that hits, I have no idea about Internet access, or frankly, about anything at all. Hopefully I’ll get on again before that, but we are going to be crazy busy with teaching practice, lesson planning and all sorts of other fun activities.

Unfortunately, I’ve been having problems uploading photos, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer. I haven’t actually taken very many either, but I’ve still got time…

Mwaramutse!

2009-01-08T04:43:00.003-06:00

Muraho! Amakuru? Ni meza, murakoze…

So, things are going well here in Kigali. Training is flying by, and we only have a little more time here in the capital. If there was more time, I’d love to be out exploring more, but then I wouldn’t be getting trained. Small tradeoff I suppose. Plus, I should have time during my vacations to visit.

Training has been a variety of things, including teaching training, science training, cultural training, and intensive Kinyarwanda training. (Above translation: Hello! How are you? Fine, thank you…). We had four hours of it yesterday, and another four hours today, and I believe we are scheduled for 3 tomorrow. The language stuff has been my favourite of the sessions so far. It’s such a complex language, with pronunciations that I can barely even attempt. In a year the most I think I could get would be passable, but I’m going to try.

As for living arrangements for the rest of the year, they are getting narrowed down. A mailing address will be going up soon, I just have to confirm it. Only problem is that it will have to be sent here to Kigali, then I or someone else will have to pick it up and bring it to Rusumo. Kind of a hassle, but I expect I’ll get used to it. The other news is that I may have electricity, at least, at times. That's a big deal, especially since I didn't think I'd have either electricity or running water. Of course, I still going to keep my expectations low as the likelihood of a mistranslation or misunderstanding is quite high. Regardless, I'm getting quite excited to get there!

Today we stopped by both the Canadian and American Embassies to finish up some paperwork. The difference between the two was quite noticeable. The American one was quite the fortress, with strict security, built off away from everything else, very much on its own. The Canadian one was off on a side street, walled off and guarded, but it was much simpler, and frankly, they seemed much nicer. The downside was the Canadian government is just beginning to switch everything over to online registration for Canadians abroad, and the system is still full of bugs (i.e. we couldn't even access the website), whereas the American system seemed pretty well settled down.

In other news, I'm getting a good handle for the transportation system! I've now taken taxis (most expensive, but the only one you can really use with a lot of luggage), motos (much cheaper, basically you hang on to the back of a motorcycle or moped and weave through the streets like a crazy person) and matatus (extremely cheap i.e. 30 cents US, buses/vans that actually run on time and to most places in the city). It's a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you can get anywhere for not too much money! Of course, with a bit of walking as well. Have I mentioned that Rwanda is called "Land of a Thousand Hills"? I should have calves the size of small sheep by the time I'm done here.

Kigali

2009-01-03T09:14:00.002-06:00

Hello from Kigali!

Sorry it's taken me so long to put up my first post! We all got here safe and sound, and we've been working on getting accustomed to, well, everything. But it's great! I love this city. It's in way better shape than anything I saw in Western Africa, and honestly, the main streets are about as clean as those in Paris or Glasgow! There are good roads, working stop signs that people obey, running water and good power and buses that run on time! I'm going to have to enjoy this while I'm here, because I have no idea what Rusumo is going to be like.

Currently, we're staying at a Catholic Mission, which is good (and cheap), where we spend most of our time in training. We've had several speakers on various issues, and we've had a bit of time to explore the city, though not as much as I'd like. I've also been able to try some pretty good foods, including goat brochettes (sticks of goat meat!). Also, lots of bananas.

New Years Eve was incredible! We went to an East Africa party, with Mutzig and Primus beers and live music from artists from Rwanda, Uganda and other parts of the region. The music was great (as were the beers) and we stayed and danced until late. Well, some of us did. Many people went home earlier, but I was part of the last three to leave at 2:30 am. It doesn't sound like much, but remember. We had arrived in Kigali one day earlier after about 17 hours in the air. I didn't sleep more than 30 min over those 2 days. But the dance was fun, we danced with each other and with Rwandans and generally had a great time!

Unfortunately, I haven't really taken many pictures yet, so it will still be a little while before any of those go up. Sorry.

Also, random facts: my room is home to at least 4 lizards, possibly more. I'm not complaining, they eat bugs and are actually quite cute.

Almost no one smokes in public here. I haven't seen a single Rwandan smoking. I love it!

People here are incredibly friendly. They love it when we try to use our pitifully small Kinyarwandan. Mostly they laugh at us and tell us it's great. I've been trying to say Muraho (hello), Amakuru (how are you?) and ni meza (i'm fine) as often as I can. If not, I try french, which I think I'd have a good chance of picking up if I stayed in Kigali. However, I know my school is anglophone, so I don't know if there will be much French spoken in town either. It's so close to the Tanzanian border that it might be mostly english speaking.

Turns out, I'm terrible at journaling. I was planning on writing every night, then putting the entry's together for a blog post. Didn't happen. I've written about 3 entrys, mostly less than a page. Thus, I'm blogging in an extremely random and train of thought manner. If you have any problems with this, feel free to leave a message. Maybe next time it will be more logically laid out.

As of yet, no address for my place in Rusumo. I'll post it as soon as I know it. I really am looking forward to getting letters from some of you, and especially that wedding invitation (you know who you are...).

Thanks for reading, I'll try to do this semi-regularly, and if you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to answer them either privately or on my next post!

And we're off!

2008-12-22T15:17:00.002-06:00

Well, I leave for Rwanda in less than a week. It's going to be a busy week, full of packing, Christmas, family, freaking out and more packing.

I know a bit more information now about where I will be. I'll be teaching at Rusumo High School, in the town of (you guessed it) Rusumo, Rwanda. Look it up on Google Maps, it's right near the Tanzanian border. I'll be living a fair distance from the school, and I will not have electricity or running water at home.

Apparently, there is somewhere nearby where I'll be able to use the Internet, so I will try to post whenever I can, as well as putting up as many pictures as I can, but who knows how often that will be...? Regardless, I'll be in Kigali for a couple of weeks first, so I should be able to post while I'm there.

I hope everyone has a great holiday, and I will see you all in about a year!

touch of death

2008-12-05T18:39:00.002-06:00

So, Madia lost. That makes four losing campaigns for me. I'm starting to think that I have the touch of death.

Well, I'm back in Ontario, getting ready to go. I leave in less than a month. And apparently I'll be teaching Biology. Or something that isn't English.

Twin Cities here I come!

2008-08-05T16:28:00.003-05:00

I've just found out where I'll be living and working for the next 4 months! I am a donation from the Human Rights Campaign to US Congressional Candidate Ashwin Madia (www.madiaforcongress.com), which means I'll be working on his campaign for a US House seat in Minnesota's District 3, the Western suburbs of Minneapolis. This is great, since I already know a lot of people living in the Cities, and the campaign looks like it will be a great one, hopefully one of the many seats that the Democrats will be able to take from the Republicans. Check out his website and if you are in the area, let me know!

Blogger or Wordpress?

2008-07-13T16:13:00.000-05:00

Hello!

It is currently about 6 months until I leave for Rwanda, and I've begun to prepare. I've started trying to teach myself Kinyarwanda, and I'm about to start volunteering with a couple of ESL classes. In a month I start working on a campaign with the Human Rights Campaign (for who and where I have no idea yet). This blog will see little activity in the next several month until it gets closer to the departure date, but I've started already in order to see whether I like Blogger or Wordpress better. I guess we'll find out...