More pictures

Sorry for all the typos in the last post, I didn't proofread it before posting I just hit post as soon as I had internet. 

More pictures of the ball game.

Molly schooling a high school boy at ball (look at that form!).

Molly being schooled in return by very very tall kids...

Settling In....

Tim and I spend a lot of time at school, or with people related to school. It has been wonderful how welcoming everyone has been (students, teachers, and staff alike), taking us around, helping us explore the city, inviting us to their homes or various community events, but it is also hard. Everyone we know is related to school, everyone we hang out with (including ourselves) are connected to St. Ignatius and I am beginning to go a bit stir crazy. We have hit the point, that happens any time you move to a new place for an extended period where you transition from being a tourist in that place to actually living there. Tim and I have a lot we want to see and do, but we feel limited by our lack of language and cultural savy, but at the same time, we don't want to continue to solely rely on the kindness of others to help us get around because we do live here, we are capable adults who just need to man up, so to speak. Kigali, while a thriving metropolis doesn't necessarily offer a lot to do on a regular basis culturally or otherwise and so I am working to find "my place." I am working to find that thing or that place where I can go to feel at home, I am working to make Kigali my home, but it's a challenging transition. We have seen the market now and the downtown, we have ridden he one escalator in, I imagine, he whole country. We have been to the supermarket and to a local corner store for a pop and the question is what's next? When we don't have plans, where do we go to get out, but that isn't just wandering around? 

In other news, last Friday, the teachers played basketball against the students (and by the studnets I really just mean the 5 best players in the school out of the roughly 130 kids). With the teachers, the pickings were much more slim. Despite the fact that I haven't played on a basketball team in 10 years? 12 years? I still made the staring line up. With 2 subs, and a few cheerleaders on out side, the students       beat us 49 to 30? Or 29? We didn't much like talking about the score. To be fair, the teachers put together a fighting team. There was moment there, at the beginning of the game when we actually were winning. It was only 2-0 and we just happen to have scored fist, but still! It was fun to interact with the students in that way though. There was plenty of trash talk and lots of cheering or book depending on scores and fouls, but most of the student body came out to watch. 

So, while most of our time is spent at school, some of that (outside of he teaching) is really great. Tim got us an invite to join the cultural club at the primary school, so I might do that. They practice Wednesday afternoons and I don't teach then, so that could be fun to learn some traditional dance (or better yet, have some primary students teach me French and Kinyarwanda). 

Also, please pray for one of our students who was hit by a mototaxi walking to school yesterday. She is in he hospital.

Tim has also posted some excellent pictures from our time here at timnendick.com if you are interested.

Teaching...

The first week and a half of school have been rather rough. It has been very difficult for me to learn the students names because some are just so very different from the kinds of names I am familiar with, plus many of the students speak very softly and it is hard for me to catch. I think they probably consider me to be a somewhat strange eccentric teacher because I am always asking "what??? Can you say that again please?" while walking up the aisle toward the speaker's desk. Overall I have been very impressed by the English of my students though. This week I am having my S2A's work with the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is tough stuff. The language in that document, like most formal declarations, is not very accessible to the reader, but they are managing pretty well.  After we've talked about it a little more, I plan to do the exercise with them in which the number of students in the class represents the population of the world and based on different statics, a certain number of students would step forward to demonstrate that. For instance if the 20 studnets in class's represented the world, then 1.5 of them would have a college education and 1.5 students would step forward to show that, or 3 of the 20 would not have acess to clean drinking water. I am guessing that they haven't done anything like it before, while is am very impressed with the quality of education here overall, my one critique so far is that the students have never been challenged to think beyond "the test," to think as people who belong both to a specific country and the world as a whole. TheN again though did my education teach me that back when I was 11 or 12? Or am I preaching from college? In my other class I was having the students do family trees, which seemed to be something new for them, and it was a lot of fun. I blew their mind when I asked the to decorate it, I think. I don't think the kids are used to directions like that. Despite a few small successes, the past week and a half has been challenging. The kids like to test me a lot because I am new, but also because they know they can get away with more when I am around simply because i don't know the culture and the rules as well. It has also been incredibly hard for me to lesson plan from scratch for each class too. I have a curriculum to follow which helps, but I put everything together on my own. On top of that, there is so much I want  to be and do as a teacher, but it is hard to implement things sometimes and to find a rhythm with each class, not to mention trying to find the balance between being a teacher and getting to know my students. All of that takes time though, and it hasn't been that long. I will post more later. That is all for now.

A typical school day... The basics

School starts everyday at 7:30am sharp.  When we teachers arrive, the students have already been in their classrooms for 20 minutes waiting for us.  The day consists of 8, 50 minute periods.  In a change up from the American system I am used to, students here don't change classrooms, instead it is the teachers who rotate and they just show up at the classroom of the class they are teaching at the correct time. The kids have a 20 minute break in the morning, a 1 hour lunch break, and a 30 minute break in the afternoon between classes officially ending for the day and the mandatory afternoon activities beginning, which include a one hour study hall 3 times a week, clubs once a week, and sports once a week. Everyone is dismissed at 5pm to go home. Fir that schedule is not at testimate to how rigorously and seriously education is taken is taken here, then I don't what is. I am teaching Senior 1A, 1B, and Senior 2A English, with 5 classes of English a week for 15 "hours" of teaching, plus some super visions periods.  What's Senior in this case means that they are in "high school" the title senior seems to refer to people in secondary school, Senior 1 kids being "freshman" Seniors 2s being sophomores in High School and so on with the letter (A or B) denoting which class for each grade you are in. One bug difference though (and it's one I keep forgetting) is that the youngest kids here are like 11! I keep treating them like adults, like I would treat high schoolers in the US, easily forgetting how young some of these kids are. The photo is a picture of the first classroom I taught in, my S1A Englsih class. 

First Impressions

Kigali, in the past 5days alone, has dispelled many of my pre-existing stereotypes of Africa. For starters, the school, St. Ignatius High School - and the primary school too, are gorgeous.  A real pride is taken in education here, both in the act of learning -it is serious business- and the place of learning too, which is not something I expected. I feel like the stereotype in the US is that education is not a priority or it is done in shacks, and while that holds true for some places I am sure, not Kigali.  Not only that, but many people here, educated or not, are bi, tri, and/or even sometimes quad-lingual in Kinyarwanda, French, English, and potentially a fourth such as Swahili.  It is really an incredible feat considering that after 17 consecutive years of private education, I've only managed to learn one language, my native one, English.  I do have to learn French though, and fast!, because English is not as wide spread as I anticipated it being. It is tough sitting at a breakfast table with 5 other people and 1. Having no idea what is being said but also 2. Having no idea what language they are even speaking because it flips from French to Kinyarwanda so quickly and so much.  As for the city itself, it is very developed, but also very very clean, downtown Kigali is far more clean than downtown Seattle, but there is something here that is more than just cleanliness.  On day 2, as Tim and I walked around trying to find a bank to exchange money at, we passed a little sinkhole in the sidewalk (which, for the record, are brick, not a red brick but the type of patterned cement blocks that people use to build garden/yard walls with, but brick sized) anyway, the next day a road crew was out there fixing it.  Another example is that at the facility where we are currently living, there are a lot of domestic workers-domestic work is very big here- but several of those workers are employed to sweep the walks with these hand made brooms that look like twigs tied together without a handle and not only do they sweep the walks, they remove dead leaves from the bushes and they honestly sweep the dirt next to the walkways to make that clean too, as opposed to someone like me doing that work who would sweep the dirt on the walk into the side dirt and call it good. In other news, everyone has been very welcoming to us so far, I rode on my first motorcycle taxi today... That is... whoa... A little scary, but also fun, I put my navigational skills to work as we tried public transit and went downtown to explore - it turns out I am pretty kick ass at reading maps- and finally something I didn't expect.  The Jesuit retreat facility at which we are staying is much more of a community hub than I expected.  On the first night, New Years Eve, we were invited to attend mass at the church here to welcome in the New Year and reflect on the year past, a Rwandan tradition, and it was packed with people, standing room only, even with benches set up outside, but every Mass afterwards, and they have a daily Mass, continues to draw a crowd.  Incidentally, that first Mass was said in Kinyarwanda so Tim and I didn't understand a word of it until the very end, at announcements, when Father Ganza got up and spoke about a different priest (with lots of gesturing toward him) and then said in The only English words of the entire Mass "Tim and Molly please stand up." Very intimidating, but not at intimidating as having to stand up and teach in front of my first class on Monday.  DISCLAIMER, I WROTE THIS A WEEK AGO AND AM JUST NOW ABLE TO POST IT. I have since started teaching another post will follow shortly!