Update

It has been a busy few weeks and so I haven't written in a while. Midterms have come and gone (for me at least). I wrote 2 tests, which is harder than it sounds, gave 3 exams, and have since graded all 83 of them. In other news at the school, the teachers at the primary school played us, the teachers of the secondary school in volleyball this past Friday annnnnd.... we lost all 3 games. We at the secondary school combined with some of the students and so I played in the first game with 2 other teachers and 3 of the students. We actually played pretty well, but the primary school teachers had one guy who was really good at serving and he just wracked up the points at the end so we lost 20 to 25. The experience was pretty incredible though. The primary school teachers came over to our court chanting and cheering and full of energy (to be fair, they were younger than many of us secondary school teachers) and then, not too long into the game, a bunch of the primary school students came over and they lined half the court to cheer and so the secondary school kids lined the other half of the court to cheer louder and it was noisy! It was very cool to be on the court playing at that time though. The students started getting competitive with one another. Every time the the primary school teachers scored a point they celebrated together by stomping their feet if and yelling something that sounded like "mi shabo" (though at is probably spelled wrong) which means something about " a lesson" which I interpreted to be the Kinyarwanda equivalent  of "you just got schooled" and the little kids started picking it up and chanting it and dancing to it when their teachers had a good play. The older kids retaliate by booing and coming up with chants of their own in response. It was a lot of fun. The final game, the teachers fielded a full team of just themselves and it honestly wasn't really pretty, we went down faster than I would like to admit, but agin it was a lot of fun. School in General is coming along a little better. It is still hard to be a first year teacher, but I am able to lesson plan faster than before and I am a little bit better (though not much) at thinking on my feet. I attempted to have one of my classes play a version of catch phrase Friday because I taught the last 2 periods of the day and the kids were wrapping up a long week a tests, so I figured hey wouldn't pay attention to much but a game. It got out of control rather quickly. Not to say it wasn't pretty fun, it was just really loud. The kids were all shouting words, at one point a chant of "China China China" broke out amongst several of the teams with dance moves and all the while the teachers who were not teaching at the moment were sitting in the staff room right next door listening to the noise and trying to peek into the classroom to see what it was all about. I feel like I am slowly getting to know the students a little bit better, which I enjoy, but it is also hard because there are definite lines between students and teachers here. Teachers are professionals. You hear things like "stand up, show the teacher some respect" when you walk into a classroom and when you aren't in the classroom teaching it is expected that you are in the staff room usually; that way, teachers and students don't have to mingle. I am breaking down the wall a little bit, some with the students and some with the people who work for the school cleaning and doing yard work, as well as with some of the construction workers hired to build the rest of the school. When it is nice out I sometimes grab my grading and sit outside on the steps correcting the work which is rather scandalous because here no one sits on the ground, no one, and my American sensibilities just don't really care, the ground is probably as clean as anything else, probably cleaner considering how thoroughly they clean (recently some of the workers have spent their day scraping dirt off the bricks of the school building - something I still haven't found a reason for. I suppose to make the bricks shine more or so they will look more defined? Who knows.) Anyway, my willingness to sit on the ground is a big statement and puts me a step closer to the workers and those doing manual labor. There was also the time that one of the workers was cutting the grass with a machete and I wanted to try, so I asked, and despite the fact that we don't speak the same language, he got the idea and handed the machete over to me. For the record, it is way harder than it looks to cut grass that way. The worker can do it one armed, but I really had to use 2 like a golf club to get the blade steady enough and I could not get my cut close enough to the ground. The grass that had taken me 5 minutes to cut, the worker went back over to fix up in 2 swings. It's the little things that count though.

Weekend #1 out of the city

Since it has been so long, things have piled up. Of the past 3 weekends, Tim and I were relatively busy for 2 of them, both times we took our first excursions outside of the city. On the other weekend, we both spent our time prepping for the upcoming tests we were about to give. Our first trip out was intentionally alone, to the south of the city. South of the city was one of the hardest hit areas during the genocide, and 2 memorial sites exist commemorating the events. Both sites are the sites of old Catholic churches where thousands of people were massacred a piece. The histories are not pleasant. At the first one we visited, that Church in particular had been a sanctuary in the past. A European woman, a missionary of some sort I think, had lived across the street from the Church and had used her pull as being a well connected European to protect those who sought refuge there. However, she was killed in Rwanda for speaking out before the genocide began and so when people flocked to this church for the protection they had received in the past, it didn't come. In some cases churches became massacre sights because the clergy themselves were informing on the people, but I am not sure if that holds true for either of the sites we were at. The people, thousands of them, had locked themselves into the church which was then bombarded with bullets and grenades to break to the metal gate down. When you step inside you can see how many of the windows had been broken and the bullet marks at chest and head height that cover the walls. All the benches that were used as pews are piled, probably a foot tall, with dirty, bloody, decaying clothes from the victims. In the center of the church was an opening in the floor where you could go down and see some of the bones of the victims there, which I had expected to see having read they would be there. What I was not prepared for was to go behind the church where they have an underground crypt I guess I would call it, 2 of them actually and we were told by the lady sweeping there to enter them. You go down these steps and when you reach the bottom there is a single light and you wind up in the middle do this huge tomb, that probably stretches for 25 feet to the left and to the right. Upon turning left or right there is a small aisle way you can walk down, so you are then walking down this aisle that is maybe 15 or 20 feet tall with shelves first of coffins (we found out later holding 10 bodies a piece) and then of straight up bones. Piles and piles of bones. All the skulls were on a in few shelves together, all the femurs, all the .... You could see the damage on some of them, one you could tell the skulls had been cleaved I half by a machete, another, you could tell was the skull of a child that had been bashed in. The church holds 40,000 remains. They were not all killed at the church itself. Some of the people were just killed in the area and their bodies had been brought to the church later to be kept. The second site was even more powerful. The church was left as it was except they had to add a roof above it and some support beams to keep it from falling over. There are holes in the side of the church where you can tell more clearly that grenades were thrown at it to break it. This church had been slight more fortified and so it was harder to "conquer." The inside tells a similar story, but with more debris, though the church itself was smaller. Some bones remain, lots of bloody clothes and sheets, bits of other things too like pots and pans of the refugees, an I.D. card, shoes, some of the school books of the children who had brought them thinking they would return to school afterwards. We were taken to another building, a kitchen for the church, that had been fire bomb with people inside it, and lastly, though most disturbing of all, we were taken into the the building of the Sunday School where all the kids had been brought to be killed. I'll just say that I knew what the stain on the wall was 20 years later, without having to be told, it was still very dark. They also had a replica of this wooden pole probable 15 feet tall used to kill the women very unpleasantly. Finally, they had a commemorative wall with names on it and a little garden, though it didn't really bring peace.   It was eery being at both sights. A definite silence hangs over them, similar to the feeling of visiting a concentration camp in Germany, but much less clinical, much less sterile. I would hate having the job of giving tours at either place. I have no pictures because they were not allowed, but I don't think I need pictures to remember those places. I haven't really processed it yet to be honest. It took a full morning to visit both places trying to figure out the transportation ourselves and we got caught in a thunderstorm that was strong enough to bring hail on the return journey, so we had some distractions, but that's not why. Tim and I talked as much as we felt was necessary at the time as we, in a move that seemed to confuse many of the locals, walked the few kilometers back to the main road (we'd told out mototaxis not to wait for us). We had undertaken this journey alone because we didn't want anyone else with us. Our closest friends are the other teachers and I have no idea how connected each of then are to the genocide. All of them were alive for it, though many were very young, but I have no idea who they might've lost. We wanted to be able to view it with out world view, which is western, and to be able to discuss it freely if we needed to. Mostly though, there is such a disconnect between what I saw and the people I've gotten to know here, such a disconnect between this place and that event. I can't wrap my mind around it. How do you even begin to process it? And I am speaking as a third party observer or 2 sites...how do you heal from that as a country? As someone who lived through it? As a survivor or perpetrator? Rwanda has come a long way, it is very evident. Considering the hate that existed here as recently as 20 years ago, everything I've experienced, everything on the surface level (and I hope deeper) speaks to how far the country has come. In many ways, it feels like they have made more progress coming to terms with the hate and making strides away from it than white Americans have been able to do with African Americans in 150 years time.