Hello again! It has been a few days since Team Rwanda’s last blog posting, but already it feels like a month. Such a short length of time doesn’t seem long enough to encapsulate the breadth of the experiences we have had since then.
It almost overwhelms me to commit them to paper (or laptop, as it were), because there have been large moments that have astounded me, and small moments that have taken my breath away, and my skill as a writer simply isn’t proficient enough to capture them. But for you, here, I shall try.
On our first day here the rain poured down in a torrential storm, and I feared that this would be the weather characteristic of the rest of our stay. Thankfully, although it often drizzles—it is the rainy season, after all—the ferocity of that storm abided within the hour, and has never returned. We walked down red cobblestone paths, surrounded by the lushest greenery I’ve ever seen, from our house on the edge of town to the university campus. On our way, we saw dozens of motorcycle riders waiting for passengers, women in colorful dresses carrying baskets on their heads, small shops of all odds and ends winding along the streets, and a group of monkeys that the locals met with the same familiarity as we would squirrels.
The university itself is quite a sight as well; it’s located right alongside a large forest, and even from afar, the magnitude of its infrastructure is impressive. The National University of Rwanda (NUR) has many campuses littered across Butare; the one we were taken to (the main one, I presume), has a large courtyard in the center, with administrative offices and classrooms on all sides. Further down, there is a library that is interestingly reminiscent of Huron University College’s library, an IT center equipped with the same Sun Systems as UWO, an auditorium about the size of 1R40, a football (soccer) field as large as ours, a bar/patio lounge, an indoor gym for basketball and rope climbing, and many other facilities. The classrooms are admittedly less well-equipped than Ivey, but still have all the amenities a lecturer would need, including a projector and blackboard. The tables are long rows with attached fold-out chairs.
Since I could ramble on and on about the things that we have seen and experienced here, let me sum up for you the challenges and the wonders.
Nothing seemed to be set up for us in terms of living conditions or class structure. We arrived to a fairly bare house, with mattresses and cold undrinkable water from the tap, and little else. Toilet paper, water, bed sheets, blankets, pillows, soap—all seemed to be superfluous things that we later picked up ourselves (at least we have electricity, although we have to pay to replenish it from time and time, it sometimes goes out in thunderstorms, and most of the outlets are broken, except for the ones in the cockroach-infested kitchen.) It makes me laugh a bit, remembering how we tried to haggle for second-hand bed sheets in the market with our guide (the second-year class representative, Daniel), only to find that most of them were as stained as our mattresses when we got home; or when Gareth and Dan barricaded the hallway to our bedrooms with a table and duct taped the sides, effectively surrendering the kitchen and living room to the victorious cockroaches. Good times.
In terms of class structure, we had almost complete freedom to design it however we liked. We were told that we would teach two classes: 80 second-year students and 100 third-years. They each had a 4-hour lecture every day, and we asked for 2 of those hours for our class. The administration has been very busy, but has offered their help whenever needed, and has been very kind about allowing us to do whatever it is we like. They asked us to form student teams and have them present each day. We will evaluate them as part of their course, a prospect both exciting and nerve-wracking, as new faculty at Ivey are bound to know. On top of that, it doesn’t appear that anyone at NUR is interested or prepared to write a local case, and none of the local informal businesspeople speak English. These are challenges that we haven’t quite faced down yet, though I’m sure we will in time.
Despite this, the challenges have been fun, and together we have handled them well. I have every confidence that we’ll not only pull through, but will do a good job and have fun while doing it. But I don’t want you to walk away with the impression that the past week has been nothing but stressful. There was been an incredible amount of wonder and excitement, and a plethora of new and amazing experiences. Like walking past schools during lunch hour and saying “Mwiriwe” (good afternoon) to the staring schoolchildren, with a chorus of “Mwiriwe”s and giggles in reply; like riding a motorcycle for the first time and feeling both exhilarated and naggingly worried at the recklessness of the driver; like calling “Cheers!” in a back-alley bar and having the locals clap and laugh in reply; like accidentally walking into an army barrack and being politely asked to leave by a man that became a friend; like being locked inside the house gates and knifing the gate open with a Swiss army knife, only to see our gardener on the other side laughing at my antics; and like wondering into a church, to a service replete with dance and music and joy, and being told “be welcomed here.”
Once, I took a stroll through our neighborhood. I looped around and around, and realized that I was actually walking down the slope of a large hill. Taba, our neighborhood, is a wealthy one, and located close to the top of the hill. The further down I walked, the poorer the neighborhoods became, until cobblestone roads gave into trodden dirt, and fenced estates gave into huts. But the people were no less kind for it, and were rich with a wealth that can’t be quantified. And the view was no less beautiful—I walked as far as I could go before the gentle slope became a steep decline. There were rolling hills and lush greenery as far as I could see, with mist-hidden mountains faded in the background and melting into the sky. In that moment I could understand why Dr. Keenan had said Rwanda was believed to be the site of Eden.
This blog posting has become an essay, and so with this last line, goodbye—till next time!