Volunteer in the Mist

Making bricks for the school

Volunteer in the Mist 

Greetings from beautiful rainy Zaza. It is so easy to get seasonally disoriented here.  Sixteen months gone and here we are, May already. (OK OK, it's June now.  That's how long it takes me to get this out) It's well into the rainy season but with none of that familiar euphoric springtime sense of cyclical rebirth and new life that makes it arguably my favourite  time year of in B.C. ( Apart from summer, fall and winter) The garden is growing like mad though and the avocados are raining down like delicious green cannonballs out in the front yard.  If you're alert you can usually beat the local kids to them. I remain guardedly optimistic that  before the year is out I will have successfully grown a pineapple.  In the meantime, they're abundant and affordable and everywhere you go you see men pushing bicycles laden with what must be over 100 kilos of them bundled together, headed for market.  Hard hard work!

We had the better part of April off between terms and also because it is a time set aside for memorials and commemoration of the genocide.  On the surface it can almost seem things go on as usual but everywhere there are poignant reminders of the depth of trauma still underlying and strongly affecting life here.   
It  was indescribably wonderful having Daphne visit for the whole month.  She hadn't been here a day before attending a traditional Rwandan wedding, getting a sunburn, blitzing around Kigali on motorcycle taxis,  and enjoying her first Primus at  a party.  We spent some time here in the village where she was warmly welcomed at school and in the homes of several Rwandan friends, mini-adventures in their own right. She was a faithful and thoughtful chronicler of her visit and I would recommend you read her blog if you're interested in the details. (http://daphodild.blogspot.ca/)   Besides travelling here and there in Rwanda and a memorable visit to the gorillas we went up to Uganda for a week or so.  I won't even try to describe the whole time but in a word, it was delightful.  I realized how long it has been since I've laughed helplessly until I cried and could barely breathe.  There were a few choice moments when the absolute absurdity of our circumstances just put us both completely over the edge.  She is the perfect traveling companion.

Jen Kamashaba last January, walls going up

We spent Easter in Uganda with my friend Jen Kamashaba and a houseful of friends and relatives out in the countryside near Mbarara.  She is the remarkable woman I have mentioned in previous blogs…an extraordinarily committed woman who is in the process of building a community school on the land beside her home.  When I stopped in last January the walls of the first building, consisting of three rooms,  were about halfway up and the mud bricks were being made on site.  Now, although the floors are still dirt and the walls plain unplastered brick, two of the rooms are being used, one for a pre-primary and the other for grade one.  We arrived early in the morning and watched as the students, many of them orphans, went through their morning ritual of songs, chants and thorough fingernail and behind-the-ears inspection. 

The teachers have done a great job of making and displaying all sorts of visual aids and activity centres (something our Rwandan primary teachers could learn a thing or two from).  The community is coming forward with materials and labor to build a good fence and provide other help as and how it is able.  Plans are in the works to continue building more classrooms. This is a very poor rural area with many children being raised by grandmothers  and there is enormous appreciation of and support 
for this little school.
**Sooooo.....It's a long, long way downhill from the school to the nearest water source and it has to be carried up in jerrycans.  If there was a storage tank they could collect rainwater from the roof.  I would like to try to raise enough money to build one.   The quotes for materials and labor are $1580 for a 20,000 litre and $2600 for a 50,000 litre tank.  Naturally, the larger one would be the one to aim for, but that will be a choice left to the universe.  If anyone is interested, the best way I know of to send money here is by Western Union, although it does cost according to the amount sent.  So, there it is..just casting my line into the water and hoping for some nibbles. And all of us former upper Fraser valley types remember what it's like to pack our water, eh?  (Please feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested.) 


A few weeks later…this thing is getting pretty stale on my desktop so if I can get some pictures together it'll get posted today.  Since starting to write this, weeks ago, it has transitioned to the dry season with its accompanying joys…dust instead of mud and water off more often than on.   

Also, it's a time of fond farewells to many people who have become good friends as their placements end and they scatter around the planet.  Before long it'll be my turn but in the meantime there's plenty of work to do. 
So, Murabeho for now. Hope this find everyone well and all of your gardens growing. 

Better Late than Never!

ONE YEAR DONE, ONE TO GO:

THE BACK-TO-SCHOOL EDITION

Greetings and a belated HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone! 

Looking back over this past year I am amazed at what an extraordinarily interesting one it has been. The challenges of the job and the location continue but at the same time so do the delightful things that make being here always fresh and never dull.  The time is passing very quickly.

Our new school year started in early January, and after a few hiccups caused by abruptly mandated timetable requirements (it is all done entirely by hand without benefit of software) we are pretty much up and running.  I am now teaching in my resource centre, which I have  set up as much as possible like a model classroom.  In contrast to the rest of the school it has lots of stuff like maps, charts, and assorted topic specific visual aids on the walls, a small library, puzzles, games, etc..  These things most of us take completely for granted are conspicuously absent from the general learning environment in most schools here. 

Having learned a great deal last year we, the TTC volunteers at the 11 teacher training colleges,  got together for a week last November for a collaborative re-write of the curriculum, which we hope now more adequately reflects our students'  needs and adapts better to the realities they face.  We're also doing workshops with our colleagues and with the primary school teachers in whose classes our students do their practice lessons in order to familiarize them with what, for most of them, is an entirely different way of teaching. 

At the one year mark we have said fond farewells to a few fellow volunteers from our intake last January whose postings have ended, while some others have extended theirs.   Meanwhile, new ones arrive.  I want to put in a word here to say that CUSO and VSO are encountering recruiting problems as it seems fewer people are coming forward to offer their time and skills.  It is being put down in part to the global financial situation, but whatever the reason, and despite it,  I would urge anyone who is thinking about taking the plunge to seriously consider doing it.  End of commercial.

 I met a young man one day a few weeks ago as I walked home from the market who is now my kinyarwanda tutor.  He, Felix, like many of his peers, is earnestly pursuing higher education on the weekends while searching for a job.  He rides his bicycle to Kibungo and back every weekend, which must be at least 40 km each way over unpaved hill and dale.  He's a gifted, natural teacher and I keep assuring him it certainly won't be his fault if I don't learn to speak this diabolical language.

Last week we met at daybreak and rode our bikes up and down over back roads to a large town, Rwamagana, where we got some work done on the bikes at an open air bike repair place.  Bikes are the donkeys of Rwanda, by the way. They are used to transport everything: furniture, lumber, pineapples, building materials, huge bags of charcoal, you name it.   At one point we crossed Lake Mugesera in a wooden boat loaded with pineapples, bikes and people.  It was an all day excursion, hotter than stink but totally fun.  Along the way the derailleur fell completely off his bike and we thought we might have to walk the rest of the way, but true to form  we went no more than about 50 meters up the road and there was a guy with a toolbox, sitting with his mates under a tree, who cheerfully re-attached the derailleur.  It never ceases to amaze me how things are kept going here. 

Apart from school and some awesomely good times on the weekends with friends in Kigali the hands down highlight of the year, though it had some stiff competition from wonderful trips to Tanzania and Uganda earlier in the year, was a fantastic seven week backpacking trip I took to Ethiopia in November and December, during our school holidays.  (have you noticed, we have a lot of holidays?)  I have put off writing this blog because every time I try to think how to describe it adequately without writing volumes I get completely bewildered.  So, here's the Cole's notes version.

Highlights:

-a brief but very enjoyable time with my birder friends Denis and Stella who were on their way home to Australia after their year in Rwanda. Everything I know about African birds  (and that's not much) I owe to them. 

-five days on horseback trekking through the mountains in the southeast, through field and forest, often above treeline, staying in tents or huts.  The  pastoralist population lives on scattered isolated homesteads without road access or electricity, and during the day you can hear them calling to each other across the valleys as they herd their goats and sheep. Horses, donkeys and feet are the only means of transport.   At one mountainside homestead the mother of my guide served fresh milk  as assorted small siblings shyly peeked around her and a family of black and white colobus monkeys frolicked in a nearby tree.  I wanted to stay there forever!

-hitched a ride on a transport truck to the far southwestern corner where the Hamer and other tribes live pretty much as they have since ever. 

-Visited the Zege peninsula and stayed in a home in the forest surrounded by wild coffee and accessible only by boat or footpath.  The mother of my Ethiopian companion roasted coffee over her charcoal fire and served us some of her very refreshing home-distilled moonshine. I could live there!  Walked to a couple of ancient Orthodox churches and monasteries that are decorated from top to bottom inside with paintings and are uniquely Ethiopian.  

-Spent two days on a small ferry up Lake Tana where I met another solo woman traveler.   We self-organized a 5 day hike in the Simien Mts. where we saw an Ethiopian wolf and a Walia Ibex, both rare and beautiful animals.  It was SO cold there that there was ice on the tent every morning.  The landscape  is breathtaking, sometimes literally as we were up over 4000 meters looking way, way down.  There were large groups of Gelada baboons, tiny villages with houses made of stone and wood, tough mountain people on horseback.

-hitched another ride in an Isuzu transport truck over the most terrifying but at the same time spectacularly beautiful road to Axum in the north and after a few days wandering among the stelae fields and the camels took a plane (broke my land only rule this once as 45 minutes on a plane vs. three days on various buses was temptation too hard to resist) to Lalibela.  The rock hewn churches, which are still in use, are incredible and mysterious.  I spent days among them, passing through weird stone tunnels and soaking up the ambiance of a place that has got so much spiritual history.

-back to Addis for a quiet Christmas at a creaky old lady of a hotel, the Queen Taitu, then a short middle of the night flight to Nairobi, a restful night spent dozing in a chair at the bus station beside a window full of shrapnel holes from a recent grenade attack,  and a long bus ride across Kenya to Mbarara in Uganda where my Ugandan "sister" Jen Kamashaba is building a school in her village.  True to form, there was (yet another) bride giveaway and wedding to attend. 

So, all in all a fabulously varied and enjoyable experience. If I don't post this soon it is going to expire, if it hasn't already. 

Wish I could post photos but it's tricky as internet is so slow and it takes ages to upload them.   If anyone has some advice re re-sizing I could give it a try.  Using iPhoto. 

Daphne has been here for a week already and today we're heading off to Musanze and the gorillas on Monday.   More later.