"A LIFE IN THE DAY OF" - diary of a volunteer FCYF thanks Kat Collis from the UK for sharing her ten months of experiences volunteering at FCYF during 2010. Reading Kat's diary below gives a vivid view of daily life as a volunteer. We are grateful to Kat and all the many wonderful volunteers who come to Musanze to share in our adventure and to tread the path alongside us. Each one who passes 'places their stone' in the reconstruction of Rwanda and thereby helps to make manifest our dream of local and global community. These international friends live on in our hearts when they leave and, once back in their home lands, by sharing their experiences in turn with their families, friends, colleagues and neighbors, they ensure that our circle of global friendship grows ever wider and stronger. And for an earlier video interview with 2009 volunteer Sara Peachey, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoRcV1zBIAs 20th Jan 2010 Hello From Rwanda! Well, I've finally made it! After months of planning and what seemed like a very long and nerve-wracking journey, I am finally in Rwanda! I arrived in Kigali, which is a crazy city... very hot and very dusty, very busy with lots of cars, motorcycles and people, but soon got away from the hustle and bustle, and am now in Musanze in the North. It's a very lush green town, and we have regular afternoon thunderstorms and showers... it's pretty hot, but not too bad and it cools down nicely at night.
The family I'm staying with is lovely.... Elie (the director of FCYF), his wife Bernadette (the headmistress of the nursery) and their four children, who are very sweet and speak fabulous English (compared to my Kinyrwandan which now stretches to hello and how are you!)
The town itself is very basic... I was worried about it being very touristy but it's definitely not! There are no big shops or bars... just tin-roofed shacks with the very basics. But it's very friendly and hopefully I'll be able to explore a bit more as I get a bit more confident with directions (it's like a maze!). We've spent the last few days setting up the Primary school which is due to open on Monday for the first time, so we've been working out menus, lesson plans, syllabuses etc. it's an amazing school, with very basic facilities (the classrooms are literally a concrete shell with some desks) and each class will have about 50 people in it. I was marking entrance papers so we could set pupils into the correct classes, and some are 13 but cannot write their name.
The poverty is pretty sad in many areas of the town... you see kids in very poor clothing or who are clearly mal-nourished or sick. Their houses are very basic... built from bricks and mud with a window but no lighting, no toilets and many people in one area. 29th Jan 2010 The Grand School Opening!  So this week saw the opening of the new "Wisdom" Primary School, which meant the end of last week was spent running around trying to get everything ready before the kids arrived and setting everything up.... I was lugging trees and stones and dirt (although I was probably lugging the same amount as a child 15 years younger than me, and not on my head!).
The school opened for registration on Monday. The school is quite unique in Rwanda.... it has been set up to provide an education to people in the local area, but because it has gained such a reputation (before it has even started!), the school is literally bursting at the seams with parents wanting to send their children here. Rwanda has recently changed its national language from French to English. We have an interesting mix of children who can speak some English and those who can only answer the ubiquitous "How are you?" and "What is your name?". The model of the school is to achieve a high standard of English-speaking by the end of the school (and calendar) year, so we definitely have a challenge ahead!
I have been teaching this week which was a little scary... a class filled with 60 5-7year olds and I had to entertain them for a few hours.... really quite daunting! Thank god for "Head, shoulders, knees and toes"... The kids are so cute! There are some who obviously come from more wealthy backgrounds but the majority is pretty poor, and for every one child who has paid school fees, there is another who pays in installments or who cannot afford to pay. A lot of have very poor or dirty clothing, have runny noses and sticky eyes, and they have holes in their shoes and sores on their feet. All the children are issued with uniforms.
This afternoon, I sat with a little boy and his sister and he chatted away to me in Kinya-rwandan for about twenty minutes, whilst I had no idea what he was saying, but he had a great time and introduced me to his brother when he came to pick him up! Next week we start teaching with a vengeance, with this rather epic challenge of making everyone speak English!
The school is so simple... its a series of concrete shells as classrooms, with one wall painted black for a blackboard and some desks (generally three or four to a desk). There is a dining hall and some toilets (holes into pits) and that’s pretty much it... it's quite refreshing really.
Otherwise, I'm slowly getting used to the climate... for the first few days we had torrential rainstorms every afternoon (I've learnt if it's cloudy and you see a Rwandan running, you run too, 'cos it's about to tip it down!), but since then it's been totally dry (very rare apparently) so the whole place has turned into a dust bowl! The food is fine... its basically beans and rice, beans and potatoes, beans and poshe (maize flour mixed with water into a lump), beans and rice...... basically its beans! The family is vegetarian, so meat is scarce (I think it is because of the cost...it is very expensive), but the fruit is great (I am even eating pineapple).
Next week I'm hoping to visit the deaf school and spend a bit longer in the nursery with the kids, as well as start teaching proper lessons at the primary school, and hopefully explore more of the town... I'm getting braver!
12th Feb 2010 240 children and four teachers...?!?  Hello! I know it's been a while since I last wrote but it has been a crazy few weeks! I can't believe I've been out here for nearly a month now; it's gone so fast! The last few weeks I've been working at the school which officially started teaching two weeks ago. We have so many children we don't know what to do with them... at the moment in the bottom class we have over 60 children in the one class, all sitting about 5 to a desk. It's insane!
They're very cute and are very excited to be at school, but you regularly have choruses of "Teacher, this one is beating me" or "Teacher Kat, please can I go outside for a short call" which is their rather sweet way of asking to go to the bathroom, and keeping track of them all is nigh on impossible! The other classes are no better, there are about 70 in second class, 50 in the third and 65 in the top class, but they don't seem to mind being crammed into desks and classrooms.
We were operating with only four teachers, but thankfully we have two more now, so we can help each other out.... our main problem is that there is such a huge range of abilities in the one class, from people who have never spoken English before to people who can at least tell you something. We also have children who are maybe 12 or 13 in classes for 8 and 9 year olds because they've never had a proper education before and who can barely hold a pencil and cannot write. So every day is a battle, but it's fun and very rewarding when a child who could speak no English at all can now tell you where his eyes are or that he can't find his book.
 Today I also visited the Deaf Centre, which is part of FCYF. They have 53 permanent boarders there and they were so excited to see me, I got hugged by all of them and then went to one of their lesson, and taught Kinyarwanda in sign language, which was an education. The school is one of its kind in Rwanda, and the children are very self-sufficient and many can articulate words. They're also learning English too so that may be easier for me to teach!! They have already given me a sign for my name (related to my hair, which everyone wanted to stroke!).
They have also developed an allotment to grow vegetables to feed their families. Some of these girls were only 15 years old and yet are responsible for themselves and four other children....
9th May 2010 Starting Term Two Several children were demoted to lower classes after last term’s exams results, which is a good thing as they were so far behind in their English understanding that they were literally understanding nothing. We have also divided the class of 70 children into two classes now of about 35: now the classrooms feel empty when you go into teach as there are only two or three children to a desk (unlike before when we had up to five). The children learn four core subjects: English, maths, science and SST (social studies, which is like geography and history combined) as well as Kinya-rwanda, and French for the older kids. The lessons are all taught in English, and by teachers who cannot speak the local language, so if the children do not understand, it can sometimes be very difficult to explain it to them (you have to do very practical lessons). For many of the children here, who can speak next to no English other than “Teacher Kat I want a pen “or” teacher, this one is beating me, I guess it must be a little like being taught in Ancient Greek. At the school, there is supposed to be no vernacular (which apparently means local language) spoken at all, and there are quite strict punishments for anyone caught talking Kinya-rwanda… although obviously, it happens all the time. I’m the only one that gets away with it… the kids love it when I (try to) speak Kinya-rwanda, and they all try to teach me, although I am the poorest of students! The content of the Rwandan syllabus is very different from what we have at home. A lot of the teaching is done by rote-learning definitions (“A home is a place where people live", A family is a group of people living together" etc)… if you ask any of the children, particularly the younger ones that can rattle these all off for you. I was in P1 (the lower class) last week and we were learning about Domestic Animals (“animals which live at home”) and examples of this were cows, goats, sheep, dogs and pigs… no guinea pigs or hamsters! Most families have animals living at home solely for food purposes, i.e. eggs, milk, meat. The school now has 300 chickens living in a hen house, to provide the school with eggs and meat (I was asked if I wanted to kill the chicken we ate for dinner the other day but I politely declined that very generous offer!), and we have four cows for milk. They also teach of the importance of the family and the roles of people within the family. I have to grit my teeth when we teach that the father is the head of the family and that he collects firewood and goes to work, whilst the mother cooks the food and washes the clothes, but I guess that is how it is here— everyone is shocked when I say that men do cooking in England! Another important topic that is taught over and over again is personal hygiene: the children are all taught how to wash and look after themselves properly and also the importance of using the latrine as a toilet (and not going just anywhere outside), washing their hands often and how often they should bathe. Some of the children are quite grubby and come to school in filthy uniforms. We have many illnesses here and they spread very quickly from one to another as they fail to wash their hands, blow their noses on their sleeves and sneeze all over each other (and me!). We’ve also had a lot of malaria cases recently… we’ve had some very wet days (it’s been a bit like England!), which I think has meant many mosquitoes, and so some pretty sick children.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time at the deaf centre. The centre
was established about 5 years ago and was one of the first in the country,
although there are now two more. It has 54 students, all of whom are boarders,
with differing levels of deafness, from partially to profoundly deaf. The
school has three classes (P1, P2 and P3) and there are two older boys who
attend the local primary school in P6 with support from their teachers who have
been trained to speak sign language. This is a huge step forward…. Children like this would have, in
previous years, been completely marginalised by society, but now are being
welcomed into local schools and being provided with the support and resources
they need. The centre
has also attracted the attention of the government, and last week whilst I was
there, a government minister visited. He seemed very moved by what he saw,
particularly when two deaf girls read out a letter of thanks in their broken
speech which they have learnt since being at the school. They also put on a
dance show for him, using a large drum to beat out the rhythm so that the
children can feel the vibrations through the floor. The children have also
written to Paul Kagame asking for him to visit, and there is a very high chance
he will do so in the coming months (cynically, this might be because there is
an election coming in August). I’ve been teaching at the deaf school which is quite a scary thing to do: although I know some sign language, many of the signs are different (they speak a mixture of local, British and American sign language), so you rely a lot on gesturing, drawing and pointing, getting the children to point to things so you are sure they understand... I can now explain basic things through signs, and many of the children are excellent at lip reading. There is also a little boy there who, although not deaf, has profound learning disabilities. He is an orphan and stays at the school all year, but he is full of fun and spends most of the time escaping from the classroom or being escorted back to his class. He again has been offered an opportunity to go to school in a society that does not have the resources to cope with those with disabilities. The deaf school also houses the Child Head of Household projects. These are children (last year’s project focused on the girls who were most at risk, but boys are joining the project from June). They have been orphaned and then left with the responsibility of looking after their younger siblings. Some of these girls are as young as 15, and have to cope with feeding, clothing and housing their brothers and sisters. As a result they have all left school, and they are very vulnerable… some have their own children and are also single parents. The girls are given a mentor in the community, they are given an allotment at the centre where they grow their food, and they are taught skills, which can hopefully give them opportunities in later life. They are learning painting and drawing, sewing, tailoring and knitting, basket weaving and woodcarving. I have been working with them and have so far made a very tiny basket (I am very slow!) and have started my wood carving of a gorilla’s face. I can honestly say I am the world’s worst wood carver, and mine only resembles a gorilla due to the rather quick intervention of the trainer!  The girls come every morning, Monday to Friday, and learn all of these skills with the help of dedicated trainers who are fairly brutal in their assessment of their work: if anything is slightly wrong, it is rejected and will not be sold, as they want the girls to learn that they have to work hard to be able to compete in the market, as these are skills many people have in the local area. The goods are sold in a local shop and the girls make a small cut of the profits. They also get counselling, a chance to share stories and troubles and some time to have fun. They have very little English, but we manage to communicate somehow!
The children are still loving being able to use colouring pencils, and last
week I organised an arts and crafts afternoon which was a lot of fun and the
kids thought was great…. All it involved was some coloured paper and some crayons, but we
couldn’t get them to go home at the end of the day, they were having so much
fun! We’ve also been donated a huge number of kids story books and I’ve started
a book club so they can come and read them. Most of the children just look at
the pictures and argue over who has the biggest book, but they love looking at
them… children don’t
have books at home so it’s the only chance they get. Even the older boys can be
seen reading Winnie the Pooh, provided you don’t let on that you can see them!
13th Jun 2010 Mother Nature's Fury
In terms of visitors, we have had a group of girls from Concordia University in Minnesota, America here for two weeks, working at the three schools we have (the nursery, the primary and the deaf school). It was great to have them here, and they joined in on all the activities including an excellent school trip which involved the whole of the primary and nursery school walking all the way into town along the main road (we were a crocodile of over 250 children!) and then climbing the nearby hill. The round trip was about three miles, and by the end of it, teachers and children were exhausted but it was a lot of fun! Still, the mind boggles at the health and safety forms we would have needed if we had done the same in England… here, we just took them out and hoped that we had the same number of kids when we got back! We handed out water and biscuits at the top of the hill, which caused a riot like none before! The Americans also helped us with sports afternoon on
Wednesday, although they didn’t like having to call it football instead of
soccer… we were playing at the town sports stadium, and due to lack of balls
and sports equipment, at one point I was playing a form of basic rugby, using
an empty water bottle as the ball!  It really was an amazing sight, to see 12-20 gorillas, lying out in the sun, rolling over, play- fighting, cleaning each other and swinging in trees. We were able to get so close to them, in some cases having to move rather quickly out of their way as they decided to move and change positions. At some points you could almost have reached out and touched them… yet they seemed totally unconcerned by our presence, yet they were aware, and it was fascinating to see the guides and trackers talking to them in their language. The large male silverbacks were huge with a massive six pack (!) and were a really spectacular sight, very much the dominant members of the family. We also saw some babies, with tiny hands and feet and curly (‘80s-perm-like) hair… absolutely gorgeous! I really can’t describe what an incredible experience it was, knowing that you were seeing some of the few remaining mountain gorillas in the world. I don’t think my photos do them justice.
I’ve also had the opportunity to have a bit of a holiday with mum and dad. We
visited Gisenyi, which is on the “coast” of Lake Kivu, a really large lake in
the west of Rwanda which shares its border with the DR of Congo, in fact we
drove to the DRC border, and you could look across the lake and see Goma, the
border town. Nowadays the lake has flourished as a beautiful destination and an
absolute haven for tropical birds and flowers. We drove along the shoreline of
the lake almost the length of the country, on what can only be described as
very bumpy roads (definitely an African massage!), through many different
communities, through tea, coffee and rice plantations and up and down almost
all of the thousands of hills that Rwanda is famous for. We visited the Nyngwe Forest, which is a huge forest in the south, with 13 species of primates and almost 250 species of birds… we saw monkeys on the road and many beautifully coloured birds on a walk through the forest. We went to a very thought-provoking Genocide Memorial in Murumbi, near to Butare. Mother Nature has unleashed its full force on Musanze in recent weeks and the result has been catastrophic for the community and our school. An unusually wet wet season (a sign of changing times the locals say) culminated in several days of torrential rain. As a result, the river running behind our school rose by at least 5 feet and washed away the school kitchen, carved a hole in the school cafeteria, took the school brick wall used as security and destroyed the girls toilet. The results were devastating, and show the real problems of soil erosion and overpopulation.  We can only be grateful that nobody was hurt… The children were at school whilst it was happening, and it could have been so much worse. The locals believe they will have a very poor harvest this season, and many people face the rather depressing thought of having to rebuild their houses and their lives. What is amazing is that the next day, we were back at school, operating as best as we could, with the kitchen in a spare classroom, the kids and teachers all sharing 4 toilets, the cafeteria moved into the girls dormitory and the girls moved into some spare classrooms, with some corrugated iron sheets acting as a fence… I think if it had happened in the UK, the school would have been closed, there would have been many forms to complete, investigations to carry out and the children offered counselling. Instead we just carried on with barely a hitch in our stride. Still, the damage that Mother Nature has wreaked on our school is devestating and the cost it will take to repair the damage and return us to some form of normality is a number that most Rwandans cannot even contemplate. Until we can raise those funds, we will just have to carry on as we are and be grateful that it could have been so much worse…
20th Jul 2010 Learning a new language, wedding bells and
elections... Deafness is not something that is well understood here in Rwanda, and certainly not well catered for. These children are some of the lucky few who have been given the opportunity to go to school and learn a language that they can communicate in. Many others are not so fortunate, and the streets are filled with those with a disability (physical or mental) who have no opportunities in a society too under-developed to cater for them. At the deaf school however, they have been given a voice and a group of friends with whom they can freely talk without stigma. A sad fact is that they don’t really want to go home for the holidays… at home they have no-one they can talk with, as their families cannot speak their language. Instead, they spend the weeks and months of the holidays in a world of silence, unable to communicate. I’m slowly learning their sign language… its all very complicated, as they speak Kinya-rwanda, learn in English and sign in American Sign Language most of the time (!), but I have picked up a lot of ASL now, and combined with my British Sign Language- knowledge plus a lot of miming, we get on remarkably well, and I really enjoy teaching them. It was a very proud moment when I signed the alphabet to the whole class and got a round of applause for my effort! The children are learning really well considering how little formal education they’ve had previous to coming to the Deaf School… many children were in mainstream schools, but without being able to fully lip-read (although this is something we are really encouraging them to do, as well as talk, as it makes them much more able to be part of the community and society as whole), they just sat at the back and struggled through. Understandably, in a class of 60-70 pupils, sometimes with one teacher to two classes at any one time, the teacher couldn’t spend time individually helping the deaf kids, and so they failed to progress. Our ultimate aim is to get the stronger children to attend our Primary School for the later classes (P4-P6)… this would be an amazing achievement, but would require a lot of funding as we need and want to give basic training to the teachers and need the money for school fees. At the moment, all deaf children attend the school for free or are sponsored by previous visitors… I am hoping to expand this because I can see how important education is for these children. We took the boarder children from the Primary School to the Deaf School (a very long 1 hour walk with kids complaining for most of the last ten minutes about how tired they were!!), and initially they laughed at the kids a little bit because of the strange noises they make or the distorted voices they have, but I think they were also a little unsure of what to do. But after a while, the kids were really interested and trying to learn lots of different signs, dancing along with the deaf kids and wouldn’t leave… we ended up walking home in the virtual dark!! The kids are learning all the regular subjects, in both English and Kinya-rwanda, as well as learning to lip read and articulate their words. Some of the children can speak really well and you can understand enough to realise what they are saying… they are even learning the National Anthem, with all the signs, and very movingly some of them are even able to sing it. In the afternoon, they are learning more vocational skills… basket weaving, wood-carving, carpentry, needlework, tailoring and mechanics. This is an ideal opportunity for them to learn skills that they will be able to use when they are older… in an ideal (and western) world, these children would grow up to work in banks and offices, but Rwanda is not quite ready for that, although hopefully things will change in time.  I discovered some heart-breaking stories behind the children’s deafness. Many of the children were born deaf, including three sisters who were all born with a hereditary disease, and another two sisters who were likewise both born deaf. Several children became deaf after contracting meningitis (some children were also left brain-damaged) and one child was left deaf after contracting malaria. There is one boy there who was born deaf; his brother is also deaf and at the school after he had an accident with an electricity cable when he was 9 months old. There is also a boy who was left seriously brain-damaged and deaf after he fell from his mother’s back, aged two weeks. Then there is the girl, who at the age of 14 suddenly went deaf, for no reason, no illness, just found that she could no longer hear. We have two children at the school who are not deaf but have profound learning difficulties. One boy, Zuzu, came to the school as an almost feral child…
his mother had died from HIV-related illnesses not long after he was born, and
the father had no other option but to leave him at home for hours on end whilst
he went out to work. The boy would literally climb the walls, was completely
uneducated and unable to speak… it is not known how long he spent at home on
his own with his father’s body when he too succumbed to AIDS, but he was
brought to the school by the police and he is slowly been taught to adapt and
to be a normal child. He’s a great kid and is always happy, but cannot stay still
for more than a few seconds, would happily eat until he burst and cannot really
express his feelings in words just yet. And we have one very sad case of a
young girl who was raped, and she has been so traumatised by the whole thing
that she has been mute ever since, unable to talk and express herself, despite
endless counselling… my heart breaks for her, and for all the kids, but they so
so enjoy school that you cannot help but have fun when you are there.
I’m on the two month countdown until I leave Rwanda which is a very scary thought… 10 months-away sounded like a really long time in January before I left, but the time seems to have whizzed by. We’ve had various visitors here over the last few weeks… a volunteer from America who is here for 5 weeks and my Auntie Margaret came for a few days at the end of her African holiday, so I’ve been doing some touristy things with them. We went to a large “Expo” fair in Kigali, which was a huge sprawl of craft shops, practical demonstrations, industrial companies, charities and food stalls. There was lots of music and dancing, both modern and traditional, and it was really interesting to see how companies and institutions were really working hard to help the country out of poverty. In fact if you only saw that in Rwanda, you would think that the country had no problems at all… We went on a walk to Lake Burera, which is very close to the Rwanda-Uganda border in the north-west. We got the bus to the nearest town, and then walked down to the shore-line from there. It was a great walk… we walked through really rural communities and saw many families living in various degrees of poverty and doing fairly depressing jobs to earn a living, including mining for volcanic soil which had dyed the ladies’ hand black and children doing heavy back-breaking work which you wouldn’t give a weight-lifter at home. The lake itself however was beautiful... very tranquil and calm, with some very exited kids swimming around in the water and catching small fish. With my aunt we hiked to the grave of Dian Fossey, the lady of the film “Gorillas In The Mist”. The walk to start with was pretty hard work but then (thank goodness!) it levelled out through a very ancient forest, with huge sprawling trees draped with vines and lichen (and other plant-type things that I have no idea what they are called!). Our guide had actually worked with Dian Fossey, so he had some great stories and memories of his time working with her. The end point of the walk was the camp of Dian Fossey and her workers. She was brutally murdered and buried next to the gorilla graveyard where her beloved gorillas were buried, including Digit, who was killed by poachers who cut off his hands and feet to sell to people to use as ashtrays. The graveyard is still in use, and gorillas as recently as last September have been buried there, but happily they are ones who have died of natural causes and not by the hand of man. It was quite a moving place and, eerily, as we arrived at the grave, the sun came out and shone directly on to it. At the primary school, we’ve had a
few school trips in the last few weeks. We went (the whole school, which is
more than 300 kids) to visit the National Police Training Academy in town,
where the kids were shown all the different buildings, the training rooms and
where they do weapons training... Obviously all the kids now want to be
policemen/women! I got told I’m too old to become a policewoman (they told me
they only take young people, which I thought nice!). We also went to the Hospital, which is the largest one in the District. It’s a good hospital, but there is an overall pervading smell of urine, disease and faeces. It’s just simple things: there is flaking paint everywhere, the beds have rust on them, and the routes around the hospital are littered with rocks and trip hazards... a health and safety nightmare. We visited the surgery rooms though and they all followed strict hygiene and barrier nursing. The kids were fascinated by things like the hospital stretchers, the wheelchairs, the gloves they wore and the hospital uniforms...  The other trip we went on was an epic, all-day school trip to Gisenyi, near Lake Kivu in the West. We went one week with Primary 3 & 4, and the following week with the lower classes. It was the first time that any school in the area had been on a school trip, so everyone was (over) excited! On the first trip we had about 120 kids, the second about 160 kids.... kids were sitting 7 to a seat!! I had the joy of sitting on a spare tyre in the boot with 13 other children... wonderful! The kids were so happy though... the excitement of being on a bus, of having a packed lunch (which was almost without fail eaten by 7 in the morning!), and when they finally saw the Lake, there were screams of excitement. We visited the aerodrome where there
were weather-recording machines (and an aeroplane which caused endless
excitement!), the Rwanda-Congo (Democratic Republic of) border, and the hot
springs, which were surprisingly hot, like boiling water... We also got to see the Marine Forces
Army Boats, and had a trip to the Serena Hotel on the lakeside. The kids were
fascinated by a vacuum cleaner, they loved the bedroom we were shown, the
restaurant and the swimming pool (am very surprised no one ended up in the
pool!), the gym, with all the exercise machines, and the general poshness of
the place. They had no idea how to use the toilets, how to flush them, dispense
the soap and use the hand drier. We went to the lakeside to eat lunch
(where we observed by the locals like we were aliens, and who hoovered up all
our left-overs)... the boarders all got food that we had prepared (with a
3:40am start that morning!!). As we were eating we suddenly turned round and
found most of the kids were stripped to their underpants and in the lake! The bus got slowly quieter as we
headed home, as kids stopped singing at the top of their voices and gradually
fell asleep... I’ve been doing a lot of work at the deaf school... my basket weaving is coming on and I’ve been teaching more regularly in various lessons. We are hoping that some of the kids will come to the Primary School next year, so we are looking for funding, and I’m organising a day for them to come and visit, so that the Primary kids can get used to their hand signs and noises/ voices, the deaf kids can see if they want to come, and the teachers can get an idea of the method of teaching... The Director of the deaf school has been showing me how he teaches them all to talk... he puts their hands against his throat so they can feel how the sound is made, or blows on their hands for letters that involve expelling air, so they know how it should feel to make that sound. It’s fascinating and amazing how well some of them can speak. Me and my aunt joined in on some dancing that they did for us... they can feel the vibrations of the drum through the floor, and, to be honest, had far more grace and rhythm than either me or my aunt!! So with less than 2 months left, I’ve got so much to cram in... finishing all my work, tourism, visiting people, meeting friends and saying goodbye. The Schools finish their term a month from today, so it’s really not long now... god, it’s gone so quickly... 5th Nov 2010 Two Graduations
We have also had the first Graduation Ceremony for the CHH project...
this is the vocational training project for girls (although the new
intake are both girls and boys) who have been orphaned and left with
responsibility for their siblings and their own upbringing. They have
been training in basket weaving, knitting, sewing and tailoring, and
wood carving and arts and crafts, and completed their final exams in
September. We celebrated their hard work and achievements with a big
graduation ceremony, giving them certificates and a bit of a party
afterwards. It was a fantastic day and possibly one of the best days I
have had while I’ve been in Rwanda. We were dressed in umushananas and
the girls were all dressed in their graduation outfits that they had all
made themselves. They performed beautiful dances and songs, including
one they had written themselves about FCYF, saying that it had made
their lives better, that FCYF had believed in them and given them a
chance where few others had. It really made me think... a graduation is
one place where you would like your parents to be. Happily though, the
Nkundabana (the mentors who look out for the CHH girls, monitor their
health and well-being and advocate for them whenever they can) all came
to the ceremony, and many photos were taken of the girls with their
certificates, their mentors and in most cases me! I was in more photos
than I was at my own graduation! Each mentor was giving 100Rwf for a
photo, and they looked as proud of their charge as any parent would be. Representatives from the sectors and district were there to lend their support, and the deaf children and the new CHH kids were there to dance, sing and join in on the fun. We had a simple lunch of bread, soda and sorghum beer (really quite disgusting!) and the event soon degenerated into everyone dancing... it was so lovely, they all said how great a day they’d had and how they had just had fun, forgotten their issues and just enjoyed what they were doing... we were dancing to the World Cup songs, the deaf kids pressed up against the speakers of the sound system we’d borrowed from the friend of a friend of a friend, so they could feel the vibrations. It was such fun and a real demonstration of how the project works and what it offers those children who effectively have nothing. The second graduation I went to was for the nursery children in Top Class who would be moving to Primary School next year. This was a real show of importance and achievement of the nursery school, and its slightly over-the-top extravagance made me a little uncomfortable. The graduates were all dressed in tiny gowns and proper mortar board hats (very cute when they’re only little themselves) and marched through the town from the bank to the nursery before putting on a marching display (like a poorly trained army!) for the parents. The mayor of the district and the Governor of the Province (a true VIP) were there, and it was a big display of FCYF’s projects to the community. All the different nursery classes performed dances and songs, as did the deaf kids, the CHH girls and the boarders from Primary School... they managed to make me cry, the younger ones particularly! 15th Nov 2010 Saying Goodbye...
Since the schools broke up for their holidays, my days have been
crazily busy as I’ve been manically running around trying to get done
everything I haven’t done in the last 10 months. I volunteered at a Street Children’s Project last week… there are a huge number of street children in Musanze. There are many boys, some of them disturbingly young, who have no choice but to live and / or beg on the streets, either because they are orphans or simply because their parents cannot cope with caring for them and providing for them. I know quite a few of the little boys and one of them I was talking to this week and he was wearing a soaking wet sweater, 6 sizes too big for him… he had gotten wet in the rain that had fallen 24 hours previously but he was still wet and had no other clothes to change into. The Project provides support and entertainment to try to keep them off the street. We just played games with them, sang songs and generally messed around… it is so easy to entertain them, they are generally so starved of any love, fun (and food) that they just want someone to take the time with them… I spent a good 20 minutes just tickling two children who did not tire of the game at all. We had a lot of fun, and inspirationally, the group was organised by children in the local secondary schools, some of whom had been street kids themselves until this charity saved them.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with the CHH (Child Headed Household) project in the last few weeks. After graduation, the girls who had completed their course have started to set up a co-operative and its becoming a really interesting journey. They have elected a president and a committee, and the girls all have to invest 200 Rwf (about 20p but a real struggle for them to raise) to start up the co-operative. What we are seeing though is that while the girls are very good at making baskets and embroidery etc they do not have much understanding about how to make them sell, and so as a group we have been trying to come up with some ideas to bring people to the shop and to attract more business. They have helped to make leaflets and name tags, and they are looking in to making a sign for the shop and making the shop look more attractive. And they are starting to show real understanding of how important this is for them and how it needs to work for them to bring in money… last week they were pricing their finished work and were wanting to up and up the prices because they knew that the profits would be coming to them. One girl has not turned up to the first three weeks of the co-operative sessions but turned up on Thursday, but the girls were not happy to simply allow her to just join and start claiming her share, as she hadn’t been there from the start. The President wanted her to pay 1000Rwf (£1 but she might well have said 1million Rwf for what the girl could afford)… crying and disagreements followed, and after some discussions and some suggestions that there might be other solutions to such a problem, a compromise was reached: the girl promised to work extra hours for a week to make up for her time. I also visited their houses as part of social work visits that are carried out every 3 months, and, despite having lived here for 10 months, the poverty I saw really opened my eyes. The CHH project is unique in that each child elects a mentor who agrees to oversee their well-being. The mentor comes from their community and voluntarily helps the child in so many ways… offering emotional and physical support, advocating at sector and government levels (some had managed to get houses built for their charges or for the government to give them a cow), monitoring their health, and in some cases feeding them when food is low. It builds on something that is so evident here in everything that Rwanda does… Community Spirit. When a child is orphaned they are automatically taken on by the community and supported… people will divide dwindling food supplies by one more, give shelter in an already crowded house and pay money from an empty purse. Today one mentor said that they do what they do voluntarily; there is no income from it, the income they get is to see the child happy and healthy and they know that they are helping... and that is enough. The houses that we visited were literally in the middle of no-where. Even if my life depended on it, I couldn’t get myself back there… we were in the foothills of the Muhabura Volcano, miles away from even a proper dirt track, never mind a proper road. We walked for 9 hours from house to house… if anyone were to fall ill and need hospital aid, it would require hours of walking carrying the sick in a stretcher… we were walking through huge fields of maize and bananas and beans, with small villages and settlements scattered in-between. A “good” house for these children would be one made from woven sticks with mud/ clay covering the holes between. But these would leak in the rain and slowly subside over time… and in these houses we would sit on one single bench, with a small pit for fire in the middle, and in the corner a small wooden structure as a bed. A whole house could be the size of a small bathroom in the UK. But there were poorer houses, where leafy branches were woven through the sticks of the structure and the wind rattled through at night. One house we went to was literally the size of a port-a-loo. But for many, it was an improvement on what they’d had in the past, and with FCYFs help, they had set up a small crop garden and had a goat to provide them with compost. Their mentors were very much in evidence… one girl who was sick was being cared for by her mentor when we arrived. Most of the children had been orphaned in the Genocide or the wars that followed. Some could not even remember when their parents had died, and very few had any memories of them as they had been babies when they lost them. They have been struggling to survive in poor conditions; some who had been taken in by other relatives have now lost them too and have faced second, third or fourth bereavement. One girl lost both her parents on the same day; one lost one to Genocide and one to illness. There was one girl whose mother was, and is, so traumatised by her memories of the war that she has had a complete breakdown and wanders the roads, leaving the girl and her siblings alone for days on end and having to care for themselves (and her). Several of the children had lost brothers and sisters in their care, through illness and disease. It was heartbreaking. But through all this gloom, there is hope. The children have developed strong friendships with the other girls in the project and they now have a social network and support system. The mentor system works very well and offers support in a community where helping each other is a part of life. And being visited by some Bazungu, who had taken time out to show that people like them matter, that they have not been forgotten, was for them a real gift… for me, I felt honoured to be welcomed in their homes and it made me realise how important the work of FCYF is. And now I am leaving. In the 10 months I’ve lived in Rwanda, I can honestly say that I have been made more welcome that I would ever have imagined. This truly is a an amazing country… it has come through so much dark history and so many difficult times, but has emerged a country full of promise, optimism and determination to succeed. If you look at Rwanda and just see its past, just see the Genocide, then you are not looking at the real Rwanda. The people here have so little but will give you so much. They will share their food, their homes and their lives in exchange for a hello and a hug. I’ve learnt so much while I’ve been here…I hope that FCYF and those who I have met have learnt from me too. In a recent UN survey, Rwanda is still one of the top 20 poorest countries in the world and so has a long way to go before the problems it faces are a thing of the past. You only have to walk down the street, go into a house or into a hospital to look at the yawning poverty that pervades, but the sense of community, the sense of determination and independence is inspirational and one I hope I can follow. My Rwandan Adventure has been an amazing experience, one I will never forget and to all the Rwandans who have contributed to it, I wish you well and I hope that you succeed in all that you want… Murakoze Cyane. |
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'A Life in the Day of' |