Starting work finally – sort of!!!!!!!!!!!

Well Monday was the day i was supposed to be starting work – but of course the schools are all now closed for their exams and then the holidays. I have wasted so much time messing around sorting out my job that I have missed the opportunity to go in and see much more than one school.
However its not a problem as for most of this week Michael and I have met and discussed what we are going to do , how we are going to work and have met other volunteers in their offices to see what we need to do when we finally get going.

In the middle of all this we took time to visit a fantastic museum at Nyanze. It has a reconstruction of the kings palace that he lived in until 1931. It is completely made of straw and wood and we had a fantastic personal guided tour by a Rwandan woman in costume who spoke impeccable French and whose historical knowledge of Rwanda was excellent. It was really interesting to see the photographs and information about the German and Austrian colonisers of the 19th century and read about the historical development of Rwanda. The guide never faltered under the bombardment of questions she got from Mike and Myself. The photos of the previous king of Rwanda were quite formidable. He looked about 7 feet tall. – It is one way of recognising the tutsi aristocracy because they are so tall . He died in mysterious circumstances in 1959 and was succeeded by his younger brother who is in exile in America. I came away feeling much more knowledgeable about the history of the country – an excellent afternoon’s visit.
The rest of the week has been taken up with meeting other volunteers and discussing our work. I am really looking forward to working with Michael. He is the only other primary head teacher here (many volunteers are secondary trained) and as such we speak the same educational language. Any of my primary colleagues reading this will know exactly what I mean.

I am in Butare today to meet some other education people and am catching up with Ruairi for a beer tonight. He has finally managed to get himself into the district office and get his hands on the statistics he needs to analyse the results of the schools in the gisagara district. Good for him – he deserves a medal. But it will be nice to see him and have a beer.