This gives an idea of how crowded together the houses are - this is on the first day when it was sunny!

We left through rivers of sludge and returned home soaked through to the skin - but at least we had paula's tiny concrete house to go to and we could get our electric kettle to make our hot water bottles and thaw out. I wondered what it was like for those poor people to return to their mud shelters with puddles on the mud floor where the rain came in and no way of getting warm and dry until maybe the sun came out the next day. A very humbling experience and one I feel very priviliged to have been part of.

The training we were doing was based on something which Michael and Ihave developed and it is designed specifically to encourage non english speaking teachers to practise how to ask questions in maths in English and to develop their basic maths vocabulary. We are really proud of it!!! And we know that it works well - and also that other volunteers like our training and are starting to use it too. BY the end of the week we could hear the difference and could hear the teachers using english with each other and singing the songs we had taught them. It is very satisfying to know that it will help them.

It was quite a challenging week in many ways, not least because of their lack of basic english language. The rooms we were working in were the classrooms of the school which has 4000 children. Each room was tiny possibly a half at the most of the size of an english classroom. There are only four small gaps in the mud walls for the light to come in and of course no electricity.
When the clouds and the storm came on the second day we had to huddle the woooden benches together in a corner so that they could even hear myself and Celestin (congolese trainer i was working with.) We couldnt see because we had to shut the door as it was so cold and then the clouds actually starting drifting in through the space which was the window.
It was miserable and cold and dark and wet and one young man only had on a short sleeved shirt. I asked him if he was cold and he answered "Yes but I don't have a sweater". At which point I took off my pink pashmina and wrapped it round him and he wore it for the rest of the morning looking like a strange male madonna in pink.

I have just spent an unforgettable week working in a congolese refugee camp. It holds 19000 people and has been there for 15 years - but it looks anything but temporary. The houses are tiny shelters made from bamboo and mud, crammed together on the very top of the most inhospitable and unwelcoming hill in BYumba. The camp is sited on the land which is of least use to rwandans and it is a desolate place, yet beautiful too as it looks down on tops of green mountains from all sides..
We were trying to train teachers in how to teach maths in english, but as the teachers are congolese refugees they speak excellent french and little english.

This week has been genocide memorial week, which is mainly why we went out to Lake Kivu to avoid the memorial services which have been taking place. Its quite weird as the whole country becomes subdued. There is no loud pop music only religious singing and always before in Rwanda there have been many many people around walking up and down the roads and dirt tracks. Shyogwe was like a ghost town when I got back. There was a huge meeting in the big hall where people were singing religious songs and sharing their experiences. Its all quite strange, but Rwanda is an extremely religious country. It is an interesting topic of conversation as it is almost as though people do not expect to do anything else. It is not questioned that you go to church for four hours on sunday and listen to people evangelicising. And it is the same with genocide memorial week. It is impossible to get your head round the national phsyche of a country like this.

This is the crowd of children saying goodbye to us when we visited a very remote school. We were actually in the diocesan car with 2 american ladies and pasteur emmanual. They went in the church and we went into the classrooms and helped with lessons. It took us over an hour in the four by four to get up the tracks to the school, many of which looked no better than footpaths. The children are so excited to see you - its more than possible that they have never ever seen a white person in their lives which is quite an extraordinary thought. But considering how long it took us in a car to get to their village its unlikely that they have ever been anywhere near civilisation. It kind of makes you think you must know how the Queen feels to be the object of such cheering and excitement. It also makes you remember how lucky you are that you can just travel anywhere whenever and however you want to

This was part of the training we have been doing for the teachers. We were in a very remote school which took 1 hour to reach on a moto up the dirt tracks. The teachers were absolutely lovely and they joined in with everything we asked them to do from "What time is it Mr Wolf" to being angleometers ie making different sorts of angles with their arms. Apart from making rice sacks with them which we wrote on in marker pens to give all the vocabulary you need to teach maths in english, we did all sorts of things which gave them ideas for different ways of teaching their lessons. Everything has to be free because there are no resources. So we cut up old mattresses and made dice and we collected bottle tops so that the children had something to count with. In this picture the teachers are arranging themselves from the smallest to the tallest. The lady at the back is called Yvette and she was a great sport - she got really competitive when we were playing addition and subtraction bingo. But they were all lovely people and so grateful to us for going and doing the training. The more remote the schools the less help they get, so although Michael and I had very sore backsides from riding up the dirt tracks on the back of motor bikes for an hour it was more than worth it. We were really sad to say goodbye to them and I hope that they manage to use some of the ideas we gave them.