…This is where the story ends, this is goodbye. (Thanks, ABBA!)
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my life in Rwanda this past year. I’ll be here for another week or so before heading home to Buffalo. Let me leave you with a common Rwandan expression, “Turi Kumwe” which means, “We are together.”
The star of this blog is undoubtedly Manzi a.k.a. Melvin, my landlord’s 7-year-old son. Readers should have one more dose of him before I finish this chapter of my life. Manzi is full of adventure. The other day I was ironing two pairs of pants and he said that he wanted to try ironing them. I hesitated, but then gave him a shot at it. Darn it, he was good at it! Manzi loves mangoes, and he often helps himself to any that I buy at the market. He also helps himself to the dishwashing soap to fill his new bubble blowing toy. I challenged him to balance the mango on his head as he blew bubbles. No problem for Melvin! The final bit of boyhood craziness involves bees. There was a swarm of them today on the construction site in our shared courtyard. He said, “Tim, watch this!” and swiped at them causing them to fly every which way. I told him that it wasn’t a good idea, but he persisted. He got stung and tried to capture a bee to bring it into me in my house. What a character!
The Year 1 and Year 2 students left very early on Friday. The Year 3’s are still at TTC Kabarore prepping for the national exams which start in a week or so. After the closing ceremony on Thursday evening (where I teared up during my speech, making this the third job I’ve cried when I left it), people just dispersed. No long goodbyes for the Rwandans. On Friday, I went to campus to say goodbye to some folks as Rwandans have a very anti-climactic way of leavetaking and I felt I wanted to spend more time with the colleagues I’ve been working with for the past 10 months. I was disappointed because very few were there. My principal, Gilbert Manishimwe, was there and he, Noella the bursar and Claire the librarian presented me with a gift. Gilbert snapped this photo of me that perfectly captured my sad-to-be-leaving mood.
Teaching is a good profession; it takes a lot of effort but it is worth it. Teachers work to properly develop other humans in many ways but sometimes you do not or cannot know the impact you have had on your students. At our closing ceremony, some students gave me pieces of paper with artwork and nice comments on them. Vanessa drew a picture of an airplane and wrote, “I will never forget you because you are my role model for the career of teaching.” These are the things a teacher will cherish when they are in their rocking chairs because it will prove you’ve had a positive effect on people. As Henry James said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
As time is drawing short in Kabarore, my landlord and his family wanted to throw me a going-away dinner. Jean Nepo, his wife Melissa, children Serge and Manzi (Melvin) and Serge’s BFF Emmanuel, the kid who cleans my house, attended. We exchanged gifts and sat down to a sumptuous dinner of chicken, rabbit, rice and Irish potatoes. We talked about how good it was to be neighbors and their current home improvement project. I thanked that for being kind of like my Rwandan family. They talked of visiting me in America someday. It was a very Peace Corps-y evening. If God wills it we will meet again, as my student Herene said the other day.
You could not make this up…This afternoon I posted about how there’s a sense of security inside a bed net because no critters get in. Well, this evening as I’m laying on the bed waiting for my landlord’s family to call to come to my going-away dinner, this little guy (he was about 2 inches long) appeared on the upper side panel of my bed net. I’m familiar with these little geckos from Thailand – they are everywhere there and totally harmless. I rolled up the bed net, shook him out and away he went.
