Nov 13, 2022
The teaching is easy and going well here. We absorbed 11 instructors from Zimbabwe so my teaching load is minimal. I’m pitching in in other ways, though. On Thursday as we were leaving school, one of the tutors (they use the British term) told me that I and two Rwandan tutors had to accompany the students to a 5-school debate competition on Saturday (yesterday). The debate was in English. On short notice, these smart and hard-working kids pulled it together and won the competition. So proud of them!
Nov 11, 2022
My neighbor Manzi is curious about everything. He wanted to try cooking spaghetti and eating it with chopsticks. Pretty good for a first try!
Nov 9, 2022
Shortly after I bought my bike, my colleague Emmanuel brought me to the place in Kabarore where I should get it repaired if need be. This place is by the market and is just a bunch of guys who fix bikes hanging around an open area. I got a flat the other day so I walked my bike over to them. My Kinyarwanda language skills aren’t good but I showed this guy the flat tire and he knew what to do. He expertly fixed the flat and pulled out a thin piece of wire about 3/4″ long from the tire, which was causing the slow leak. The total cost for this was 50 cents.
Nov 8, 2022
Regular readers of this blog want more of the adventures of my landlord’s son, Manzi, aka ‘Melvin.’ Last Saturday, I bought a toaster in Kigali. No one seems to have a toaster in this rural area of Rwanda and Melvin was very intrigued by it. He wanted to know how it worked and checked out all aspects of it. He made toast and slathered it with chocolate spread. When I made toast for myself, the fire detector that Peace Corps gave me went off. Melvin ran around with his hands over his ears. When he came over the next day to make toast, he asked me why didn’t the alarm say, “Fire! Fire!” again. (It was because I move the toaster from my kitchen to my living room.)
Nov 4, 2022
I was surprised to hear recently that only 5% of what we put in our recycling bins in the US is actually recycled. It’s very hard to break my habit of buying products packaged in single-use plastic, but I’m trying. Rwanda is wise to have banned plastic bags. There is no trash pickup in rural Rwanda, so my plastic garbage is, sad to say, burned by my landlord’s son.
Nov 4, 2022
Rwanda has many dirt roads, but amazingly Rwandans have the cleanest shoes of any group of people I have xever met. When in Rome…Here is a picture of my shoelaces about to get handwashed. I scrub my shoes about once a week here.
