Mar 30, 2023
Readers of this blog clearly want to hear more about Manzi, a.k.a. Melvin, my landlord’s 7-year-old son. He is always up to something. A while back when I was grading tests in the courtyard at the end of the day, he spied my red Sharpie and he thought he should do some drawing with it. Manzi commandeered that Sharpie, ending my grading, and also took my black Sharpie and a neon yellow highlighter. He then took my chair and added another to serve as his desk. He drew a picture with a rainbow, a house, a couple of fish, a basket and some other things. When the light faded, he came into my house to continue his artwork. He was joined by Emmanuel, the teenager who cleans my house, who ripped off a flap of the box my toaster came in for his canvas. Then the electricity went out in the neighborhood, but that didn’t stop either of them. They turned on my bicycle light and continued drawing their pictures.
Mar 29, 2023
Term 2 is officially over. The grades are in the books and now the students must return home until Monday, April 17. I’m sure they are all looking forward to the break and some home cooking. For the students who cannot walk or take a motorcycle taxi home, which is most of the 500+ students, the school rents buses for them. Here are a group of students who are heading to Rwagatima, about 10 km away. Since the bus only holds about 30 people, another bus pulled up shortly after to take the rest of the students to Rwagatima. The students take only their backpacks and leave everything else behind in the dormitories. See you soon!
Mar 26, 2023
Exam proctoring, or ‘invigilation’ as its called in Rwanda, is one of the duties of each tutor. Sometimes boring, sometimes challenging, it’s part of the job and it has to be done. Usually, a tutor is assigned to a single classroom, but the number of students necessitates also using the dining hall. My colleague Onias, a tutor from Zimbabwe, and I had to invigilate exams in the dining hall. That means that there are two of use and 130+ students. That keeps us hopping. For the afternoon session, we devised a plan to place the exams down before allowing the students in to properly space them. That seemed to work. Here is a picture of the students at taking exams.
Mar 22, 2023
One of the end of term duties you have do is “floating invigilation.” This means that you have to sit in a central location and be ready to step into any one of six classrooms if the teacher needs to leave the room for any reason. I was doing floating invigilation the other day and at the end of the day, most students are finished with exams so they want to have fun. This group of Year 3 (HS seniors) led by Ms. Clementine came by to chat and to snap a few photos with me, which were then emailed to her. These are really precious times as you get to learn a little bit about the students’ lives which you don’t really have time to do in the classroom.
Mar 21, 2023
For as long as students have been sitting at wooden desks, they’ve been etching their names and drawing on them. Here’s a typical desk in one of the classrooms I was proctoring in recently.
Mar 20, 2023
Feathered visitors often come in my door when I leave it open. (For some reason, “The chicken is in the kitchen” was a difficult sentence for my Thai students to say; not sure if it poses a problem for my Rwandan students.) The chickens in the landlord’s courtyard like my house for some reason. This gal got in my house when I was in another room so I had to chase her out. My landlord, Jean Nepo, like a lot of Rwandans, raises a few chickens to sell. My principal is also has chickens. He’d like to do a project where we build a chicken coop at school so we get the eggs to add to the students’ food, thereby increasing their protein intake. Good idea!
