Monday, July 22, 2013

Greetings from Eastern Rwanda!



The news around here is: we moved to our house in the community, we have internet as of right now, and I have found out the specific school where I will be mentoring teachers over the next few months.

As for the internet, I just set it up tonight: slow and steady definitely wins the race over here. It has been busy and very hot and dry as we are in the midst of the dry season. All the roads are very dusty and every plant within sight is coated in red dust. Yesterday we moved out to our house in the community - it was not exactly as predicted, but we are doing just fine so far and our front porch looks out over a lake. I have a picture but will have to load it later, perhaps in the city with faster internet.

We went to visit the three schools today and met some of the teachers. They are currently marking exams but the largest school mysteriously still had oodles of children running around. They were happy to greet us and practice their English (as well as calling us mzungu, mzungu of course) and we had some quick meetings with the teachers. We happened to have a driver this time as there were 6 or so of us running around together, and by the time we left, all the dust on the car had been converted to handprints and smears. The kids do love cars, but the driver was standing guard to make sure no real damage ensued.

Next week we start our intensive teacher training, and we plan to spend as much of this week as possible writing lesson plans and prepping and practising for Monday. We will also do a mini-lesson session with some of the local education advisors and organization staff to try out our content later on this week. Today we also decided which schools each of us will be placed at for the ongoing mentoring, post-training. I'm going to be at a school about 5 km away. I think I'll be taking a motorcycle taxi to work, which I always enjoy, so no worries there – it keeps that adrenaline flowing!!

To wrap up this post, I’ve got the score so far on bugs vs. humans in our new home…
 
Cockroaches: 0 (including Ned, our first pet), Mzungus: 2

The battle continues.

No comments:

Post a Comment