Flexibility

There is a running joke at our house here in Musanze about my lack of flexibility.  I cannot bend over and touch my toes; I can barely even reach past my knees.  Kat tries to help me by making me do yoga and ballerina stretches when she is in town, but my basketball body can’t help but laugh when she tells me things like, “Now put your forehead on the ground.”

Oftentimes when I walk from the high school to the primary school, I pass Sonrise’s huge garden full of hardworking women, many of who have babies tied on their backs, all of whom are bent over, folded completely in half like lawn chairs.  Their flexibility astounds me.  Who needs yoga when there is a garden to tend?

While I am not very physically flexible, Rwanda is teaching me to be flexible in other ways.  For example, I spent all last week preparing Powerpoint presentations for my English classes on Monday.  They were beautiful, if I do say so myself!  I left my house at 6:45am and hopped on a moto-taxi thinking I had plenty of time to get to school and get everything set up before my 7:30am class.  I arrived, checked out a projector from the IT department and took it to S1C where I was informed that they had no outlets in their classroom, so I could not use the projector.  So, I had to scratch those beautiful Powerpoints and revert to the ol’ chalkboard to teach my kids about sentences.  And you know what?  Those kids learned about sentences.

This kind of flexibility comes no more naturally to me than physical flexibility.  My natural inclination is to be fifteen minutes early, always.  I love to make plans, and I get frustrated when they fall through.  It is only by traveling around the world that I have acquired this new skill.  When meetings are scheduled for Monday morning, it is my newfound flexibility that has allowed me to show up to that meeting on Thursday afternoon with a smile on my face.  Or to happily eat really tough chicken when the restaurant has run out of beef and fish before we have arrived.  Or to teach someone else’s class with one minute’s notice because things are “unsettled.”

Rwanda is stretching me as much as Kat, my yoga instructor, stretches me.  Hopefully by the time I leave this beautiful place, I will not only be able to touch my toes, but also to truly keep having a positive attitude when things don’t go quite as I had planned.