This week has been a loooooooong week. Anna went home for some weddings leaving me as the lone Muzungu at Sonrise, and this week was my week on duty. That basically means I have to be at school until 9pm for the whole week, and be at school on Saturday and Sunday. It was quite long, but also a very rewarding week. The highlight was definitely today when I got to accompany 23 girls from Sonrise to a celebration where they were awarded for scoring high on their national exams. There were about 50 girls recognized in the Northern Province, and I’m the proud teacher of 22 of them! Here’s a little recap of my day for you:
6:00 – My alarm clock goes off, you know, just in case they actually pick me up at 7am as they said.
7:27 – My teacher friend calls to tell me to walk to the courthouse to meet the bus.
7:30 – I arrive at the courthouse and carry on a conversation with Jean Claude who apparently has mistaken me for Kim, another Muzungu in town (we look nothing alike).
7:43 – Teacher friend calls to say there’s no room for me in the bus, but I stay at the courthouse to give them my camera, anyway.
7:57 – The bus arrives, and they decide to squeeze 5 (though it’s not really squeezing when it’s 7th grade girls) girls in the back seat to break the law to allow me to come along for the festivities.
8:00 – We stop by the bus station to service the bus.
8:03 – Depart the bus station.
8:34 – The first girl pukes.
8:39 – Several girls are feeling a little carsick, so we pull over and rearrange seats so that the sick ones don’t puke on other people.
8:45 – The second girl pukes.
8:47 – We reach the Gakenke district and stop to ask for directions to the ceremony.
8:53 – Head down the road to the field where the ceremony will take place.
8:56 – Girl #3 pukes.
9:00 – We arrive at the destination and get the girls all seated in their special seats and signed in to receive their awards.
9:30 – The ceremony begins! Only 1.5 hours late! For the next 54 or so minutes, we watched various dance troupes do various traditional dances.
10:24 – The emcee interviews a male teacher, a female teacher, a mother, a father, a high school boy, a high school girl, a primary school boy, and a primary school girl. She asks them what causes the gap between boys and girls in education. The female teacher noted the fact that girls are expected to do chores at home and thus have no time for revising. The high school boy mentioned the fact that girls are distracted for up to two weeks per month by menstruation (to which my male teacher friends responded, “That is so true! He really has a point!”). The primary boy said that when girls fall behind and ask boys for help, the boys say, “I’ll only help you if you’ll be my girlfriend,” and then the girl is distracted by the boy and thus never gets the academic help she was seeking. These are the only answers which got a reaction from the audience and thus the only ones which I had translated.
10:56 – Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for! The girls receive their gifts: a duffle bag, 4 dictionaries, an atlas, a mathematics set, a calculator, a watch, and 20,000RWF!
11:38 – Some women who care for orphans in the area were also recognized and given a cow as a gift.
12:01 – Representatives of the Inbuto Foundation brought gifts for the mayors, the governor, the first lady, and the president.
12:05 – The governor of the Northern Province gives his address.
12:26 – A crazy little man riles up the crowd, and the girls go dance in the field.
12:30 – Group photo time.
12:34 – We are finally dismissed, and then the girls finally see what I mean when I tell them that people stare at Muzungus. As the lone Muzungu among thousands of Rwandans, I got plenty of stares.
12:54 – We depart for Musanze.
1:42 – We arrive at Vision2020 for a good ol’ Rwandan buffet lunch. It was QUITE a treat for the girls! And they totally deserved it for being so diligent in their studies. I am so proud of them all!
2:43 – We take a group photo at Vision2020 and board the bus for Sonrise.
2:47 – The fourth girl pukes.
2:50 – We arrive at school and get the girls all their stuff stowed away in the Discipline Master’s office so no one will steal all their hard earned prizes.
3:22 – I ride the bus back to town with a girl who is going to the clinic tomorrow in Kigali.
3:25 – We get off the bus and meet her mother who invites me to her house.
3:30 – I visit with the family, see the family photo album, watch her little brother sing and dance my new favorite Rwandan song (Igipimo… I’ll sing it for you sometime if you Skype me!), drink Fanta, and watch random American music videos.
5:00 – I arrive home and finally get my first chance to relax and to update my blog in over a week!
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