Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Site Visit


This week we had our site visits, meaning that each of us was thrown out on our own into the countryside to spend four days visiting the schools we will be teaching at, the houses we will be living in and the communities we will attempt to integrate into. My site is a boarding school called Ecole Secondaire Ngara located in the Nyamagabe District of the Southern Province of Rwanda. It is a lower secondary boarding school meaning that they only teach levels Secondary 1 – 3 (the rough equivalents of an American Middle School). Here is all the technical stuff I’m sure you want to know:

1.     There are 267 students and they all wear orange (LIKE SYRACUSE ORANGE!! I think it’s a good sign!!) pull-overs with their numbers in the upper left hand corner,
2.     It is a math and physics specialization school – meaning that English lessons are a smaller portion of the day.
3.     The school is at the very top of a mountain at the end of a windy potholed road that is only accessible by  a 30min motorcycle ride. Yea I was not pleased either.
4.     My house is sick! I have a living room and two bedrooms because there is no other female staff to room with me. Also running water! (aka  spiget in a closet that doubles as my shower) Electricity from 6-9pm and a western toilet!! (that I need to pour water into to flush but hey). I live inside the compound of the school meaning there are several fences and an armed guard between me and the outside world; can’t complain there.
5.     I am the only female teacher and one of 3 female staff so there are potential problems there, but not anything other volunteers don’t deal with.
6.     I’m a 30min moto ride from Nyamagabe city the closest big city with a transport hub, bank, etc. There are bars and Chinese food there!!
7.     I am an hour away from 4 or 5 other volunteers in my training group and several others from previous groups who I don’t know yet.
8.     I am an hour from Butare, the second largest city in Rwanda and a major hub for other volunteers, NGOs etc. and the site of the national university of Rwanda.
9.     My school has a pretty baller project they are starting up to try and get a dining hall built on their campus which they want me to spearhead so I’m looking forward to getting involved in that.
10.  There’s  a volleyball court in the center of campus so I bought a ball in Nyamagabe city and started playing with the girls.

So it looks like I’m in for quite the adventure but after seeing the school and meeting the kids I’m really amped about it! It was hard coming back to Kamonyi and studying by kerosene lamp last night, I didn’t realize how much I missed electricity!!! The only real downside of my site is that it is kind of isolated. The village the school itself is in is incredibly small and from what I saw it will take 20 minutes to get to a reasonably sized village meaning I’m not sure how fast I will be able to integrate. I’ll just have to try extra hard not to get stuck in the trap of spending all my time at the school and only working on projects with them since a lot of the point of Peace Corps is to be a community volunteer. On a more positive note; very few people in my village called me Mizungu!! I think it’s the benefit of being the only one but people very quickly picked up on my name and remembered it when they saw me later! That is one word I will not miss!

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