Family

I taught terms describing the family today, as a vehicle to teach possessive adjectives. I knew it was a risky subject in Rwanda, but also that I had to broach it eventually. It’s in the curriculum and it was part of a greater assignment I’m teaching on describing yourself. Many volunteers had taught it model school without any problems and I knew if I handled it tactfully the whole thing would go smoothly. Instead of having the children give their own examples, which I knew could be problematic, I decided to use my family for the entirety of the lesson. I drew out a family tree on the board in the beginning of class and labeled everyone on it; adding a few details like age and occupation to facilitate better sentences. We did exercises where they learned vocab regarding family relationships and used possessives to write sentences like “Michele’s grandmother’s name is Mary and she is retired.” There was a whole fake family for them to work off of, there were pictures to describe and details and I thought I had covered every angle to avoid the one thing you are always avoiding in Rwanda. At one point they wrote their own sentences using possessives during which I got roughly 40 variations of, “My [relative]’s name is…” Which turned out fine, except that I was writing the answers on the board and not only could I not spell any of the names, but I couldn’t say them either. This just led to general hilarity culminating in the moment when I misspelled the Rwandan president’s name. My system broke down around the end, when we were writing sentences like, “there are four uncles,” and one of my best students asked a question that seemed to silence everyone. “They are all alive? So many in your family? It is not that way in Rwanda.” This must have been building for a while and for a second I honestly had no idea what to say. All the people in my chart weren’t alive, but they had probably never seen this type of family tree before and wouldn’t have known that you count everyone, that you could go back as far as you liked making a chart like this. And even the deceased had occupations and ages listed, I was for whatever reasons of my own, acting like they were alive. I hadn’t included any indication of who was deceased, it didn’t seem necessary, although I had been painfully aware of these facts as I assembled my graphic. I took a deep breath and came back to the moment, I needed to answer, and on my second day I felt like this answer meant something for my time here.

“ No,” I finally said, “ they are not all alive, but in a chart like this you count everyone. Americans like to trace their histories back much farther than this.” I could see this wasn’t quite enough, my large family tree had clearly upset this girl, (although it did appear my tact had been enough for everyone else in the room).  Remember here that the oldest student  I teach is 14 and the oldest student in the school is 17 and that’s a lone female whose study was interrupted. These children were born in the after of Rwanda’s history, I am not calling back to mind Post Traumatic Stress – like memories for them. And although the tragedy didn’t simply end one day in 1994 they are all still too young to remember the worst of that. This is a different pain, of knowing that it is not this way things are everywhere, that I had been trying to avoid. She was still looking at me, so I took my chalk and shading in the triangles and circles of the deceased adding years underneath. This had an effect, the classic Rwandan, “eh baba we (oh goodness)” went through the room as they noticed the similarity in three of the dates. The girl’s face softened, almost as if to acknowledge that people outside of Rwanda know hardship too, that I wasn’t so foreign after all. “Life is hard all over,” I said “Death is universal.” It was the perfect thing to say, I was so proud of myself, until a few students said they were sorry and I replied, “Nta Kibazo (no worries)” and they broke into laughter as they do every time I speak Kinyarwanda. But maybe that was better, we were all laughing, and we were connecting, and the rest of the family lesson went off without a hitch.