Seriously, where am I?

On my final weekend before school started, I went to visit Mark and Matt, fellow transfers from Mauritania. They get the prize for sweetest set-up in Peace Corps Rwanda. They are working at a university and living on the campus, overlooking gorgeous Lake Kivu (16th largest lake in the world, you know!). The boys live together in a cushy 3-bedroom house with a furnished living room, indoor bathroom, running water, kitchen with 4-burner electric stove/oven and fridge, and free high-speed wireless internet. Not exactly roughing it! But fortunately, Mark and Matt are quite amenable to receiving visitors. We had fun making some delicious food (facilitated by a care package -- thanks, Yates!) and night-swimming in the lake. The water is a ridiculously perfect temperature, at all times of day and all seasons of the year. The full moon was rising over us just as we waded in, and if I swam out far enough I could see it barely peeking through the trees. It was one of those ridiculous moments where you look around like: seriously, where am I?!

The boys' site is about two and a half hours from Kigali. On my bus ride there, I grabbed a window seat and settled in with my iPod. After a bit, I happened to see the girl two over from me with some viscous liquid on her hand, dripping onto my backpack on the floor below her. My initial thought was: aw, poor girl, did she break an egg or something? I noticed she was holding a brown paper bag -- which she promptly puked into. AND then the girl between us joined in vomiting too, in the same bag!! Unbelievable, so gross. Leaking all over the floor, onto my stuff, which they didn't even attempt to wipe off. And wryly I remembered PCVs' horror travel stories about people spewing out of control on these buses. In this "Land of a Thousand Hills," the roads have many twists and turns, and yes, the drivers tend to whip around them, but get it together. Honestly.

Sure enough, there was more throwing up on my ride back.

School has been a little slow getting started here, unsurprisingly. For the first week I just played secretary and helped to register new kids (continuing in my valiant struggle to interpret Kinyarwanda names). It's a boarding school, so before classes could really get underway, we had to wait for at least the majority of students to arrive. They came from all over the country, rolling up to the school on motorcycle taxis or in private cars, each kid invariably toting the same things: a backpack, a small suitcase, a bucket with a lid, and a rolled-up foam pad mattress. Guess that's all you need for boarding school in Rwanda.

Now, two full weeks since our start date, a few slackers are still trickling in, but stuff has gotten started at least. I am teaching all 5 or 6 sections of the highest level at our school, S4 (4th year of secondary school, about equivalent to 10th grade American). For English, each section has two one-hour classes per week. I am thrilled about only teaching one level, because that means only one level to plan for. Planning is what takes forever here, when you're working with such limited resources. In Mauritania I only taught 8 hours per week, but that was for 4 different levels. I much prefer this.

I'm really impressed with the kids. I feel like we run a pretty tight ship at our school, so there aren't discipline issues. The biggest struggle for me, I think, will be working with such a multi-level classroom. I have some students who grew up in anglophone Uganda and are absolutely fluent in English. One doesn't even speak Kinyarwanda! So of course these kids are bored out of their minds when I am speaking painstakingly deliberately in my "Special English."

But overall, teaching has put a pep back in my step. The general skill level here is enabling me to do so much more than I could in Mauritania. This past Thursday I'd wanted to do a lesson on Nelson Mandela, since February 11 was the 20th anniversary of his release from prison (a fact I knew only from the relentless coverage on BBC and Voice of America). Completely coincidentally, when visiting Mark I had just gotten a copy of the movie Invictus, which so happens to be all about Mandela. I haven't even watched it yet, but I thought I'd flip through it just to see if there might be anything to jump out at me. And what do you know, the very opening scene reads: "South Africa: February 11, 1990" -- followed by real footage of Mandela (due respect to Morgan Freeman). How perfect, I thought! Am I brave enough to show this clip in class? I wouldn't have dared in Mauritania, with 75 wild kids in a single classroom. But here, the classes are a relatively much more manageable size, 30-40, and they're so good.

Well, I dared. And it was GREAT! After watching the clip, kids that hadn't spoken all class were suddenly raising their hands. I loved it. They picked up on the white and black boys playing football separately, visual evidence of apartheid. And when I asked what it means for a country to be democratic, one girl told me, haltingly with crisp enunciation, "It means a government of the people." "Yes!" I replied, impressed with the answer. But she wasn't done: "...by the people, for the people." Are you kidding me?! Seriously, where am I?