Flying Kites

I was very surprised a fortnight ago when a huge box arrived at my PO Box in Kibungo. It turned out to be a large number of kites which children at the Greycoats Hospital School in Westminster, London had made for the children in my schools. Along with the handmade kites, the children had written beautiful letters to the kids here, sharing snippets about life in England and what they had learnt about Rwanda at school:

I had a great time distributing the kites last week, at two of my schools and the children were fascinated by them. With support, they wrote a few lines of thanks to the students in London, which I have posted back to them. It was great to provide them with a real purpose for writing and some of the children were quite inventive with their letter writing:

Of course the highlight of this project was seeing the kids tearing around in the playground trying to make the kites fly. Due to the lack of wind, it seemed the children who ran flat out had the most success with getting their kites to fly but lots of fun was had by all and I am sure the children will perfect their kite flying soon enough.

An adventurous journey home

My blogging has become a bit lapse recently as I have had the lovely Bebhinn staying at my house. Bebhinn is also a TMA with VSO and she has just started her placement in Rwamagana. I agreed to let her shadow me for a few days so she could see what the role entails.

Yesterday, Bebhinn and I visited one of my further-away schools. Unfortunately the head teacher informed us when we arrived that we could only stay for the morning as he had some business to attend to in the afternoon. We were not too upset by this and quickly made arrangements with our moto drivers to collect us at midday with the intention of being dropped in to town so we could do a spot of shopping, walk home and then get on with some admin tasks. Alas, it was not to be.....

Our motos arrived at midday ready to take us home but the Head Teacher then decided that we could not leave without taking lunch so our motos were asked to wait whilst we were presented with this:

After a delicious feast, we prepared to board our motos but the drivers had disappeared. Eventually we found Safari sleeping in an empty classroom. He told me it was about to rain so we should wait in the school for the storm to pass, and within minutes, the rain was bucketing down! The noise of it hitting the classroom roof was incredible - there is no way lessons can continue during that sort of downpour. Unfortunately the rain continued for another hour and we were not able to leave the school until 2pm. But then we were on our merry way.........

Until.....my moto broke down. I think rain water got inside the mechanism somehow which caused it to go "chug chug chug" and then die. (Technical terms, of course!). Bebhinn and I had quite the crowd of onlookers including a number of children who should have been in the school where we had been working. After 10 minutes of waiting, we decided to start walking home. We had a lovely walk for an hour or so, after which the motos, freshly mended, caught up with us, and whisked us home.

It was really nice to enjoy the landscape at a walking pace and we took lots of photos on our adventure. Here are a few of my favourites which demonstrate the variety of houses in my district.

As you can see Ngoma has lots of banana plantations. In the distance, you can just see one of the beautiful lakes, which lots of the teachers I work with enjoy visiting with picnics during the holiday.

ALOA Schools

Last week was incredibly busy as Moses and I collected data from four of the schools in our ALOA sectors.

The collection went relatively smoothly and it was certainly an interesting exercise. During the week, we assessed 60 children and I found it interesting to see how different their responses were to English children. For example, when asked reading comprehension questions, most of the children who did not know the answer would reply with a word from the excerpt, clearly trying to second-guess an answer, in contrast to children in the UK who would probably remain silent or say "I don't know". It also entertained me when many of the children answered the question "What hit Senga on the head?" with the answer "sister" instead of the correct answer, "rain". I am fairly sure they gave this answer because the story talks about Senga's family, not because they think sisters normally hit their siblings over the head!?!  I also discovered that most of the children could read nonsense words just as well as real words. I suppose they were sounding them all out and probably didn't comprehend the meaning of many of the real words, so this, sadly, would explain the lack of significant difference here.

On Wednesday, we visited the school which is in our comparative sector, a place where we do not provide any support but still collect data so that we can compare it to the data in the sectors where our intervention takes place. I found it hard to be at this school because the teachers and children were really eager to see, and work with, us and I had to confess that we would only visit again when it came to collecting more data. It then took us 4 hours to get home from this school, which is supposed to be an hour and a half on moto. But 10 minutes into the journey, the rain came down in torrents and we had to seek shelter next to a building. Thankfully, a door quickly opened and we were beckoned into a shop where we were able to dry out, buy tea and seat for an hour and a half until the rain stopped and we could continue our journey. I never knew rain could be so painful!

I took a few photos at the schools during the week, and here you can see the contrast between a classroom where we provide intervention, and one that doesn't get support from VSO: