Familiar Sights

Monday was sadly (for me at least) our last day of normal activities in Rwanda, and as a group we were pretty exhausted so it ended up being as much a day of recovery/schoolwork as anything else.

In the morning a few other students and I visited ESCAF, the primary school run by Jotham, the uncle of my sort-of relative at UNI. ESCAF is a private school, but the fees are extremely low compared to other schools such as Green Hills. I think we all agreed that what the school does with the resources it has is completely amazing. We were treated to songs or other performances in every class we visited, and usually the headmaster (who was escorting us around the school) would ask a few students some random questions for them to demonstrate their knowledge. A few things really stood out to me:

- The discipline of the nursery school. These were ~4 year old kids, yet obediently listened to the teacher, sang us a welcome song, and jumped out of their seats to be called on to list English consonants.
- When we visited a P3 (3rd grader) class, instead of singing songs they performed dialogues that they learn. A dialogue that 2 students performed for us was about HIV/AIDS. I am sooooo in support of an honest education about HIV, especially starting with children. Awareness is the easiest way to fight HIV.
- The overall feeling of welcome we received at the school. When the kids went on break we hung out with them for a while, and I think I shook about 200 hands in 15 minutes. Everyone from the students to the teachers all the way up to the headmaster was so happy to see us and so positive about the school... the feeling was contagious.

In the afternoon we went to another women's center in Kigali, just like the one I described many blogs ago. We were warmly welcomed, as always in Rwanda, and given a description of the women's network. It probably would have been more interesting if we hadn't already been to a place nearly identical already, but it was good to learn more about the network that connects all the women's centers.

After that visit we went back to the hotel, supposedly to do some school work, but I just passed out for a couple hours instead. I am totally against naps (and sleeping in general... just a waste of my life), but it was pretty much necessary at that time.

In the evening we went for dinner at Bourbon Coffee Co., which is pretty much the Starbucks of Rwanda. It was kind of nice to have a taste of home, but I really had mixed feelings about it in general. We didn't come to Rwanda in order to seek out the most Westernized experiences we could, we came to learn about and experience Rwanda. If I had to venture a guess as to the number of white people in all of Rwanda, I would say somewhere around 1,000 of the 10,000,000 people in the country - about .1% of the population. I'd also say Bourbon Coffee usually had about 50-75% muzungus. Probably not a place to learn about Rwanda. I'm really glad that we didn't go to Bourbon before the end of our trip, otherwise I'm afraid our group would have only been concerned with going there all the time instead of enjoying what Rwanda was offering us.