Friday, May 15

Friday morning we woke up at our usual 6am to visit Green Hills Academy, a private school that's very well funded – President Kagame's children attend. As we took a tour of the grounds I was extremely impressed by how nice the perfectly landscaped campus was; obviously some of the money the school gets goes into looking prestigious as well as being prestigious. The school has a very interesting admissions system that's based on an entrance exam rather than simply being able to pay. If you score well enough on the exam and are admitted to the school then you pay fees based on what you can pay, so the rich families end up paying for some of the poorer kids' education.

I sat in on a 5th year class, and I loved it. The instructor, Teacher Caroline (Teacher is the title students use here), was teaching students who had been taught in French their whole lives up until 5 months ago. However, Green Hills is currently in the process of switching to all English teaching (I think both for practical reasons and because of Rwanda's current feelings toward France) and these students are now being taught in English. I really enjoyed Tr. Caroline's style of teaching – she had the class split up into teams and gave out our took away points from each team as a rewards/punishment. She had a policy of absolutely no French or Kinyarwanda spoken in the class otherwise she would deduct points, and she enforced it very strictly but still managed to be fun.

Her style was obviously effective as well because I was blown away by the English ability of the students. I was also amazed by their honesty – when she thought she heard French somewhere and asked a student if they had spoken French the students were always honest. I really enjoyed getting to observe and participate in her class. I also observed her teach English to students who had not been placed into a full immersion English setting, and the difference was striking. Their English level was nowhere near as good as her regular students. I got to spend time answering questions from the class, too, and it was really fun to hear the questions they came up with. They asked about everything from family, pets (extremely rare here), whether I know countless celebrities (Kobe Bryant, Miley Cyrus, and of course, Barack Obama), and the first question I always hear, where my loyalties lie in football (Best team: Barcelona, best player: Messi. Luckily I picked up a little in Scotland).

I then got to observe the students' option class, where they choose what classes they would like to have out of art, band, dance, and debate. Tr. Caroline was in charge of debate, so I went to that one. In case you were wondering, yes these are still 5th year students. First of all, who knows how to debate when they're 10 years old? But it gets even better – they debate in English. I was absolutely amazed. The topic was whether or not science has done more harm than good, and they raised points that I think some high schoolers would have trouble bringing up. They spoke properly, saying things like “for example” and “I would like to address a point raised by the third opposer” and sometimes rambled on for 5 minutes or more. After a while the teacher had me introduce myself and see if anyone wanted to ask me questions. I made the mistake of making a little joke about the topic which just launched everyone back into debate again. They didn't even hesitate to skip asking me questions! It was a little unbelievable.

After debate I ate lunch with the students and talked to the girl who mediated the debate, Kelley. If I'm completely honest, it was a little odd – I felt like I was talking to someone my age stuck in a 10 year old's body. I learned about her family, which sounded like one of the more wealthy ones attending the school, but I was most interested to hear about her father. Her father is currently serving in Sudan, in the force Rwanda sent to help fight the genocide in Darfur. While almost the whole world recognizes that a genocide is occurring in Darfur right now, the protective forces come largely from tiny little Rwanda. Rwanda: a country with little military to serve for its own defense but a country that knows firsthand why genocide needs to be stopped.

That afternoon we left Green Hills and headed up to the northwestern part of Rwanda, to a place a little bit outside of the city of Musanze. This part of the country shares the Virunga volcanic range with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the volcanoes are surrounded by a large jungle which is one of the few remaining habitats of mountain gorillas. The drive up was beautiful – the mountains would drift in and out of sight as the low lying clouds sailed along, all illuminated by the light of sunset.

We spent the night in a lodge right next to the Volcanoes National Park center where we would start our trek for gorillas the next day. It was very basic, back to wilderness accomodation and I loved it. At night I stepped outside and heard a collection of sounds I've never even dreamed of... the animals of the jungle are a little different than what you can hear at night in Iowa.