So to continue my travel log, on Wednesday morning we went to FAWE, an all-girls boarding school. It was pretty obvious that there weren't too many boy visitors, especially American boys, as I seemed to be getting quite a bit of attention everywhere I walked. The first class I went to was just a Q&A session with the students there (S6, so the same as a senior in high school). They mostly just asked us about what America was like where we live and what the education system is like. We also had occasional questions regarding personal life, which were probably much more interesting to everyone involved. After answering simple questions like what we do for fun in America, we got to the juicy stuff that everyone apparently really wanted to know, like how old we we were. My reply that I was 20 years old was met with giggles and “ooohs” of surprise. When we were later asked if we were dating anybody the girls I was with seemed to make the deliberate effort to prevent me from having to answer the question and being asked for any premature marriage proposals.
The second class I sat in on was an S5 physics class, which was very impressive. The students were learning much more advanced concepts than I did when I was a senior in high school. I was also really taken aback by the students' eagerness to participate – not something that you see very often in America.
From FAWE we left for a local hospital, which was pretty much just a small clinic – it only served the local population of ~1,500 people. While I would normally be extremely excited at the prospect of seeing what a medical setting is like in another country, I didn't enjoy this visit at all. From the moment we our trucks pulled up I felt apprehensive – 15 people taking a tour of a tiny little hospital didn't really seem like it would be what the patients here would want to see. Hopefully sometime next week I'll be able to return in a smaller group and will have more to say about it, but for now I'll just move on.
After we broke for lunch we went to the Village of Hope, the Kigali branch of the Rwanda Women's Network. It was a little ways out of the main part of the city and almost felt like we were out in the countryside. When we arrived we were treated to a song performance by a few of the youth women who are a part of the network. We then learned all about the center as it is now – while I'm sill a little confused about how exactly it all works, I know that it does help a lot of women who would otherwise be unable to provide for themselves and their children. Many of the women have lost husbands to AIDS and are HIV+ themselves from the use of rape as a weapon of genocide; other women had husbands killed during the genocide or from diseases. The center gives the women the training and the means they need to perform a craft (like basketweaving) and then sells the products they make. All of the money from the sales goes straight into putting the women's children in school and keeping the center running. While everything is a little more expensive than market price, it's easy to justify spending what is only a small amount more from my perspective in order to put kids in school and support this organization.
After we did a bit of shopping, we went to a classroom where we were told all about the history of the center. It was awesome to hear about how everything started from the women who were around at the start themselves. It was a really inspirational story about women coming together after the genocide and trying to help each other out. The coolest moment, though, was when we were all done and about to leave. The big lady who had told us the whole history of the center walked over to me out of nowhere, gave me the biggest bear hug ever, and said murakoze (thank you).
Once we were done at the Village, we returned to FAWE to spend some more time with the students there. Everyone was still busy when we arrived, so we met with an American woman who was teaching at the school through WorldTeach. She was really cool and was able to give us a little more insight into what life was like at the school, especially for the teachers. I learned a lot more, though, once she recruited/harassed some students into coming and talking with us in a more small group environment. I talked to two girls who spoke English pretty much perfectly; I probably learned more about Rwanda from talking with them than everything else on the trip combined. Since we only had one of our cars available to us (one of our drivers had just had a baby born so we released him from service), only half of us were able to go to the orphanage that evening while the rest stayed to spend more time at FAWE. I had no problem staying and talking – it was the first time I'd really been able to know people outside of our bubble of Americans, and I was happy to talk about school and life in general between our countries.
To summarize my feelings after visiting the school, I can only say that I am extremely, extremely impressed. The ability, motivation, and dedication of 90% of the students at FAWE is probably about the same as the top 10% or less in America. Everybody here dreams of attending university in the USA, and to be honest they all deserve it. What's sad is that probably less than a quarter will actually succeed in that goal because it is so expensive/difficult to be accepted, while about a quarter of freshman college students in America will eventually end up dropping out from what usually amounts to lack of motivation. It really gave me a perspective on how much we take education for granted and on the unfairness of the global division of wealth.
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