First Week of Teaching a Hit!

Our first week of English classes has been a busy one. We have had four teachers from Fawe girls school, which is a boarding school and ten teachers from Gisozi School, a K through secondary school nearby. We teach them in two groups so some can be reading with the LST team from Nashville, while the others are in group class.  We are team teaching most of the time, which has been nice. Since we teach each group for four hours, we leave Bryan and Holly Hixsons’, where we are staying, before eight each day and come home about 6:30 after a delicious dinner cooked by Shatia and Fanny, our cooks for that one meal Monday thru Thursday. This last week we then spent the evening planning lessons for the next day usually until after 11. We hope that this weekend we can get a little further ahead so we won’t have to spend so much time every night getting ready for the next day.

In spite of the long hours we have thoroughly enjoyed our first week and our students. Most are so eager to learn; they were even thrilled for us to give them homework for the weekend. They are giving up three of the four-week school break for our classes. We had them interview each other a lot this week as part of various exercises so we have learned a lot about their daily lives and the schools they teach at. For those of you who wish your class sizes in America were smaller. Gisozi School has around 2600 students and 44 teachers! The students come in two shifts, one at 7:15 until around noon the other from around noon until sometime after 4 pm. Jean de Dieu told us that his morning class has 48 students and his afternoon class has 49!!! And he is expected to teach these kids in English but he so far has only rudimentary skills?

For years I have been telling people that the world is getting smaller and smaller, meaning the differences between peoples and their ways of life are becoming smaller. However, this week we realized that the world isn’t quite as small as we thought. The vast majority (including all of the teachers in our classes) have not been touched all that much by the western world. Though they virtually all have cell phones and trenches are being dug all over the country to lay fiber optic cables, those trenches are being dug by hand with pick and shovels and only the upper few per cent of the Rwandans know what a hamburger is or have ever heard of McDonalds. There are no movie theaters in Kigali, the capital, and there is little western programming on their television. Most people do know that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. The few stores where we shop stock a lot of western goods but the prices are twice or more what we would pay for them in the States; there are no fast food restaurants and those where we have eaten average about $10-12 per person. This would be nearly a week’s wages of our teachers so they have likely never even set foot in these markets and restaurants. They do their shopping in the open markets where they can barter for the rice, beans and potatoes that are the staples of their lives. We are introducing them to peanut butter this next Thursday.

We start each day teaching them a song. This past week they ranged from “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ to finishing the week with ‘Jesus Loves Me’. Please pray that we will have an impact on their lives other than only improving their English skills but they may come to understand why we have come.

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