Education 2 COS
By Ian Reed Ross, ED2
For the last time, the Bethanie Hotel in Kibuye opened its gates wide to accommodate the nearly 60 volunteers of Education 2. The conference room was hung with flip charts with titles like “What I liked best…” and “A souvenir I’d like to take back…” and we were encouraged to fill in the empty pages with our own contributions. Once again, tourists from around the world reserved their place in a secluded resort on beautiful Lake Kivu only to find themselves surrounded by Americans. Hopefully the semi-open buffet provided some consolation.
We covered the many important COS rituals—description of service, medical, safety, saying goodbye, COS checklist, lots of forms, and so on—that every input will cover. But my favorite parts of the conference were those that invited us to reflect upon our service. In reminiscing, rehashing, we delved into the more personal side of being volunteers. Out of the formulaic, sometimes cliché aspects of a conference, a unique element emerged—us.
The infamous ‘energizer’ breaks were peppered with anonymous stories about our funniest moments in Rwanda. Throughout the conference, someone would pick one of the stories out of a box to read at random and, while laughter was still subsiding, we would try to guess who wrote it down. Hearing about Danny Taylor-Shaut’s umukozi (domestic worker), who, among many other weird things, shaved his eyebrows off ‘because he was hot,’ lightened the pensive mood that came with thinking about what’s next in our lives.
Not every part of looking back was light-hearted. We all know that being a foreigner here in Rwanda is not easy. After living in Rwanda for two years, nearly all of us still struggle with the feeling of being outsiders, of being stared at like animals, and being reminded by passersby that we are not Rwemas or Mahoros or Mutonis, but abazungu, a word whose meaning ranges from rich man to White man.
When this came up in one of our first sessions, we began to vent our anger and bitterness and it became clear how taxing these feelings still are. It helps that, over time, people in town get to know you and get used to you. Gradually, you hear your own name more and more frequently. You overhear people correcting others, saying ‘that’s so and so, not muzungu.’ But as the catharsis continued to pour out in a series of complaints about Rwanda, we were reminded that the change that we brought often doesn’t carry as far as a 30 minute walk outside of our villages.
If our contribution feels small, however, it’s only because we are considering it on an individual level, what each one of us has done in each of our sites. Collectively, our contribution is very great because it provides a foundation for others to build on. Our presence has helped to add ‘Peace Corps’ to the growing vocabulary list of NGOs operating in Rwanda and to add complexity to the Rwandan definition of umunyamerica. Outside of BCR Bank in Kamembe, I heard one guard tell another that the abazungu that speak Kinyarwanda are Americans.
We’ve broken in over 50 new sites, worked on pooling our own country-specific resources, such as a school curriculum, and taken part in ongoing PC Rwanda secondary projects such as English for Judges and GLOW/BE, expanding and streamlining them. Ed 2’s service has been about building up our program and increasing opportunities for future volunteers. We’ve often been told that Rwanda’s status as a new country program would have both downsides and rewards. We’ve all had to exercise patience, knowing that things are still being established. And in turn, we get to watch two processes of development at once, that of Rwanda and that of Peace Corps Rwanda.
Despite being appointed to a new program, one that’s still evolving and catching up as we’re in it, Rwanda was a great post. I feel lucky to have served here. Because Rwanda switched its education system from French to English as recently as 2008, the opportunities to help have been abundant. The small changes we make might snowball into larger ones as students become teachers, girls feel inspired to do great things as a result of GLOW camps, and participants in the English for Judges program have a better grasp of the new official language. Even people who we talk to for five minutes and never see again gain a little something from our interaction.
At COS, we asked ourselves, ‘How can we condense the story of our service into a bite-sized clip? Something we can tell the folks at home when they ask us what Rwanda was like.’ The consensus was that we can’t, really. In our 2 years in Rwanda, we’ve all had such vast and varied experiences that they are impossible to summarize, to take away a single moral, as I imagined I’d be able to when I submitted my application to Peace Corps.
When I talk about my service, to those who are interested in listening at length, I’ll probably tiptoe around the doubts and fears that I’ve had throughout my service. It won’t be hard, because there’s a lot of good memories and a lot to be positive about. And if those who are listening don’t understand the point of all my ramblings about the bus ride through Nyungwe forest, banana beer, or the Rwandan education system and how it could be improved, that’s fine. Our experiences in service were personal journeys. Reflecting on mine, I see that many of the meaningful changes were personal too. Patience, maturity, perspective, a sense of humor, I feel like all of it belongs to this place and the people I’ve met along the way. It will be hard to say goodbye.
We covered the many important COS rituals—description of service, medical, safety, saying goodbye, COS checklist, lots of forms, and so on—that every input will cover. But my favorite parts of the conference were those that invited us to reflect upon our service. In reminiscing, rehashing, we delved into the more personal side of being volunteers. Out of the formulaic, sometimes cliché aspects of a conference, a unique element emerged—us.
The infamous ‘energizer’ breaks were peppered with anonymous stories about our funniest moments in Rwanda. Throughout the conference, someone would pick one of the stories out of a box to read at random and, while laughter was still subsiding, we would try to guess who wrote it down. Hearing about Danny Taylor-Shaut’s umukozi (domestic worker), who, among many other weird things, shaved his eyebrows off ‘because he was hot,’ lightened the pensive mood that came with thinking about what’s next in our lives.
Not every part of looking back was light-hearted. We all know that being a foreigner here in Rwanda is not easy. After living in Rwanda for two years, nearly all of us still struggle with the feeling of being outsiders, of being stared at like animals, and being reminded by passersby that we are not Rwemas or Mahoros or Mutonis, but abazungu, a word whose meaning ranges from rich man to White man.
When this came up in one of our first sessions, we began to vent our anger and bitterness and it became clear how taxing these feelings still are. It helps that, over time, people in town get to know you and get used to you. Gradually, you hear your own name more and more frequently. You overhear people correcting others, saying ‘that’s so and so, not muzungu.’ But as the catharsis continued to pour out in a series of complaints about Rwanda, we were reminded that the change that we brought often doesn’t carry as far as a 30 minute walk outside of our villages.
If our contribution feels small, however, it’s only because we are considering it on an individual level, what each one of us has done in each of our sites. Collectively, our contribution is very great because it provides a foundation for others to build on. Our presence has helped to add ‘Peace Corps’ to the growing vocabulary list of NGOs operating in Rwanda and to add complexity to the Rwandan definition of umunyamerica. Outside of BCR Bank in Kamembe, I heard one guard tell another that the abazungu that speak Kinyarwanda are Americans.
We’ve broken in over 50 new sites, worked on pooling our own country-specific resources, such as a school curriculum, and taken part in ongoing PC Rwanda secondary projects such as English for Judges and GLOW/BE, expanding and streamlining them. Ed 2’s service has been about building up our program and increasing opportunities for future volunteers. We’ve often been told that Rwanda’s status as a new country program would have both downsides and rewards. We’ve all had to exercise patience, knowing that things are still being established. And in turn, we get to watch two processes of development at once, that of Rwanda and that of Peace Corps Rwanda.
Despite being appointed to a new program, one that’s still evolving and catching up as we’re in it, Rwanda was a great post. I feel lucky to have served here. Because Rwanda switched its education system from French to English as recently as 2008, the opportunities to help have been abundant. The small changes we make might snowball into larger ones as students become teachers, girls feel inspired to do great things as a result of GLOW camps, and participants in the English for Judges program have a better grasp of the new official language. Even people who we talk to for five minutes and never see again gain a little something from our interaction.
At COS, we asked ourselves, ‘How can we condense the story of our service into a bite-sized clip? Something we can tell the folks at home when they ask us what Rwanda was like.’ The consensus was that we can’t, really. In our 2 years in Rwanda, we’ve all had such vast and varied experiences that they are impossible to summarize, to take away a single moral, as I imagined I’d be able to when I submitted my application to Peace Corps.
When I talk about my service, to those who are interested in listening at length, I’ll probably tiptoe around the doubts and fears that I’ve had throughout my service. It won’t be hard, because there’s a lot of good memories and a lot to be positive about. And if those who are listening don’t understand the point of all my ramblings about the bus ride through Nyungwe forest, banana beer, or the Rwandan education system and how it could be improved, that’s fine. Our experiences in service were personal journeys. Reflecting on mine, I see that many of the meaningful changes were personal too. Patience, maturity, perspective, a sense of humor, I feel like all of it belongs to this place and the people I’ve met along the way. It will be hard to say goodbye.