Week 8 (part 1)

Well it is difficult to believe that I am already more than half way through my placement here in Rwanda. It is a very special country with a really friendly people. You are made to feel welcome wherever you are.

Before I report on Gorilla Trekking, I have some more observations about Rwandan behaviours.

Personal space is not at all considered, it may be a function of living in the most densely populated country in Africa, perhaps it’s just that you get used to travelling in a "mutato" (minibus) with people sitting tightly together four on a double seat plus fold down aisle seat, with children as extra!

However, it is quite usual for friends to walk along holding hands. These can be same sex, same age, different age and / or different sex. It is quite usual to see two men holding hands they could be friends or possibly father and son.

Another feature that is quite surprising at first is that it is quite normal and acceptable to spit in the street, to scratch yourself, pick your nose in company, etc.

If you are invited by a Rwandan to join them for a drink or a meal you are not expected to pay. It would be considered rude to offer to do so. However, if you invite someone then you will be paying! So the best way of balancing things out is to offer as often as you are invited.

What has become less obvious to me now is that people walk around with brown envelopes. A postal service does not exist as we know it in the UK. Here it is almost non-existent. If you want something to be delivered you are likely to be taking it personally in a manila envelope!

Headteachers are often out of their schools to deliver documents to the sector or district level. There has been a campaign for a $100 laptop per pupil (gradually rolling out) but one per teacher or certainly one per headteacher would not go amiss. An email address for all and training in basic ICT for teachers and heads would be a real benefit to this country.

On Thursday the DEO was working with two headteachers on the production of a very important document. This required quite complex formatting including adding a front sheet before the contents table (difficult if not even one line has been left above it on the first page!), inserting pictures, setting up tables from which bar charts were to be drawn, etc. Tried to get across that the use of page breaks is best and not the use of many blank lines to alter where pages were split. It is a nightmare that no one uses page breaks. This means that every time they want to insert text, table or two, a picture or a chart they have to edit the start / finish of nearly every page.

Anyway we had done so well that the DEO invited us for lunch (see earlier)!