Placed!

I found out my placement yesterday!

I'll be teaching at Stella Matutina Secondary School in the town of Shyorongi (I think...), situated in the lower part of Rwanda's Northern Province, just 30-45 minutes north of Kigali. Stella (I can call it Stella now because I'm soooo there) is an all-girls Catholic boarding school with about 440 students and 22 teachers/staff. According to my field director, they've requested a teacher for math and science, but may use me for other subjects as well.

Score: I have my own little apartment! It's right across the street from the school, and it seems like the other teachers (/nuns? I can't tell if the other teachers are all nuns) will live nearby, possibly sharing a dining room with me. From what I can tell, I'll have a bedroom, kitchen, and guest room. I won't have running water (hooray for adjustment!) but the apartment and the school are tricked out with electricity and internet! This is big news for me, as I'm guessing it'll make things far easier both for teaching and for communicating with home. The other teachers at the school speak limited English, so this'll be a great opportunity for me to finally speak that fluent French I've been after since 6th grade.

Random little things I think I know about Stella/Shyorongi: The town is somewhat spread out along a main road. It's way up at nearly 6000 ft. elevation, so I'm going to have horse lungs by the end of this. Stella has guard dogs (...what?) with newly-built guard dog kennels. The electricity rarely goes out, but when it does, I can head down to a little shop called La Bonne Addresse and get some tea or milk and bread. The whole school compound has a brand new wall/gate scenario, which locks at 9pm nightly, so if I want to go out after that I have to jump the fence. Fresh fruits and veggies seem hard to come by in Shyorongi, so I'll have to trek into Kigali for those. My cooking setup consists of a hotplate with one functioning burner. Eating lunch with the nuns (if they are, in fact, nuns) is feasible but is likely to result in massive weight gain.

So, obviously, I'm still in the dark about a lot of things. As usual, I've got to just get there and find out. All of us WT vols received our placements yesterday, and everyone seems as excited as I am. Can't wait for meeting everyone, orientation, getting to know Kigali, all leading up to meeting my new little home in Shyorongi!

My family is savage and strong and cool and I wouldn't have it any other way.

If Ross wasn't trekking about, falling into amazing opportunities, and going where life took him, he wouldn't be Ross (it's 4pm in Edinburgh!).

If Ben wasn't doing something ridiculously dangerous, slightly stupid, and so heavily reliant on mad skills, he wouldn't be Ben (it's 5pm in Kabul!).

If I weren't being alarmingly over-laid back about preparations for a life-altering third-world move, I wouldn't be me (it's 6pm in Kigali!).

Cheers to our parents for creating, ever improving, and always holding down the fort in California. And for keeping us in our places by loving the dogs slightly more than us. And for advocating hard for the Devil.

I have high hopes for Christmas 2010.

Birakomeye...

So. So. So.

I got my travel information yesterday. I fly out of Washington, DC on Sunday, December 27 at 9:30am. WorldTeach is putting us up in DC on the night of the 26th so we can all make our morning flight, so I have to be in DC for a pre-departure meeting by 8:00pm on the 26th. Meaning that I have to fly out of San Francisco that morning to make it. So the morning of December 26 is when I leave San Francisco. Leave San Francisco. Leaving San Francisco. I'm leaving San Francisco.

Up until this point, I've had virtually no trepidation about leaving. I knew I would be sad to say goodbye to family, friends, and city, but I was so excited about going that I didn't feel it yet. I'm still as excited about going, but the fear swelled this week. It took some good cries on the way to and from work yesterday just to adjust to the fact that I have mangled my annual, indestructable family vacation with my too-early December flyaway date, and I can't stop myself from getting choked up when I think about those inevitable final goodbyes. I know it's only a couple years, but my plans after Africa don't, at this point, include coming back to San Francisco. This departure date is only three days earlier than I expected, but those were three precious San Francisco days...gah. Stop. Stop. Stop. Who knows what will come of or after this.

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Precicely.

...ariko ndishimiye :)

just shoot me

Not sure why, but I am childishly excited about getting vaccinated. I just made my appointments today (I have to go in THREE TIMES because the damned rabies vaccine has to be spaced out just so). Thankfully, I got so close to moving to the DR that I have a good amount of shots taken care of already, but I still need:

yellow fever vaccine
meningitis (my most acute fear) vaccine
rabies vaccine series
polio booster shot
typhoid pill series
cipro doses (bleagh)
malarials

For the malarials, I have three options: one that will cost upwards of $1,000 for my two-year stay (so we can just strike that from the list), one that must be taken daily and that presents nausea, sunburn, and hormonal muck up in 20% of cases, and one that presents neuropsychological side effects (vivid dreams, anxiety) in 20% of cases. Hmm. I am pretty torn between those last two.

So tell me, friends, which would you rather have messed up: your stomach and skin or your brain?

franyarwanglish

Interesting article pointed out by one of my fellow Rwanda 2009 volunteers:

Why Rwanda said adieu to French

I'm wondering whether I'm going to come out of this experience trilingual or mute.

begging, borrowing, hoping not to steal

So I've been compiling my Rwanda packing list this week (just three months in advance!) to figure out how much stuff I still have to scrounge up before my late-December departure. Turns out, it's a fair amount of stuff. If anyone happens to have anything on this list just gathering dust at their apartment/parents' house/local department store and feels like making a donation to the get-Jo-out-of-here cause, email me! at joanna.a.copley@gmail.com.

for me:

lightweight sleeping bag
high-quality bug repellent
high-SPF sunscreen
small flashlight
batteries
travel alarm clock
swiss army knife
first aid supplies/basic medicines
internal frame backpacking backpack
smallish regular backpack
hot water bottle
iPod headphones
small short-wave radio
thermometer
oral re-hydration salts (anyone?)
water purification tablets
band aids
Pilot G-2 rollerball 07-pt pens (because writing with any other pen is just drawing)

for the children (think of the children!):

maps, posters, calendars, anything that could hold some educational value
portable tape or CD player (upgrade: iPod speakers!)
3D models from chemistry or biology classes or anything of that ilk
BOOKS in English, preferably paperbacks, preferably at a high-school reading level

More to come on both these lists as launch day draws near. Suggestions for things that I should absolutely bring/not bring are also welcome!

Rwanda is attempting to step up their internet game:

Bold Rwanda takes broadband leap

Too much too soon? The development economist in me is fidgeting with excitement.

curve shift

Oh yeah, I'm going to Rwanda to teach kids.

I knew that, but these three months since finding out I was accepted by WorldTeach have been incredibly narcissistic ones, focused mainly on how I had to prepare myself for living in a foreign country. I've been practicing my Kinyarwanda, keeping up with Rwandan news, getting advice about how/what to pack, wrapping things up at work, etc. But now that I'm just three more short months away from leaving, I'm getting really excited about preparing to teach in a foreign country. Or to teach at all. I don't know if I'm going to be good at this. So many delicious unknowns.

On the recommendation of Ian over at Sup Teach?, I've been reading dy/dan and loving it. He's realistic and manages to combine optimism, anecdote, methodology, and the occasional rant in a perfect blend which I think would make even the scroogiest kid-hater excited about teaching. This stood out today:

DM: Your students will excavate with profound determination and speed every social anxiety you thought you buried. It will take them minutes to decide that you are insecure about your appearance. Do not wonder if they notice your post-adolescent pimple. They do. They will exploit these anxieties as often as you allow them to. Determine quickly what matters to you and rid your psyche of the rest. Interest yourself in your students as often and as genuinely as possible. Love this job. Love your students. I'm not kidding about that last one even though I'm positive my 21-year-old self would have scoffed at that kind of attachment. Take it from me, please: you do not want to be the teacher I was when I was 21.

It's good to remember that this is about them more than it's about me. No, I'm not going into a soppy gloppy "I'm doing this for the children" spiel. I'm not at all mixed up about who I'm doing this for. But when I'm in the classroom, it'll be a big help to remember that the point of my being there is for them to learn something, not for me to come off as nice or sharp or funny or smart or whatever. If my social anxieties get excavated in the process, I look forward to seeing how that goes. Bring it on, kiddos.

Not sure if anyone catches my drift here, but I'm more excited than nervous about teaching and that's more than I've hoped for. Thanks again to Ian and Dan!

Rwandan presidential election set for August 2010

Excited about this:

Rwandan presidential election set for August 2010

I'm lucky to get to be there during an election year! This should be a pretty cool process to be able to witness from the inside. Also, a good reminder that I need to get myself much more familiar with current Rwandan politics. Fifth-grade book report-style briefing coming soon.

Copleys FTW!

Yet another Ben Copley appreciation post.

Thank you to my big brother for schlepping himself and my original diploma all the way out to San Francisco at the very last minute so I could meet my notatization deadline and not be a complete failure! That time you failed to show up at 5:30am so I could drive you to the airport is officially forgiven broheme. Love you lots!

your rwanda blog is unupdated

cries the cacophony of disappointed blog readers.

That's because there's not a whole lot to report. I've got about four months till departure, and that feels a little too far out to be focusing all my effort on this, but not far enough to be letting it move into my peripheral vision. I'm working at MLVS two mornings per week now, and it's been primarily observation so far. Hopefully this week I can convince Dr. Vic to let me help with some of the lessons; my lack of proactivity has been a hindrance so far and I know I need to get over it. I'd like to hold an office hour outside of class to get some one-on-one time with the students, but I'm hard pressed to find one reasonable hour per week that's regularly open on my schedule these days. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to getting out of this all-consuming limbo and reaching the two-months-to-go mark so I can start making real effort towards real plans.

look ma no criminal record

Two steps forward on the planning/preparation front this week:

1. Finally trekked down to the Department of Justice, had my criminal record checked, got it back squeaky clean, and received the resulting police clearance that I needed to kick off my visa application. As expected, the SF DOJ was a barrel of laughs. The guy in front of me speak-yelled for about 15 minutes on the subject of how the brains of the DOJ staff were not connecting to his brain in a way that he thought was respectable and human (his sentences sounded reasonable as background noise but fell apart like wet cake when you actually listened to them, like looking at a baby up close and seeing that it's really an old man), while another fellow stander-in-line waxed eloquent to me about how his summers on a cruise ship in Brazil when he was young were nothing like my year in Rwanda is going to be.

2. I set up my teaching internship! I'll be starting in the adult ESL class at the Mission Language and Vocational School (MLVS) this Tuesday, and going every Tuesday and Thursday morning till I leave for the big RW. It's remarkable how well this clicked together after banging my head against the wall with City College for the whole summer. I wanted to volunteer somewhere that could be useful to my local community - MLVS is specifically geared towards recent immigrants to the Mission (and it's on my street). I wanted to go somewhere where they could actually use a volunteer, rather than just being a burden - MLVS was all over the idea of having someone with my goals willing to help out. I wanted to have a strong mentor with solid teaching experience - the instructor has been teaching this class for 18 years and is a bit of a fixture at the school. I wanted to fit this in with my work schedule - miraculously, my boss agreed to let me start at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays to accommodate this opportunity. The school is small and local and the administration has already gone out of their way to be responsive and helpful. I'm excited to start, and I'm hoping that this change of schedule might be as good as a rest.

supportive parents

My mother, on the scope of my international health insurance: "I don't think we'll have to pay to repatriate your remains, so that's good."

Thanks Ma!

Good!

I started out today pretty damned frustrated about setting up my TESL experience here in the US, since I feel time slipping away and every school administrator in California seems to peace out for the summer and return just minutes before the school year starts. Inefficiency, dead ends, and obnoxiously unhelpful administrative assistants bring my blood to a rolling boil easily. I was a little surprised at how angry I was, and it dawned on me: Am I not signing up for a whole year at least of working with a potentially slow and inefficient school system?

It's easy to divide my life in two right now, to think only in terms of While I'm Here and When I'm There, and to place way, way too much burden on future Jo while letting present Jo get away with murder. I can let my frustration and temper run rampant now, but in Rwanda all those frustrating things will be Part Of The Experience so I will handle them with effortless grace and charm. I can be shy and deferring now, but in Rwanda things will be Different Somehow so I will be outgoing and strong. I can live outside my means now, but in Rwanda I will be Poor But Happy so I'll be able to live easily on less than a tenth of what I currently make. Right? Oh God.

One theme that has been coming up over and over in my preparation so far is: The person you are when you get on the plane in the US is the person you are when you step off the plane in Rwanda. If it hurts here, it'll hurt there. If you suck at it here, you'll suck at it there. As Guildenstern says, it's still the same sky. I have lots of improvements to make, and I guess I'd be a fool to wait for this magic panacea that is Rwanda to start making them.

So. My TEFL experience is frustrating. Good! Practice. A chance to brush up my pleasant telephone demeanor. A chance to persevere in spite of hitting a few brick walls. A chance to push for something and get what I want out of a system while working within it. A chance to raise a glass to my temper and say it ain't nothing big.

President Kagame Speaks to the BBC

This seemed worth linking to:

The challenge of re-inventing Rwanda

When I tell people that I'm moving to Rwanda at the end of this year, the standard reaction of nearly everyone who hasn't visited the area is "ohmygodyou'regoingtodie". Fair enough, everyone, I suppose that before I started researching the country for the purpose of this program, the first word in my head after a mention of Rwanda was invariably 'genocide'. Even now, it seems nearly impossible not to look at every aspect of the country through genocide-colored glasses.

Let me put your minds somewhat at rest: The genocide part of the genocide, with machetes and abject terror and the 100 days, ended in 1994. When I was seven. Since then, while the recovery process seems to have been understandably bumpy and painful at times, Rwanda has emerged as one of the safest and most peaceful countries in East Africa (and one of the most modern, since so much that was destroyed during the genocide had to be rebuilt). A few (all?) of the countries bordering Rwanda are seeing their fair shares of conflict, many of them as direct results of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, but Rwanda itself seems to be a bit of an eye to that hurricane.

Seems. I'm going to say seems a lot on this rwblog; as some of you know, perspective is my Achilles' heel. How can I know that Rwanda is peaceful and safe without being in Kigali feeling safe and at peace? (Having just read Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, I feel the need to see for myself even more than I did.) I'm going to try to build up as much of a knowledge base as I can before I leave, but I'm trying to let knowledge in while keeping expectations out. When I tell that rare person who has actually been to Rwanda that I'm going, the reaction is never negative; it's some variation of: "Good. You should." If everyone who visits the country falls in love with it, then maybe it will just take a critical mass of outside visitors to spread the good word that Rwanda is not what it once was. Maybe the re-invention that Kagame talks about has to come from without as much as it's already come from within.

Sailing

The sailing culture in my little land-locked destination looks less than vibrant. This lone and relatively random flickr picture seems to be the only evidence on the entire internet that anyone from Rwanda has even heard of sailing:

Canoe sailing on Lake Kivu, off the shore of Gisenyi, Rwanda.

I'm sure I'm going to have to be creative with the available equipment over there, but there have got to be some cheap and sharable ways to get out on the water, which I will definitely explore if by some stroke of grace I'm placed near a lake. Based solely on the picture above, canoe sailing looks like it could be a perfect mix of dinghy sailing and windsurfing principles.

We'll see we'll see.

Rwanda Rwanda

Population: 10 million

Size: 10,000 sq. miles (a little smaller than Massachusetts, for those of you who like to think of things in terms of Massachusetts)

Official Languages: Kinyarwanda, French, English

Capital and Largest City: Kigali

Independence: July 1, 1962, from Belgium

President/Prime Minister: Paul Kagame/Bernard Makuza

Currency: Rwandan Franc (RWF), approx. 550 RWF = 1 USD

Accepted!

The news:

I've been accepted as a volunteer on the 2009/2010 WorldTeach Rwanda program! I'll be heading to Africa right after Christmas 2009 for a year of teaching in a Rwandan secondary school, and I'll have the option to stay on for another year after that if I'd like.

I'm keeping this [yet another travel] blog as a nice little vaguely public record of my progress as I prepare for my first step into the developing world. It seems that, while the internet in Africa can be a fickle mistress, regular updates from Rwanda itself will also be doable. I'm confident that I have no idea what I'm in for at this point, but I'm all-over excited about getting this show on the road.

What the next six months is going to be about:

• READ about Rwanda. Due in part to its notorious recent past, there's a good deal of information out there about my future home, and I'm aiming to soak up as much of it as possible before I head out. I'm a bit devastated to have to put some of my other reading projects on the backburner, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to pick them up again while sitting under a bednet with a broken radio in Rwanda. And reading is reading is always good.
• Get trilingual. The three official languages in Rwanda are English (aced it!) , French (oy), and Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language which at my first assessment sounds completely beautiful, almost like Portuguese. I'm still not sure whether to focus on French or Kinyarwanda at this point, but I'd love to become proficient at both during my time in Rwanda. Mercifully, the BBC has a ton of radio and written news coverage in both Kinyarwanda and French, so I've been listening to the morning news in both languages daily to get a feel for them. I recognized my first Kinyarwandan word on the radio last week! One correspondent took over from another and said murakoze, which means thank you, and I was all over it. Pure joy.
• Learn how to teach. Yikes. Somewhat daunting but I'm actually pretty excited about this too. In order get some teaching experience to draw on, I need to volunteer in an ESL classroom for at least 25 hours (though I'm hoping to do much more, as I have no classroom experience :-X). Planning for this is still in beta stage, but I'll likely be shadowing a teacher in one of San Francisco's many ESL havens this fall, and hopefully taking over a lesson or two before the end of term.
• Shoot up. The menu of diseases available for the having in East Africa is thorough, and I need to get immunized against a l l o f t h e m. Look for many I-just-got-immunized-against-___-and-definitely-am-having-a-negative-reaction-so-see-you-in-the-next-life posts in the future!
• Visa my heart. I've never worked in a foreign country before, so this'll be a great opportunity to get practice going though the notorious visa process with WorldTeach holding my hand. Looking to draw on the extensive experience of Dad, Mum, Ross and Nicki on this one.
• Plan my impact. Participation in/organization of after-school programs for students is a major part of the WorldTeach experience (and seems to be where many teachers feel their most effective), so I'm going to do what I can to gather resources here that will make it easier to implement the programs I want to in Rwanda. I'm most interested in starting an HIV awareness club, overseeing a school newspaper, and organizing a library (depending on the needs of my placement), so I'll be tapping the giant pulsating brains of my connections at SF AIDS and The Daily Cal, along with my bookish/resourceful friends, for ideas and support.

My challenge will be to slow down and enjoy this exciting planning process while living the last six months of my sweet life here in San Francisco. I hope to rope as many of you into it as possible. Please feel free to comment with any questions, thoughts, concerns, tips, or links to photos of Mike Pelayo throwing a hissy fit over a round of hot chocolate, if you have any.

For all the support, well-wishes, and advice I've gotten from many of you already: Murakoze!