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!