City vs Country Life

I have been spending more time in the capital, Kigali, the last few weeks, which has been very refreshing and definitely a change of pace.  I have a second school vacation at the end of July and instead of spending a lot of money to go abroad, I am just going to rent a room in Kigali for the time I am there.  It is only about an hour away but I’m always surprised by the completely different life people lead here! 

Living standards and income

To vastly oversimplify, if you have or want money you should be in Kigali.  According to the 2012 statistical yearbook published by the government, the poverty rate in Rwanda in 2011 was 44.9%, but in Kigali City it is only 16.8%. The province with next lowest rate of poverty jumps to 42.6% in the Eastern Province.

Picture of Gacuriro, courtesy of livinginkigali.com

courtesy of http://kateturner45.files.wordpress.com/

My breakfast the last time I spent the night in Kigali
Avocado ginger smoothie and chocolate-almond croissant

That room I am renting over school vacation is located in a very affluent.  And it almost feels a little fake, like I’m not in Rwanda but rather in American suburbia.  People do not even need mosquito nets there!  Part of the rent includes a servant who does laundry and some cooking (please don’t judge me).  Last time I was there, I walked to get a breakfast smoothie (!) and passed a 24/7 pizza place, a couple with their tennis gear, an apartment complex with a pool, and a yoga studio.  The houses all have the same layout and are behind gates with cars in the driveway.  I honestly do not know if I would want to live there permanently because it is very secluded from the life of the average Rwandan.  But I’m really looking forward to it as a short term vacation.

Noise

One of the most surprising parts of Maranyundo that I always forget until I go to Kigali is how quiet it is.  In the city, there are cars, people walking right by the window, opening and closing gates. 

Maranyundo has it’s own noise from the frogs at night, but that is all and I find it soothing.  Just the other day, I walked out and saw this huge bird perching next to the garden. You can’t find that in Kigali!

Shopping

In Nyamata we can basically only do heavy shopping on Wednesday and Sunday when there is market.

.In Kigali, things are open every day except Sunday mornings for church. Also, people are always complaining about how things are more expensive in Nyamata and I’ve found that to be true. For example, it costs about a $1 more to buy peanut butter in Nyamata than Kigali.  But I’m pretty sure it is because there is only one store that sells in in town and we seem to be the only ones to come buy it so he increased the price from when we arrived.  Otherwise, there are many products that are just not possible to find and you must go to a city to purchase, including seasonal produce.

Social

I will be honest that I’m usually much more social than I have been in Rwanda and it wasn’t something I really missed from the US.  However, just a few weeks ago, I started improving a lot on that front and have been socializing with both expats and Rwandans. In Nyamata, people really don’t seem to go out very much, at least my roommates don’t and the teachers don’t seem interested.  The average evening for me consists of making dinner, reading and going to bed.

But in Kigali….wow, it is so different.  The bars are packed.  And where I’ve lived, establishments have always closed by 2 am.  But not here! Some clubs are still busy until the early morning.

In addition to the typical drinking scene, in Kigali there are more restaurants, gyms, organizations and other entertainment venues.  It even has a bowling alley!

Food

Restaurants are a fairly new concept in Rwanda.  It is still considered pretty shameful to eat in public, so almost all restaurants are behind some kind of wall to ensure privacy from the streets.  Most Rwandan restaurants do not have a menu, which is okay because they all serve the same things: goat brochette, French fries, potatoes, or omelette.  This is the only dining option in Nyamata.

But Kigali has much more of an international scene with a lot of variety.  When I went to the American Embassy for the fourth of July, they had options from different restaurants and the fare included bakery desserts (including donuts and cheesecake!), Tex Mex (including margaritas), and Asian (including expensive sushi). 

There is also more variety in the supermarkets, including basic international ingredients, cold options and different types of produce.

Fashion in Rwanda

Do you ever wonder where your clothes go after you donate them to Goodwill?  A good portion of it goes to developing countries like Rwanda!  The clothes are sold at extremely discounted prices.  Toms shoes may go for $5. I once found some Birkenstocks for $10.  Free tshirts, such as from Relay for Life, also are commonly purchased. I’m always on the look out for Virginia Tech shirts, although the wearer usually doesn’t even know what VT is. But who actually gets that money? The thrift store is getting free merchandise and selling it to very poor people to be sold again to even poorer people.

But my discomfort with this concept goes past that.  In addition to second hand clothing, Rwanda’s fashion scene is made of custom tailored pieces.  You can go to market and pick out your favorite patterned fabric at a cost of about $3/yard. You haggle as much as you dare with the seller (I always feel somewhat guilty arguing over 75 cents with a woman who has no electricity in her home so I tend to get ripped off a lot).   Then you bring it to your favorite tailor (who may also be the fabric seller) and have a dress/skirt/shirt/pants made to your specifications for another $5. 

Do you see a problem here?  The high quality, local clothes may cost about $10 with most of that money going straight to the locals, but you can get a ‘cool’ foreign branded piece for $5 with most of the profit going to…who knows?  These donations are not so good for the Rwandan economy! It is interesting to note that the more stylish among us may prefer second hand clothing to any other option. 

Once I arrived I realized I should have packed another sweater or sweatshirt because the evenings can get pretty cool here.  I went to a market in Kigali with a pretty good selection and I had wonderful visions of finding a high quality and fashionable garment with these features

-full length zipper

-no hood

-warm, but not hot

-fits me well

-professional enough to wear to work

I was envisioning something like these from Express.  But you really can’t be too picky when shopping here, I quickly realized. 

By the end I was pretty happy I found something that is relatively high quality without any weird spots or fading and was the right amount of warmth. Oddly, I was offered a lot of parks.  My final purchase fit two aspects (warm and full length zipper). The above are not my photos, I simply found it online here.  I ended up getting a Victoria Secret Pink Phi Beta hooded zip up jacket. I know nothing about this sorority and will likely not take it back to the US for that reason.  But for $6, I can’t really go wrong!

Update on Fundraising!

I am so excited! My fundraising initiative for the Nyamata Church is going very well.  My parents' chuch hasn't even had their collection yet. This is such an important cause to me.  Read more about it here.

If you wish to donate, please click here to get to my Gofundme page

Typical Day in the Life of an MGS Student

Here is a theoretical schedule for average MGS student.  There is a lot of structure to the days here and most days follow this schedule.  A notable exception is Wednesdays when classes are over at lunch time and after lunch, students have time for formal debate teams, extra class time for teachers or exams.  Just as a comparison to the average American high school student, I have put a similar schedule for my brothers who are in eleventh grade this year.  Their schedule is not quite as formal and structured as MGS, but it gives a good comparison.  I think one of the biggest differences is the amount of independence the girls show. They do not have a parents to keep them in line and disciplined, so they rely on each other.  They wake themselves up, they clean their own dishes, they do their own laundry, etc

My brothers’ life		MGS student’s life
	5:30	Wake up in dorm shared with 179 other people. The dorm is hall style with all the bunk beds in one room. Put on uniform.
Mom wakes each one up in his own room, complain that they have to share a single bathroom with each other, have cereal and milk for breakfast, running late so leave dishes for mom	6:00	Start prep time, meaning it is time to study independently!
Labor over clothing decision, catch the bus to go to school	7:00	Time for breakfast consisting of porridge and a hot dog bun sized piece of bread
Class starts, the students switch between rooms allowing them to decide which classes they would like to take.  One of my brothers takes band, the other an extra gym class, both take Spanish and technical classes. They choose a math and science appropriate to their level	8:00	Class starts, the students stay in the same room for all their classes and the teacher switches between rooms. All students take entrepreneurship, physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, geography, political education, English, Kinyarwanda, and French
	10:30	20 minute break time, then back to class
Lunch time- consisting of the their choice from the school lunch options or packed from home	12:30	Lunch time- Today it is beans, carrots, rice, potatoes and maize meal.
Time to go back to class	1:00	Still sitting with friends or starting to wash own dishes and clean up dining hall
	2:00	Time to go back to class
School is over, go to club, sports or band after school	2:45
Extracurricular time is over, time to go home on the activity bus	4:30	Class is over, time to change into sports clothes for free time. Popular activities are informal basketball or pattycake games
Home, greet parents, grab snack and work on homework until dinner	5:00
Dinner time, time to wash dishes, back to homework after dinner	6:00	Free time is over, time to shower in the communal bathrooms and change into prep clothes (uniform).  Study time until dinner
Done with homework, time to hang out	8:00	Dinner time, consisting of cabbage, carrots, rice, starchy baking bananas and cassava root
Mom encourages them to go get ready for bed	9:00	Dorm is unlocked. Students go and get ready for bed

Developing World Problem #3: Internet

Before I arrived in Rwanda, many people had told me how terrible internet was at the school and in the country as a whole.  When I came, it was very slow by American standards, but it was still functional for me and had exceeded my expectations. The company used a satellite dish to direct internet to a router in the computer lab and it serviced all the classrooms and the library.  But at the end of March it started cutting out every few minutes and then one day it stopped working altogether.   The longer I’m here, the more I realize how people take for granted the most important uses of the internet such as updating or installing software.  Nothing can download if wifi turns off regularly. 

MTN is both my phone and internet company.
I have two sim cards, one for the phone and one for the internet

A common way to access internet in Rwanda is to use the phone networks on computers or mobile phones.  I have a personal modem that I can put into my computer to route the internet and can buy a day for only $1.  After the satellite broke and the company could not repair it, the school started using a router that they simply stick a phone sim card into to convert it into wifi.  However, the big kicker is that you don’t actually get unlimited internet when you buy a day or month or whatever. A day of internet is only one gigabyte of data which may seem like a lot until you start actually using the internet.  The worst was when I skyped with friends and it only lasted 2 hours.  My roommate once tried to install Microsoft Office and it took a few hours to get about 80% through before shutting off.   I have been trying to install Adobe on the computer lab desktops so they can use Rachel but it shuts off after only a few are done. 

For personal use, I usually use the modem in the staff room but it is worse there.  Imagine 8 computers trying to use 1 gig of internet?  Usually it is done by lunch, especially because the teacher enjoy streaming youtube videos.  Interestingly, the companies provide free Wikipedia, facebook and twitter. So sometimes I have run out for the day, but I am still able to go on those websites!

From Maranyundo Initiative website

So how does this affect the students?  The internet does not reach the computer lab so they do not go online.  When I give them a project that requires research, usually I have to do it for them, which is both time consuming for me and a missed opportunity for them. I have noticed they tend to be less inquisitive about large themes in the world because they only have access to the information known by people in their immediate vicinity.  This is probably the main reason I’m so excited about Rachel. The students will be able to work and learn using a computer without requiring the internet! On the other hand, right now they are more able to solve problems on their own.  In the US, if I have a question or problem, I google how to take solve it, but they are able to work more independently.  

Buying in Bulk?

Candy hoarder?

I have been really lax about updating my blog lately.  I'm sorry.  I will try to do better.  The senior three students had a speech competition so I went to town to buy some prizes for the winners.  I finally settled on simple lollypops and biscuits.  When I started picking out twelve candies, the man in charge of the stand and everyone around him burst out laughing and continued until I had paid and walked. Buying in bulk is not at all common here.  When I had bought the biscuits earlier, the vendor asked if I was going to sell them in the street.  There would be no other sensible reason to stock up.  Quite the opposite of Cost-co loving USA!

Raspberry Pi and RACHEL

Big changes are coming to Maranyundo!  This little device called the Raspberry Pi has been making waves all over the tech community for the last few years.  It is a credit card sized computer that only costs $35!  It was specifically designed by a nonprofit to be used in education for teaching students coding, but soon enough techies in the developing world started swooping in and making it work for their uniqueproblems.  One such project is called RACHEL standing for Remote Areas Community Hotspots for Education and Learning.  This is an offline digital library sent through a network to any computer that tries to access the pi (Here is an online version of the library).  It includes resources licensed under creative commons including textbooks developed by the state of California, Khan Academy videos and interactive exercises, much of Wikipedia, .books from Project Gutenburg and much more!

Maranyundo describes itself as a School of Excellence and part of this high standard is to use technology in teaching for the benefit of students.  This is not always so easy because of the unreliable internet and electricity.  But RACHEL-Pi requires no electricity, as it is battery powered (you can still use it on a battery powered laptop, which every teacher has) and supplies its own wireless network that computers connect to as if it were wifi. The Maranyundo Initiative Board visited the school last week and they brought the Rachel-Pi and donated by an organization in Boston  through one of the founders of the school.

Marcella showing how to use the technology

Working together with individual questions

Exploring RACHEL independently!

There was staff training a few days later.  I expected only teachers to come, but the headmistress was so supportive of the technology that she implored even the librarian and secretary to attend. It couldn’t have gone better.  The teachers all brought their computers to follow along with the demonstration.  I also have to point out that even with almost 20 computers connected to the network, the Pi was still faster than the usual internet!  It was really amazing.

Now my next step is to find additional, Rwanda specific content to add to RACHEL. It would be great if there were more English exercises, Kinyarwanda content, National Exam standards and perhaps even some lessons about coding because that is the original vision of the Raspberry Pi. I’m sure I will think of more as time goes by!  The big challenge here will be to find information that is not under any copyright or other protection.  If I have any coding friends who would like to help with this in any way, I would be eternally grateful (not even exaggerating). Please get in touch with me if you are at all interested in giving me even 5 minutes of your time for this project.

When you aren’t using RACHEL, the Pi can be used with just a monitor and a keyboard as its own computer on a Linux Operating System. Then you can do anything! So I also want to learn some coding and possibly teach it to the girls or maybe even start a robotics club! If any of my friends want to help me in this initiative in any way, that would be great because I have no idea what I’m doing :p But I’m so excited to find out where this can take the school! Now I just need to take a deep breath and go one step at a time!