Trimester, Finished

So, I am sitting here at an internet cafe in Gitarama, enjoying their free internet and the fact that….IT’S BREAK!  I had the joy of proctoring/monitoring exams 2 weeks ago for the entire week and then spent last weekend grading all my exams.  That totals over 200 exams of messy student hand writing.  That also means more entertaining notes…so here are some tidbits that I remember because I forgot the paper where I had written them all down!

When asked “What country is the teacher from?” (supposed to be an automatic point question) I got quite a few unintelligible answers, but I also got these…
-“Teacher, you are from America. Calorine, you are from America!”
-“The teacher is from Rwanda. The teacher is from America.”
-“Yes.”
-“The teacher is from South America”
and my personal favorite: “The Teacher is from Ameliqwa”

I wish I was from “Ameliqwa” that just sounds cool.  But yes, and then when asked “What is peristalsis?” [the movement of food in the esophagus/small intestine” I got:
-“Peristalsis is Calorine” and
-“Peristalsis is Barack Obama.”

Now, because in Kinyarwanda there is no pronunciation difference between “r” and “l” those letters tend to get confused. So words like “rice” and “lice” are pronounced exactly the same.  Thus, my name tends to get spelled “Calorine/Kaloline…etc” different mutations of the sort.  Oh well.

And, of course, my students left me notes again.  Here are some good ones:
-“Very difficult!!”
-“Thank you teacher!  but some was difficult”
-“Oh my God Yawe, help me!!!”
-“Very easy!!!”
-“Thank you so much teacher, you write easy questions and easy test, so thank you!!!”
-“Thank you teacher!  But you write difficult questions”

And then, after they had finished their Biology exam I had students running up to me going “It was very difficult!!” and “It was very easy!!!” so there was a pretty good balance.  Then, like I said, I had the pleasure of grading all said exams.  It could have been a lot worse…I only had about a 50% fail rate for the classes overall…which is pretty good considering Physics had a 100% fail rate…ohlala.

In other news…I’ve started running with one of the village residents, Twa.  Which is basically a love/hate relationship.  It’s good because I’m running, in the land of many hills and getting a good workout.  The bad, he makes me wake up a 5:30am to run, hills suck to put it blatantly and Twa can run forever…he will never stop.  So we’re going on week 2 of running and now I’m able to scale roughly 4 of the 1000 hills of Rwanda.  I think it’ll be a good goal to say by the end of this I can run the Boston Marathon/Bay to Breakers or some other ridiculous race in the states.  Which means I am hopefully successfully combating the Rwandan diet of starch, starch starch.  It’s also a really good way to entertain the villagers.  They are so amused that I’m going out for “siporo” [sport] and usually just cheer me on and tell me “Komera” [be strong].  So yeah, I’m still an amusement to my town, which I guess is good.

I have not checked the mail yet…but I will later today, so do not worry.  And then, I will let everyone know how long things took, who I received packages from and all that good stuff.  Let’s just say I hope there are some good goodies waiting for me!

And now it is officially break.  I’ve got 3 weeks off until the next trimester begins.  So today I am in Gitarama, will possibly stay the night with my host sisters but I’m not sure, it’s still up in the air.  Otherwise, I’m planning on hanging out  in my village for most of break.  Might wander into Buhanda/Gitwe for a day or two to visit with one of the Health PCVs who lives out there.  I think it’s now an acceptable time to become a good neighbor and start to visit the PCVs that actually live pretty close.  And then in the last week of break I’ll be enjoying a nice week in Kibuye for training with all the other Group 2 Ed PCVs.  That will be fun and nice and am totally stoked for that.

Other than that, just going day by day at site. The rainy season has begun…which means rain, at least once a day.  Most days I have enough sun to charge my phone but if not, it’s okay.  I apparently have some sort of “executive” status so I get to charge my phone in the village Executive Secretary’s office which has bigger and more powerful solar panels.  That’s nice, because now either way I don’t have to pay to charge my phone…which is good, because even in Rwanda I’m cheap and don’t like to spend money.  And that about wraps it up here, I’m going to go meet up with Gelsey, Brittany and hopefully Jed for lunch in town and then we’ll see what’s going on in the Post box and then who knows what the day will bring!