So today we arrived in Rwanda and besides the overnight flight with a 6 hour layover in the Kenya airport it was a lovely flight. Kenya Airways, despite all the trouble we had trying to book with them, manages to try to feed you whenever possible, so we received meals at around 2 am on our 4 hour flight, and another full meal on our little 1 hour flight from Nairobi to Kigali International Airport, which, if you’ll excuse the term, has got to be one of the cutest little airports I’ve ever seen, resembling most closely an overlarge Cabana you might find housing a bar somewhere on a tropical beach. The fact that we had absolutely no trouble walking through customs, getting our free visa, and grabbing our waiting luggage should have informed us that Rwanda was a very different place than Cameroon, and as we were driven over to where the workshop was being held in a nice tour bus we got a chance to see just what an understatement that was. A cool breeze blowing through the trees, growing next to clean red-dirt roads along which pretty red-roofed houses were scattered among the many rolling hills of this “land of one thousand hills”, all this was enough to make it apparent that that contrary to the perception held by most Westerners, most likely informed by knowledge of the 1994 Genocide and movies such as Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, Rwanda today embodies bucolic beauty and peaceful progress.
Indeed the facility where much of our training was to occur was a modern marvel that housed the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, or KIST, an important partner to OLPC in Rwanda. Rwanda has further distinguished itself by having purchase more XO laptops than any other country in Africa, and is pursuing a goal to have one for every child in the country. These laptops are already being used to propagate public health warnings and to facilitate the transfer over of the language taught in the public school system from French to English, a move that the Rwandan Government hopes will further increase the opportunities for foreign business investment and growth. This is just one example of the many new policies implemented by Rwanda’s much admired president Paul Kagame, who gained fame as the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) the Tutsi led army that put an end to the genocide and brought stability back to the country.
But back to the training. Unfortunately Team DBF had to miss the first two days, where the grand ceremony involving the OLPC and Rwandan leadership occurred, though we heard mixed results on how exciting it was (from “it was sooo looong and boring you guys are lucky” to “omg you missed the biggest thing ever! I got to shake the president’s hand and meet Nick! (the chairman of OLPC)). Whatever the case, we arrived on Wednesday and got right to work meeting the other teams and getting the technical rundown on everything we ever wanted to know about updating the XO, setting up our server, and establishing network protocols, setting up access points, and our personal favorite, NANDblasting (a way to update all 100 of our XO’s to the latest operating system. We also (I think perhaps most importantly) got the chance to visit a primary school that already had over 3,000 of the XO’s (almost enough for every student there) but where they were significantly underutilized, mainly because the teachers were a little scared of them and not very comfortable using them in their classrooms yet. At the school we had training sessions where we (the OLPCCorps members) taught the teachers how to use a few of the programs (mainly Scratch, Record, and Write), and worked with them to brainstorm how they could use them in their classrooms.
These sessions were somewhat frustrating, due mainly to the language barrier and a technology learning curve, but they were also very useful as it helped us to identify many of the issues we would probably have in our deployment country when it came time to familiarize our local teachers with the XO and get them comfortable using it in the classroom. We also had the great opportunity to interact with many of the children at the school, and a more curious lot I have never seen, with groups of them gathering around us during their recess time and staring at us like we were alien life forms. We responded by using the few words in Kinyarwanda we had learned from the teachers and the hotel staff to surprise them with a hearty “Mwaremutse” (good morning) and an even less expected “Nimeza” (Well or Fine) when they found their voices to ask us how we were.
The evidence that much of their limited English was gained through rote learning was pretty plain by their response of “Fine, Thank you” to almost any question posed them. That and other aspects of the education system were somewhat new to me, especially the extreme discipline the students were under, where they responded like machinery to whistles blown by their principle and any student out of line would receive a sharp smack from a light wooden cane that they were obviously quite terrified of. These kids were still kids enjoyed rousing games of volleyball and soccer during recess which they graciously allowed us to join to our unending embarrassment. More than anything I think this interaction with students made us eager to return to Cameroon and start using the XO’s with the children there, though as we were to soon find out that was not to happen as soon as we might have hoped…
The last few days of the Kigali workshop were spent saying goodbye to the new friends we had made, sharing contact info and advice on each other’s deployments, and working out last minute kinks in our technical setups. We met a man who would also be working in Cameroon in the North of the country with a deployment of 5,000 XO’s that he was financing through a partnership with a major Islamic Bank and so we made sure to network with him and made plans to meet up in a few weeks once we were back and started in on our deployments. By the end of the week we were sad to be saying goodbye to plentiful food, showers, the cool climate and the interesting people from all over the world we had spent the past 8 days with, but we were also ready to get back to the UAC and the program we were itching to now get off the ground. Of course as we were to be reminded time and time again, things in Africa are rarely that simple. Before we left Kigali, Brittney, who had stayed behind in Buea to assist with some preparations, (and to visit lovely beaches, waterfalls, and pigmy villages in the exotic southern town of Kribi) informed us that we were unable to get our shipment of XO’s out of customs because they’re monetary value was of such a size that they required a hefty duty to be paid, somewhere along the lines of 3 million Central African Francs! Mr. Orock had been in Yaoundé the capital attempting to negotiate their release for several days but was unsure of his chances at success, and so we needed to think of something to get our laptops and save our project, fast. The only thing that we could come up with as we packed our bags to return was that we would go to Yaoundé ourselves and plead our case before the highest official we could get access to, and if that didn’t work, well, it would just have to.
26 JUN 2009