Meeting Sr. Rose

11/29/09

Sr. Rose came home from the hospital in Nairobi! She is very sweet, and a very animated storyteller, as I've found that many Rwandans are. She was recounting the events of her hospital stay, in which she had several operations. I am not really sure what problems she had, but I guess she had an infection in her gallbladder, and they ended up removing it. They had done all kinds of tests, three catscans, given her all kinds of antibiotics, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong. But after the gallbladder came out, she was just fine.

When she returned, I was in the middle of a lesson with Fr. Antoine, but I'm sooo glad it got cut short. I hadn't really planned anything, but I had only given him the Mass parts yesterday, so I assumed we could go through it again, and maybe even look at a particular days' readings and work on a homily. Well, after talking a little bit, he tells me that he feels very comfortable saying Mass in English because he remembers it from seminary, and now that he has the typed script, he's all set to go. So I'm like…yeah, good, what should we do then…hm… I started doing a few consonant pronunciation exercises, but it was not going well. I was not prepared, and he was just flying through these exercises. They were not really something that he needed work on. All of a sudden, the lights go out. Thank God! Our electricity goes out frequently, so this was not unusual. And my failure improv lesson was cut short. But then Sr. Rose came back and we went to greet her by singing Hail Mary, Gentle Woman. It was fantastic.

Sr. Rose speaks very little English. Actually Kathryn's teaching was the first exposure to English that she has had. So the next morning we picked up where Kathryn left off. She is a very conscientious student, eager to learn and really grasped what I was teaching. We were going over very basic things – I introduced the common verb tenses, gave her some example verbs, and how to conjugate regular verbs. I then gave her some fill-in-the-blank and rearrange the sentence exercises to work on by herself. She did very well and was very happy with the way the lessons went. It really helped that I could explain things in French, but I need to make sure I'm speaking more English than French in my class with her! The more she hears it, the better.

Friday at Patronage I had two very devoted followers – these two older girls who spoke more English than I've heard from most of the kids were basically little barnacles stuck to me. They were both in my class on Tuesday, and they were very sweet, telling me they love me and stuff. I would rather have them fully participate in the group activities though, instead of just hanging on to me. When the games got going though, they did rejoin the group. The kids really like this "kill the mouse" game. Two kids are blindfolded and given a huge stick. A balloon is placed a few feet in front of them, and they are spun around and given three whacks to try to smack the balloon with the stick, and thus kill the mouse. During their formation, I was asked to go supervise the Abastrong group, the big kids. My two barnacles were really happy about this, and they really wanted me to sit next to them. But I told them that I needed to stand up in order to watch everybody else. These kids were much better-behaved and didn't need too much supervision. But I again trust that my presence gave a little message of "pay attention, don't mess around."

Afterwards, Fabrice accompanied me during playtime to translate. That was super helpful. We actually played real games, like Red Light Green Light and Cut the Cake, instead of having the kids follow me around and do whatever I do. It was very beneficial to have the kids understand what I was trying to say, and we decided afterwards that from now on, I will always have a Kinyarwanda translator. Sweet!