Feast of Our Lady of Kibeho

11/29/09

English class on Friday was great. We played a game with three teams, and each team is given a section of the chalkboard. On each section I drew a small house and a stick person. Each member of each team had to go up to the board, quickly add something to the picture, and pass the chalk to the next person. I was hoping this would be a really fast, frenzied thing, but people were taking their time with their drawings.

So after all the pictures were completed, we explained what we think is happening in each picture, and I wrote these stories on the board. Some of them were really hilarious. It took a lot of prompting at first to get them to describe what they drew. I would ask questions like "Who is this? What is her name? Where is she going? What is this thing?" When we got to the third and final group, they had really gotten the hang of what the purpose of this activity was. I called on the first guy to raise his hand, and he basically had the whole story prepared! But after calling on more people to give them a chance, we ended up with the main character being a fisherman who is also a professional soccer player, going to Kigali to the airport, where he will fly to England to play in a match. Edouard wanted this guy to fly to Wisconsin…love it. Someone else suggested England, and I figured that's a better option since Edouard is probably the only person who remembers the name of my home state.

Also, a miracle occurred today. Fr. Antoine showed up at 4:58pm. I was still finishing up my class with the animators, which ends at 5pm. Fr. Antoine usually comes at 5:30ish, sometimes 5:45ish, and I've always counted on him waltzing in much later than the originally-discussed 5:00pm. So I'm at the front of the class saying something to the 23 students sitting before me, I look over at the door and see Fr. Antoine not only on time, but 2 minutes early, my jaw drops. "Whoa," I say out loud. He just comes in and makes himself comfortable, shakes hands with a few people, and we end our lesson. We had our usual after-class party, and Fr. Antoine joined in playing some ping pong. This time we really didn't do much Zumba. People were doing their own thing, playing ping pong, doing puzzles, a few were dancing and I taught some songs, but the dance vibe wasn't as strong today. I didn't actually start my lesson with Fr. Antoine till 6:15pm – and I felt really bad about that. We all hung out after class for at least a half an hour, Fr. Antoine included, but then I was kind of sweaty from the bit of dancing that we did. So I went to get a drink, which took a while because students were chatting with me on my way towards the convent. On my way back I run into Edouard and Felicien, two very faithful animators who I know very well, who say they need something to drink. So I get them some water and we end up talking for like 20 minutes. By that time, all the other students had left and I hadn't said goodbye to a single one. That made me feel like a very bad teacher who gives a disproportional amount of attention to the students who she is most comfortable with instead of reaching out of her comfort zone to talk to the newcomers. Bad. Plus, Sr. Charlotte and Fr. Antoine had tried to call me and see where I was so that we could start our lesson. They had actually decided that we need to give me more time in between these two lessons. I think this is a good idea. So next week we will end animator English at 4:30pm, have a half an hour of after-class party, and then I have a half an hour to myself, and then the Fathers come. Sounds good.

The lights again went out during my lesson with Fr. Antoine, but we were having a really nice conversation, so we just continued it. The lights came back on and we did a brief lesson on stressed syllables, but the majority of our time was spent just having a conversation. This is very beneficial as well, and Fr. told me this. The best part, however, was at the end. You see, tomorrow (Saturday) is the feast of Our Lady of Kibeho. Kibeho is a tiny village in Rwanda where the Virgin Mary appeared in 1981 and continued appearing for the next 8 or so years. She gave many beautiful messages to the world, including a special warning to the people of Rwanda to change their ways of living, because the future will contain horrible acts of hatred if they don't. Unfortunately, this message was not heeded by everyone, because one of history's most devastating and rapid genocides (if not the most devastating and rapid one that has ever occurred) resulted a few years later. We were just about to head out the door of the classroom, when Our Lady of Kibeho comes up in our conversation. For the next 15 minutes, Fr. Antoine is at the chalkboard writing dates of apparitions, names of visionaries, telling me all kinds of facts about Kibeho, and summarizing the homily that he is going to give in mass tomorrow. I was so touched – you should have heard this man speak. He loves Mary so much! And he was just going and going, I loved every second of it. He has a very pure heart and a genuine desire to bring the message of Kibeho to the parishoners at Muhato. "Our Lady's message was 'change.' We must change our lives to follow the gospel message. That is what she said then, and it is still true now. People hear so much about Kibeho and they want to go there to see this and that and all kinds of exciting things. But She told us that everything She says is nothing new. She just wants us to return to what her Son told us in the first place. And She loves us! She loves us so much! So, please pray for me that I could convey this message to the Christians tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow is a big day in Rwanda." - Fr. Antoine.

Well indeed, Saturday was a big day in Rwanda! I feel so so incredibly blessed to be in this holy land on this day. Mass was so beautiful. Mary's statue was adorned with flowers, the choir was all dressed up in their uniforms and sang many beautiful Marian hymns, and thanks to Fr. Antoine I knew just what he was saying in his homily! At the end of Mass he recited a prayer from Kibeho – I could see Her picture on the little card he was reading it from. And I have no idea what the words were, but man was it beautiful. What a moment – to realize that you're breathing the same air, soaking up the same sunshine, walking on the same ground where so many pilgrims have come from all corners of this country and beyond to come visit the place where Mary Herself visited. And to be among the people that She considers her special children! Of course, she loves all people across the world with the same amazing love that Jesus has given Her, but Rwanda has a special, unique place in Her heart.

Later that day, I had plans to go walking with Louise, another animator who lived with the Sisters here at Muhato all of last year. She was an Aspirant, meaning she wanted to become a Salesian Sister, and she headed off to Kigali to begin her formation. But less than a month ago she returned because she was not sure if the religious life is truly her vocation. Well it was raining quite a bit this afternoon, so I didn't really know if she would come. I had also invited Edouard and Felicien yesterday, and I said I'd beep them when we're leaving.

So at 4pm, it was still raining, and figuring that it'll be dark in 2 ½ hours, I assumed we could just reschedule for next weekend. That was ok by me because I had a lot of catch-up things that I had hoped to do but didn't get to yet. But she came knocking at the door just a bit after 4, even in the rain! We sat and talked for a while to wait for the weather to clear up. Meanwhile Felicien called to yell at me in French for not beeping him. It was very funny. Well, Sr. Gisèle was going to drive Sr. Rose somewhere in town, so they offered to drive Louise and me, and we could just take umbrellas, and it was evident that the rain was almost finished. So we drove into town and they dropped us off near Lake Kivu.

That was very helpful, and sure enough, it stopped raining within 5 minutes of them dropping us off. We had such a great time on our walk! Louise is a very kind, generous person (who walks 45 minutes in the rain to come meet me!) and was very interested in snow. I was telling her about how the cold is miserable but it offers many fun things like skiing, snowball fights, and traying! She said that she would probably die in such cold, as right now, when it was probably 60 degrees F, she considers it cold. We laughed a lot and talked a lot and had a really nice walk. We were headed for "La Grande Barrière," which is one of the borders between Rwanda and the Congo. She explained to me along the way that its really not very grand…that I'm probably going to laugh when I see it. Sure enough, we arrive there and the border is a small stretch of a red metal fence. There are two moveable arms with stop signs for cars passing through. But it is well guarded, so you can't just hop over. There's an immigration station right there too, where people are waiting in line to have their passport stamped. We turn to walk along the road to stay on the Rwanda side, and Louise explains that there is also "La Petite Barrière," which apparently is even funnier because you would think that a barrier can't get much smaller than the grand one. We plan to head there, but it is already starting to get dark, and we still have at least 45 minutes to walk back to Muhato. So we decide that we'll see the little border another day. I was also very privileged to stop by Louise's house with her! Only her brother was home, and he was heading out the door to go meet the rest of the family at a prayer service. But we stopped there to get some money so Louise could take a moto-taxi home since it will be quite dark by the time we get all the way back to Muhato. She said that one day soon I can come back to visit and meet her mom and sisters – I'm very excited about this! The rest of the walk back home was kind of tiring…it’s pretty far, and you are walking on uneven, rocky surfaces the whole way, in the almost-dark. And there were lots of kids shouting "Good morning!" I corrected them, telling them that now we say "Good evening." It was really really great to get to spend some time with her – and her English is verrrry good. She has only studied it for a year, but she lived in Kenya for a while where she got to practice a lot. I'm so happy to have a friend!

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!

The Rest of the Week

11/29/09

So, Patronage on Wednesday and Friday were very similar in structure to Monday, as described earlier. Wednesday's large-group games were quite enjoyable for everyone. They played a version of Marco Polo called Adama-Eva. One kid, Adama, is blindfolded and is trying to find Eva, also blindfolded, who is trying to avoid Adama. The rest of the kids form a circle to guide the blind Adam and Eve whenever they veer towards the edge. It was pretty funny to watch!

During formation, Sr. Charlotte asked me to go supervise the Abapietro group because they are many and the animators are few. So I went in and just sort of stood at the back and would separate children when they started fidgeting with each other, or go stand by these two troublemakers. I felt like my being there was a bit pointless, but I trust that it did some good to keep them paying attention. Really though, the environment in which they learn is not conducive to learning. Kids are entering and exiting the classroom freely. They open the door and come in after a half an hour, they come and squish in a seat with three other kids, they get up and leave randomly, and a few of them have their baby siblings strapped to their backs and need to leave to tend to them and get them to stop crying. But I guess they're just used to this. They did pretty good at learning the song and associated hand motions that was today's goal.

Later during playtime I had a larger group of kids following me around to play "do what she does." It was again very fun telling them to stand up, touch the ground, stand up, touch the ground, faster faster faster, and they giggled a lot a lot a lot. But again, it was tiring. I tried to teach them leap frog too…I chose one girl to help me demonstrate, and motioned for her to come over here. But then the whole group followed her! It was hard to get them to understand that they need to stay there and watch. Fortunately one of the older girls told the littler ones in Kinyarwanda to stay. So me and this girl played leap frog, but she actually just somersaulted over me while laughing hysterically. Hey, whatev. I then told the others to join in, but they didn't really get the whole idea of continuing the line…that once someone jumps over you, you get up and jump over the next person. It ended up being a few people crouched on the ground while everybody else jumped over them….they still had a pretty good time. Then Fabrice joins us with a ball and we play a duck-duck-goose game. Everyone sings this song in Kinyarwanda and one person takes the ball and walks around the outside of the circle. They stealthily put it behind one person, who must get up and chase them around and tag them before they get back to their spot. It was fun, but I can only squat on the ground for so long, so after a few minutes I stood up. And as a result, all the kids stood up too and the game instantly dissolved. Goodness. We walked around a bit with all the kids trying to hold my hands or grab my arms, they really just like to touch. I was pretty tired that day and did not have as much energy to run hither and thither with them. But then it was time to reconvene, phew.

In my English class we corrected the stories that the groups wrote yesterday. Not too much to say about that – they did a decent job of spotting the errors and correcting them. But after class we had an excellent Zumba party! They wanted to do "Chin Chin" without me leading, so that I could watch them and tell them what to fix. So that's what we did! And then we did a few other songs just for fun. Sr. Charlotte captured it on video, but unfortunately the file is too large for our portable modem to handle :  ( I wish you could see it though…they're great!

Thursday I was supposed to go with Sr. Charlotte to Rubavu for Patronage, but she suggested that I stay home and get caught up. I mentioned that I still needed to plan lessons for the Father's and that I still need to figure out what we're doing tomorrow, and a few other random things that I hadn't been able to do. So I had a day of finishing things. I actually typed up a copy of Sunday Mass in English for the priests in this area. I've emailed it to one priest from a different diocese, and I gave a copy to a priest from a different parish who came to visit the Sisters, and I've gone through the script with my two priest students that come regularly for lessons. They were very grateful and eager to get started with saying Mass in English. I don't know when they'll actually start, but I'm glad that I could help get this process going.

11/26/09

11/26/09

Tuesday is when the Patronage kids in the middle group come for an English lesson. Sr. Charlotte asked me this morning if I would help her teach them, and I agreed. Now during this exchange, I was under the impression that I'd be HELPING, but deep down I had a slight idea that this meant, "you'll teach the class. ok?" So I was prepared to take the reigns. Good thing, because that's exactly what Sr. Charlotte meant. I figured I could just use the same first lesson I did with the secondary school class – "How are you?" other responses besides "Fine, thank you." "What is your name?" etc. This group was a lot more challenging than the older kids. Sr. Charlotte had to chime in a lot with Kinyarwanda explanations. Kids again confused "how are you doing?" with "what are you doing?" So I tried to explain the difference by writing the two sentences on the board and putting their respective responses beneath each one, but they didn't really get it.

Also, one thing I didn't account for is that you need to tell the children to copy down the things you write. They won't just do it automatically. I should have expected this, since they're only about 10 years old, but I just hadn't thought of it. So at the end of class I re-wrote everything we talked about, and we gave them a good 20 minutes to copy everything.  Sr. Charlotte reminded me that in school, they're still perfecting the skill of writing, so each letter they copy with great care and precision. Just the act of writing down what we discussed is a big task in itself, but it really helps them remember it.

We spent at least 30 minutes learning "what is your name," "how are you" and responses other than "fine, thank you" (that's the only response they're taught in school, I've discovered.) I would toss a ball to one student at a time and ask them their name and how they're doing, and this was mildly effective. Many kids were just silent when I tossed it to them…its not such a good idea to put young ones on the spot. Having the class as a whole repeat things worked much better. To fill the remaining 15 minutes, we learn the days of the week. They are super excited about this because they already know it. When I write "Today is ______." about a third of the students jump up and start waving and snapping their hands (instead of simply raising their hands, they all do this kid of snapping thing…its like they're snapping their fingers, but they're actually flicking their wrists really hard to make a noise…its weird.) So everybody wants to say that today is Tuesday. We review "tomorrow is _______" and "Yesterday was _________," which they had not learned yet. Sr. Charlotte had to explain that. Well, after my hour of teaching, Sr. Charlotte taught them an English praise song with hand motions and movements. I sat in the back and participated with them. It was so awesome to see them sing and dance – they really love this type of stuff. They're very loud, not at all shy or reserved with their voices! And they like the motions too. It was quite a blessing to watch them all sing "This is the day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."

.