College Town

As I’ve said before, I live in the Rwandan equivalent of a college town. I love college towns, so this is a real treat.

The university here, Umutara Polytechnic, is comprised of six faculties – Business, Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Information & Communication Technology, Technology & Applied Science, and Language, Communication & Media.

I’m not really sure what the quality of instruction is like. Several students have complained to me that their teachers are not well-qualified or that they frequently make mistakes. People have also told me that the library doesn’t have very many books, the computer lab doesn’t have very many well-functioning computers, and everything they learn is theoretical. The students also don’t have textbooks for the most part. They buy photocopies from the school for some things, but not all the students can afford them (it’s 30 francs, about 5 cents, per page, and there’s a lot of hand-outs); for other things, they take turns reading the one copy of the book in the library. I’m hoping to sit in on some classes at some point and get a better idea of what things are like.

Anyway, a lot of my good friends here are students, and they are really impressive. Many of them are from extremely poor families in very rural villages and grew up without electricity or other resources. On top of that, a lot of them are genocide survivors, who witnessed violence at an early age (around 6 for most of them), lost family members, and were even left to care for their siblings. But, they still finished secondary school and earned government scholarships to study at university. In a country where many people don’t complete secondary school and very few pursue higher education, that’s a really amazing accomplishment.

Even now, most of the students don’t have a lot of resources, but they work really hard (unless they’re always lying to me when they say they’re studying!). A lot seem to spend hours in the library, they come by with their reading assignments and ask me about words they don’t know, they practice English all the time, they sit in my house and copy vocab lists out of my Kinyarwanda books.

As the Rwandan government just changed the language of education from French to English last year, the students who grew up in Rwanda (which is the majority of them, as far as I know) are facing some difficult challenges. Imagine if you took a few hours of Spanish class per week in high school, then got to college and were told that everything was going to be conducted in Spanish. It would be a disaster. But, that’s what the kids here are dealing with, and they’re doing a remarkable job. Not only do they have little experience in English, but they’re not always getting great instruction in English, as not all of the teachers speak it very well either. Plus, they don’t have a lot of opportunities to really practice. I guess that’s where I come in – I’m really happy that I’m able to help them and give them a chance to practice. Two of my good friends were at my house the other day, and they told me that I explain things really well and that I’m helping them a lot – it was definitely a highlight!