Short Takes on a Two Day Celebration
Front Page News, Baby! The Sunday edition of the Kigali
Times had as its headline, Quality education is the best legacy – First Lady.
Yes, the lead story and pictures were referring to the graduation ceremony at
the Maranyundo School at which Madame proclaimed in her keynote, ”Education is the
best heritage we can hand to our children.”
The story also included her pride in touring the new Library and STEM
Learning Center. The tour of the Labs, Maker Space and Computer Space showcased
students demonstrating projects in chemistry, physics, biology and computer
science. Among the projects that impressed the dignitaries was an app that 3
first year high school girls developed to help peers study for science and math
tests. They had won an award at a Girls in Computer competition last month.
The ceremony was two days of celebration. The events
included opportunities to meet with the graduates, speeches, poems, singing, a
blessing by the bishop, dancing, lunches, dancing, skits, dancing. Rwandan
people now how to celebrate and be joyful as a community.
For my Role of Story students: I had a conversation with
several girls at my lunch table about Americanah.
They had all read it and found Adichie a clear and captivating author. I asked
them what they thought the main lesson that she wanted readers to take from the
novel. Replies included: “Racism is a barrier that needs to be broken. Life is
a struggle but don’t be afraid to engage in the struggle if what you want is
important to you and good for others. Be true to yourself.” When I asked the
what they thought she wanted them to think about education in the US and Africa
there was a re-sounding reply…”You should never take your education for granted
because not everyone can afford to have the right to a good education that you
have…not everyone has teachers who understand your ideas and culture.” And then this…”Each of us has a voice that
must be heard, an identity that must be respected.”
There are traffic jams throughout the roadways that lead
into Kigali from the outlying areas. Slow moving farm vehicles include enormous
cattle trucks transporting enormous cattle. And scooters weaving and dodging
through traffic and pedestrians. Not for the feint of heart. Horns are part of
the sounds of the city.
The school has come so far. The campus, the buildings and the landscaping far
surpass what the members of the Maranyundo Initiative could have imagined in 2005 when they planted
a tiny tree on the former site of a Tutsi concentration camp and promised that
the site would be a school for girls, a sign of hope in a rebuilding nation.
Seeing the gradating high school
girls…proud of their accomplishments yet sincerely grateful for the support of
family, friends and teachers is so rewarding. But hearing the entire school,
(now 400 girls where there were 60!) Singing the school song together…amazing.
Yes, “Education is the best heritage we can hand to our
children”…and to ourselves.
In the first October 2015 post that I wrote in this blog I
began with this passage:
Arriving in Rwanda and
navigating the first night and day in the country, are always an adventure. In
this nation that is rapidly building new infrastructure, developing new ideas
and economies, there are always signs of this progress blended with familiar
signs, sounds and smells.
That description remains apt to describe our arrival from
Amsterdam to the warm, spicey darkness of the airport in Kigali. I always
forget that arriving at the airport means you walk off the plane into the night
air instead of through a covered tunnel that has been pushed up to the arriving
plane as in most arrival terminals. In Rwanda, you exit the plane that has been
your seat on the world for 9 hours into the soft night air and walk to the
entrance of the Customs Hall where you show your passport, apply and pay for
your 30-day visa and retrieve your luggage. An adventure, indeed. The customs officials are thorough,
deliberate, careful. These routines take time and patience.
This trip to Rwanda promises to be different for me in many
ways. First, it is a trip for celebration not work. I am traveling with my
colleague and fellow educator, Jane O’Connor (and 40 other Maranyundo Girls
School supporters) to attend the first graduation of the STEM High School for Girls on the
Maranyundo Campus. Besides celebrating the achievements of this first group of
57 young women who majored in STEM disciplines, it celebrates the commitment of
their teachers, the sisters of the Benebikira Order who administer the school,
the families who support the school. It
is also a celebration of the remarkable
partnership that is represented by the Maranyundo Initiative…the visionary
women of both Boston and Rwanda who took a pressing need…a school for girls
beyond elementary grades…and supported it to become one of the most successful
schools in the country. It is a celebration of the families of the girls enrolled
in the middle school, who sought the support of the Initiative to build a high
school on the campus that would prepare the graduates for post-secondary school
studies and employment in the rapidly growing technology sectors of the Rwandan
economy.
Secondly, it is a trip on which I will stay in a hotel and
not at the girls school, itself. As many of you know, staying at the school is
an experience that I treasure. This time, I will be a visitor like everyone
else. I will not wake to that gentle light and hear the rooster crow and the
soft lowing of the cows in the stable. I will not hear the girls gather at the
meeting space outside the administration building and listen to Sr.
Juvenal introduce the day to the
students. I will not follow the routines and schedules of the school day, sit
in classrooms or spend time with teachers in the library or the Teacher’s Work
Space. This trip, I will be a guest, as it were. So I will have a different
vantage point from which to experience the graduation and the life of the
school.
Besides traveling with the Maranyundo Board members, I am
traveling with new supporters of the Initiative. Among the group I am traveling
with are Jane O’Connor’s daughter Erin and two of Erin’s friends. They are
traveling to Rwanda for the first time. It is so interesting to see the city,
to hear the story of Rwanda’s amazing growth since the devastation of the
genocide through Erin and her friends. I always come away with new insights to
stuff I thought I knew for sure.
One thing I do know for sure every time I enter this
country, the development of the infra structure is amazing. It continues to
grow and thrive. Around the central city, tall buildings of interesting
architectural design are everywhere. One sight which greeted us as we came into
the central city last night was the new Convention Center whose centerpiece
sports a dome which is lighted with the colors of the Rwandan flag: green,
yellow and teal. There are new hotels, elegant and chic, like the new Marriot
across from the Serena. New government buildings, new buildings at the
University of Rwanda, new banks, new shopping areas.
This morning when we went out to the Genocide Memorial and
Museum in central Kigali, our driver took us through the “new city” of Kigali.
It was an area of the city that was known as the “bush” before 1994. During the
genocide, it was a place where many Tutsis fled as horror came upon their
neighborhoods or villages. As a result, it became a place where killers hunted
down their prey and left the bodies to be eaten by wild dogs and other animals.
A place of death and evil.
Today the area is a place of prosperity with lovely stone
homes, gated communities for the rising Rwandan middle class and schools. Moses, our bus driver, who was 7 in 1994 and
lost all of his family except for his dad, is so enthusiastic about these signs of prosperity. He gives credit to “our brave president” and
feels that he is benefiting from the security and “we-are-all-Rwandese” spirit that
gives him hope. In fact, he told us that he is expecting his first child in
December. “I am rebuilding my family,” he said softly.
And so the signs of prosperity and the building boom in
Kigali and its suburbs is a rebuilding that is reflected in families that are
rebuilding. What an interesting time to be celebrating the graduation of
accomplished young women whose school motto… Respect, Responsibility and
Leadership…are three ideals so needed right now in a nation developing rapidly.
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