Finishing Camara Volunteering in Kigali and heading for Week 4 to Nyamagabe

Hi Everyone! Hope you all are well. Again sorry for not getting to blog sooner. Thanks to people for leaving comments - much appreciated.

We are re-locating today, to a town outside Butare called Nyamagabe. I only have about 15 mins to blog as our bus leaves at 11. I tried to transfer photos from my laptop this morning, ready to upload, but we had a power cut. Luckily the shops and Internet Cafe here in the centre of Kigali seem to have their own generator and i'm hoping that i will be able to finish this. More detailed blogs and photos to follow so watch this space.....

Since my last post and over the last two weeks, I have had my highs and lows. I found week two both frustrating, interesting and tiring. A lot of the more technical and specialist courses were being offered and this meant my scope for helping was limited. On Monday and Tuesday of Week 2, I facilitated for a networking course. As you know I am not the most 'technical' of people, but by the end of Day 1 I had learnt how to 'crimp' cables, run a test by 'Pinging', set up IP address' and connect computers up in a network and make them 'talk to each' other! So if anyone wants me to help them to network a school lab..... Happily On Thursday, I was back to familiar territory teaching ICT in Education to teachers.

At the end of this week we received disappointing and frustrating news, that the schools 'Up North', where we were planning to go for week 3, had pulled out because their were unresolved issues about school reports being issued before the end of the school term here and they had been directed to spend the week resolving this issue. So in consultation with The Rwanda Hub managers, we came up with a schedule for week 3, which involved spending the week training up the Camara Rwandan Volunteers, some of whom are sent out to schools to train up teachers in basic ICT. In the end this plan worked out really well and was very productive.On Monday of week 3, i created a pack of teaching materials for teaching the ICT in Education course and on Tuesday and Wednesday trained up 10 volunteers in this course. It was very encouraging and the volunteers were very keen to learn. The highlight for me was the teaching practice on Day 2, when the volunteers selected a Edubuntu application that they had learnt on the course and delivered a presentation on how to teach it in the classroom. The presentations were of really high standard and I saw the volunteers growing in confidence. We ran other courses for volunteers this week, including Moodle, Webdesign and Networkig. I found it encouraging that we had made a positive contribution to developing the skills of a local team of volunteers who would be using these to further the training of local teachers.

Go to go now...Need to head back to the guesthouse and get our bus down south. The Schedule for next week looks really packed... Will blog soon.

Quotes for the Week

Bosco, one of the teachers who received training from us commented on the meaning of the word CAMARA which appears on our TShirts. (In Swahilli this means 'one who teaches with experience)
"In Kinyarwanda CAMARA means a type of small sweet bananna"
(We were wondering why people were asking us about what was on our T-Shirts( and giggling) Perhaps the fruit theme is a good one though. You can use apple computers why not bananna ones!!)