(Not just) another day at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village

Today was easily my best day at the village. I found out that three of the major projects that I’ve started while here are sustainable, and are already in the curriculum for next year. Meanwhile, I’m still sitting here wondering why people are taking my ideas seriously. 

Idea 1: Guidance counseling day.

One of the issues that comes up now and again in discussions about inequality in America is guidance counselors (or a lack thereof). There are many underfunded schools in the US that have guidance counselors to student ratios of 1:500 or worse. This sucks because it means that kids don’t get access to structured 1-on-1 time to discuss their goals and how they’re working on achieving them.

At the village, there are no dedicated guidance counselors, and the resources are definitely not there to hire them. The closest things to guidance counselors we have are Keturah, Moses, and me in the Career Development Department, but we’re all remarkably busy and don’t have time to give adequate guidance to 500 students. Students can seek out adult advice/guidance, but there is a sizable population (25-50%) that doesn’t reach out, and they probably need guidance the most. While those students probably still interact plenty with their “family mama” and “family big sister/brother” that still isn’t the same. Families are 16 people, and individual time and attention are surprisingly easy not to give if you aren’t consciously thinking about it. I had a cabin of 6 kids this summer, and I spent plenty of time with them as a group but didn’t regularly have 1-on-1 conversations with at least half of them.

So the idea, which made it onto the schedule this morning, is to have a guidance counselor day. We’ve set aside an afternoon where the entire staff can set up shop in the dining hall, where each one of us can meet with 2 or 3 students in their freshman year to talk about what they’re shooting for and what they’re doing to get there. Afterwards, we can each write a few sentences (there’s already a paralyzing amount of reporting done here) on the students, so that we can follow up with them at the next meeting and keep track of their trajectory over time. Since most of the staff is around for a long time, most students will have the same mentor for their entire time at the village. This will also help the village administration get more face-time with the students, which should be great on both sides (I find that most school administrators work at schools to be around kids, but end up stuck in offices all day). If this goes well, it can happen each term for every grade next year. The next incoming class will never know an Agahozo-Shalom where this wasn’t the modus operandi. 

Idea 2: English wristbands.

The Rwandan education system is, for better or worse, in English. Since many of our students come in with extremely fledgling English skills, and students tend to speak only Kinyarwanda with one another, they struggle at school. Almost every kid here will tell you that they desperately want to improve their English. After they graduate, the number one thing we hear from alumni is that the English development here didn’t prepare them well enough for either universities abroad or Rwandan universities. So how can we bridge the gap between students wanting to improve their English but not knowing how to do it?

My solution was to allow students (on a totally voluntary basis) to sign up for an English wristband. To get one, a student finds a partner and they sign a contract saying that they will speak only English to other students that also have wristbands. If one of them breaks the contract, they both lose the wristbands (although enforcement is nonexistent intentionally). After telling the 150 students in the English classes I’m coordinating (more on that in #3) I made sure they had to go well out of their way to get a wristband, and created artificial scarcity by only distributing limited numbers of wristbands at a time. This made sure kids were serious about making the commitment, and kept the subjective value of the wristbands high (looks like my econ major is good for something). I knew that a few kids were keeping up with the bargain, but until this morning I had no idea about the other ones. This morning I got feedback from a number of people that the students are actually, en masse, adhering to the rules of the contract. I’m sure there are plenty of students that are disregarding it, but the fact that most of the (over 80) kids that have wristbands are following through and probably speaking 3x the english they were beforehand is pretty sweet.

Idea 3: English classes for freshmen and sophomores.

I spent my first few weeks sitting in on Keturah’s SAT/TOEFL class for seniors. Watching and talking with Keturah made it obvious that our students, even the top brass, were drastically underprepared for either test. Trying to learn how to take those tests is hard for anyone, and they’re impossible to prepare for in less than a year if you haven’t had a formal English grammar education in years (if at all). So I put out an application for freshman and sophomore English classes. I was expecting to get something like 60 applications and take 2/3 of applicants to have one 20 person class for each grade. When I counted out the 150 students applications (1/2 the freshman class and 3/4 of the sophomore class) it was not an option to take 40 kids and throw the other 110 to the curb. So I looked into the scheduling, got the fellows to agree to help teach 5 of the 9 sections, and accepted everyone. The first few classes have gone really well, and the head of informal education at the village is making these classes available to all first and second year students next year. The students are hungry to learn, and the curriculum and manpower should be there to help them for years to come, which makes me really happy.

If you’ve read this far and are wondering how you can e-meet these kids or pitch in to help them learn English, you’re in luck! Shoot an email to RwandaEnglish@gmail.com saying you're tentatively interested and I’ll set you up with one of my students who is working on their writing and grammar skills. You can edit their work, give them advice, etc. I (obviously) won’t be offended if you don’t want to, but if you have some spare time, these kids are really incredible and anyone would be lucky to hear their stories—I know I have been.

“I loved the Nazi party!”

“I loved the Nazi party!”

–bits of the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had. Liesel is a German woman living in Switzerland who lived through World War 2 as a German citizen.

She was 7 when the Second World War started and was ten when she moved out of Frankfurt for the countryside.

Starting with the highlights:

Her mom came home distraught once because she had seen Jews packed into cattle cars at the local train station. “It’s impossible, those are people” her mother remarked. “But what could she do?” Liesel asked us, “she couldn’t write a letter to the newspaper.”

“I loved the Nazi party! My older sister was a member of a youth program and they did all sorts of things, like hiking trips and group meetings. I couldn’t wait to join.”

“Think of the young German soldier. He was taken from his education and forced to do terrible things. He was a murderer, yes, but he was also a victim.”

She remembers hearing Hitler speak, but when she listens now she can’t believe people liked him so much.

She recalled Goebbels, “one of Hitler’s ministers” and said that no one in her family really knew what was going on, which was very common. “Propaganda hadn’t existed before that, we didn’t see it coming. They didn’t know about the killings because it didn’t come through the radio.”

Her father hated politics, didn’t like any politicians, and avoided it until his boss asked him incredulously, “you aren’t a member of the party?” and after that, for fear of his job, he joined.

She didn’t know any Jews, but she was aware that they had to wear stars.

None of the teachers who taught during the Nazi regime could be teachers afterwards. So there was a major shortage. The old teachers needed to be “re-educated.”

Other super interesting stuff in more chronological order:

One of her earliest memories was being scared when she heard planes going over. Her mother said that there was going to be another war and that was very bad. But as the war progressed and the armies were progressing, they became invested and supportive of it. They didn’t know that Hitler was trying to enslave the entire world, but they kept a map in their house and marked off all the battles won and new advances after victories.

Her older sister was very patriotic and supported the regime. After she found out what had been happening, she felt like her youth and enthusiasm had been betrayed.

“We were all so poor that we thought it was normal. I was so young that I felt it even less than other people. We were so much poorer than poor people today. Her older sister was so hungry that she would go down at night and eat a little more of the bread than they had marked off” (they literally marked loaves of bread because they had to last so long). Their mom would then give them all a little less with the next bit.  “The poor have it far worse now because they see what all the people around them have.”

“Each family got a ration voucher card. They cut off little squares to get food and supplies.”

Her family moved to their relatives’ house in the countryside after the first major bombing of Frankfurt. But she did experience (before she left) the tunnels running between basements to the bigger shelters underground. In the countryside she lived off milk and potatoes, much more than people in the city got to eat.

Her family doctor lived in a town that was also in the countryside, but was big enough to be worried that it might be bombed. He wrote a letter and ended up moving his family in with them. The younger daughter, who was around Liesel’s age, slept in a bed with Liesel, which was perfectly normal. The older daughter slept in her sister’s bed.

She mentioned that in the countryside town the secondary school was a train ride away. But they were afraid it would get bombed because it could have been for transporting supplies, so they started a school in her smaller town. Since so much was destroyed in the cities and so many people fled to the countryside, they kept the school up after the war. Liesel pointed out that, even though her house was never bombed in Frankfurt, they were very lucky to have had family in the country.

The allies used bombs that made fire to burn houses, and while people were running from their burning homes, they would come back down and use bombs that changed the air pressure and made people explode from the pressure.

[This is reminiscent of “double dipping” the term for when drones drop one bomb on a suspected “militant” and then drop another one shortly after. The intent is supposedly to make sure the first person is dead but in effect the second bomb kills the doctors and townspeople who come to inspect the damage and maybe help the person who was bombed.]

After the war:

2 million Germans died coming back from the East. Liesel believes that many people thought that Germans didn’t deserve to live.

Her dad came back to Frankfurt first. There had been three families living in their three room flat and when one of the families moved out her dad went back. Then her sister moved back to do some schooling and be a teacher. Then Liesel came back to go to university (which was free everywhere in Germany) while living at home. She always worked, even from when she was younger. She kept the money and used it to buy food when she ate away from home at the university. She lived with her sister in the flat for a little while but soon her sister was married and having children.

There was starvation and many, many people went hungry. Even worse than during the war. She thinks that it was intentional, that the allies thought that Germans didn’t deserve to live.

“The old money was useless because there was nothing to buy. When they issued new money they gave everyone 60 marks no matter what, and we all started from there. After that, the shelves had goods in them and we could buy things again. But chocolate was 5 marks, so I didn’t have chocolate until I was fourteen. I remember buying a cheap postcard with a drawing on it just because it was fun to buy something with money.”

I pushed her on the idea that there was no store of old wealth and she noted that you could trade in the old money, 10 units for 1 mark. And if you had a bank account, if the money had been put there a long time ago you got a slightly better cash-in rate.

[that makes sense to me, because someone depositing 100 units before the hyperinflation was a much larger real deposit than 100 units just before the new currency was introduced.]

Still, many people had nothing if their homes were destroyed; especially those who didn’t have bank accounts and kept everything in their houses including their money and possessions. Her family, during the early air raids, always kept suitcases packed with necessaries and money and such.

Even with the new money after the war, they had to apply to get things. Once her mom applied to get Liesel new shoes, explaining that she had grown. It was granted and they went to the shoe store, but they didn’t have anything that was the right size so they went home.

Higher party members and SS members were put in ally-built concentration camps after the war. Her uncle (her mom’s brother) lived in the countryside. It used to be the case that when a farmer had sons he would divide up his land among them (or something like that which made the farms get divided) and so farms had gotten smaller and smaller. The Nazis made a rule that if you had a farm that was smaller than a certain size it couldn’t be divided. Her uncle’s farm was just small enough not to be divided and he liked that a lot, so he was a big supporter of the party. “People vote for and support what they know and what matters to them.” He was the village head of the party and when they got together to have meetings and stuff he would run them, but “he never did anything bad.” He was put in one of the concentration camps.

Getting into the SS was a big accomplishment. It meant that you were very physically fit and you had to pass rigorous tests. They had a family friend who made it in and obviously joined. It was an honor to him and his family to join. They didn’t really knowing what was really going on. After the war, his family didn’t know where he was for a long time. They sent letters back and forth that arrived very quickly so they knew he was close, but he wasn’t allowed to say where he was. He visited once and said: “do not ask me where I’ve been” and that he “didn’t want to talk about it.” He was in a very terrible place—he was in a concentration camp. He saw what he had done and the machine he had helped to build and he killed himself after he got out. He left behind a wife and three daughters. He was also a victim. He didn’t have a choice.

She also mentioned that there were a lot of intellectuals in the concentration camps and that they held operas there and other performances.

I asked her if she remembers the Nuremburg trials. She said she didn’t remember them very well but her husband paid close attention. He thought it was bad that they were punishing the generals. They were just doing their jobs.

In University, Liesel did a 3-month German-English reconstruction program in England working on a farm. When asked, she said it wasn’t weird to be living as a German in England at the time. But she was part of a group that talked about an Irish playwright. She met her first Jew there and he asked her is she knew what had happened in Germany. Even though she was very young when it happened she felt tremendously remorseful for what had been done to his people.

[This is almost exactly what I was doing when, as a Jew (though I didn’t mention it), I asked her if she had been in Germany during the war and prompted her to tell us about her experience. Reminds me a little of something my first college professor told our class: “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”]

One person she met in England said that Hitler’s only mistake was that he hadn’t managed to kill all the Jews. A few other people made similar remarks to her, though that was obviously not a common sentiment. It seems like even most of the people in Germany didn’t support that at any point, but didn’t mind the regime because they didn’t know about the bulk of what was happening.

Lisbon and Leiden

Lisbon and Leiden so far:

“Passport” is spelled “paspoort” but “vacuum” is still “vacuum.”

Some form of Japanese amphibian (I think it might be a type of salamander) is 7-feet long, or else the kid I sat next to on the plane was lying to me/ill-informed. He’s a 14-year old amphibian connoisseur who I asked for some fun facts.

Notes from going to the supermarket in Leiden. 1) I cannot fit on the back of a bicycle. 2) Oumou, a 5’6” woman from the Netherlands cannot successfully pedal her bike with me on the back up a hill. 3) I can pedal with her on the back and successfully got us most of the way to the store. 4) Oumou discovers that riding on the part of the bike where you’re supposed to store a sleeping bag is actually as uncomfortable as people have been telling her it is for years after riding there.

TAP Portugal airlines serve you a twix bar and a sandwich for breakfast. There are also Mars, Inc. sponsorship ads all over the Lisbon airport.

Lisbon is BEAUTIFUL. After metro-ing to the financial district and asking at least 7 different banks if they would exchange my dollars for Euros I finally succeeded in a really upscale hotel with an extremely nice custodian . Note: do not get directions from bankers in Lisbon. They will point you to a place down the street, then when you go in that direction and stop in another bank to try there and ask them for help, they will send you off in another direction entirely. This is a tiring way to spend a morning after you barely got any sleep on a red-eye.

After getting cash, I wandered into a nice church-looking building that is apparently a restaurant. Though the restaurant was closed, the guy illegibly scribbled out the name of some subway stops that I visit to wander around downtown. I have bad handwriting and I can tell you the things he wrote down were barely words. After eventually finding the stops he recommended on the metro map, I went to the first one and came out onto a beautiful intersection with mosaic tiles on the ground and a statue in the middle. It’s hard to take statue imitation pictures when you don’t have another photographer, so you’ll have to trust that I was mimicking the statue’s pose while I took the picture. This seems to be an unusual practice judging by the looks I got from the locals. Anyway, the streets had white buildings awash in sunlight, trees everywhere, and Portugese red roofs that look even cooler than they did from the plane.

When I left my friend the statue and walked towards his friend, the other statue, the breeze started to pick up and I turned left see (many blocks down a side street) the ocean and coast that had looked so gorgeous from the plane. I half-walked, half-ran down the giant hill of street with the cool wind off the ocean on my face and the 70-degree sunshine on my back and started laughing with a goofy grin on my face. I didn’t even know the city got that close to the ocean, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how epically surprising and awesome it was. On the way down I cruised by pastry shops and people laughing at the funny-looking tourist with the giant red frame-pack laughing to himself.

I spent a few minutes by the ocean before it was time to head back to the plane, to meet my friend, Eduardo the lizard-fanatic, arrive in the excellent town of Leiden to meet Oumou, her bike, and the setting of the next few days of my trip.

Last update

After our auto-rickshaw driver pulled onto a third side street, this one even more isolated than the last—with people around small fires on the side of the road by ramshackle homes—Megan and I began to wonder if this was really the way to get to the nicest hotel in Chennai, or if our trip was about to take a turn for the worse.

It turned out to be just fine; the driver was just pretending not to be lost until he could ask someone how to get to the ITC hotel. We arrived there at 6:30 am, argued our way into the business center, called various hotels in town and figured out that we needed to get across town to a different hotel.

We hopped in a cab that, as he was about to pull onto the road, asked us which terminal we wanted to go to. Eventually he got the idea that we weren’t going to the airport, and decided to quadruple our fare because of it.

Eventually we arrived at our correct hotel, saw Taylor and Jac, checked in, and went to stay at our friends’ amazing Tower Suite back at the super nice hotel. We ate lunch there and hung out at the pool for the rest of the afternoon.

Now seems like a good time to catch you up on the last part of our stay at Lily’s Valley resort. After I posted last, I was offered a motorcycle ride, met some wild expats, and tried to sleep through blasting Tamil music.

The motorcycle ride was offered (but I never had time to cash in on) from Prince, an employee at the resort who I talked to just after I went to the central area to get internet to post onto the blog. He told me about his friends’ arranged marriages, his views on female education (positive), and about getting his MBA while working the night shift at Lily’s Valley.

The next day we went to a friend of Sukumar’s (Mark) in town for Christmas. There, we met a number of interesting people including Mark himself, who Megan talked to at length about their favorite philosophers. We went from Mark’s house to a 60-person Christmas party with a bunch of foreigners in Kodaikanal.

Expats always have great stories—there has to be some reason that they left. This is even more true when they are living in a small city on top of a random mountain in India.

We met one guy who works to make diamond mines more like cooperatives in the Ivory Coast. The host of the party brews his own beer. Another person, Benjy,  was a drama teacher in the US and now teaches at an international school in Kodaikanal. There were a few people who had lived their whole lives in the area, including a guy who is an “opinion-maker” on television, who told us why he doesn’t think India isn’t the best place for gay rights. All these people were really cool to talk to, and there were a number of other folks with interesting things to say.

As the outdoor gathering wore on, someone pulled out a guitar and started playing Simon & Garfunkle and Beatles songs. The guitar was passed around and people played and sang songs they are fond of. Megan and I had a great time listening and singing along, and particularly enjoyed one guy’s song about Kodaikanal that he had written. The food at this gathering  was also terrific, with a number of Indian dishes as well at stuff you’d see at any barbecue in the US like grilled chicken.

As the sun started to set we headed back to Lily’s valley, where we watched the second half (I had seen the first half) of Django—a really good movie. After that, I went to skype my parents for a while, came back, and went to sleep.

On our last day, we woke up late, went out for a drive with Sukumar and his friend who owns the farm. We drove by the huge pine tree forest, drank coconut water, saw an amazing overlook onto a village in a valley, and had lunch. We came back to the hotel, packed up, and headed to our overnight bus to Chennai.

The bus assistant put on a painfully loud Tamil film ripped from tamiltorrents.com. It was painfully loud because of the subwoofers right above our heads. The movie was about a bus assistant falling in love with a girl from a rural area, and had plenty of eardrum wrenching scenes where the bus wheels would screech to a halt. We tried moving back but there were subwoofers back there too.

ALSO, instead of having cuddle-cabins like the last one, there were just seats that leaned back a little. Sleeping in them was a lot worse than the bus we took on the way to the resort. Both were listed as semi-sleepers, but we’re pretty sure the first one was a full-sleeper.  When we got to the bus stop, we found an auto-rickshaw that took a very “interesting” route to the ITC, bringing us back to the beginning of this story.

Now I’m safely at the hotel for the debate world championships, and likely won’t be posting again. I appreciate the vote of confidence expressed by your willingness to read my ramblings, and I hope I’ll get around to writing something for my next trip!