A Rwandan student's life

My 7th grade classroom.  There are 70 students in this class. 

The kitchen where all meals are prepared.  Those are some seriously huge pots and fires going.  Today's meal: rice and beans!

The living quarters of the students.

Indashakirwa College, the school I taught at for 2011. 

A student’s life in Rwanda can be quite demanding.  Wake up at 6 am, go fetch water, clean up, get to school, lunch, more school, then clean and get to bed.  There is only about an hour of free time for the students each day. 

Rwanda has two types of schools: boarding schools (where students live at the school) and day schools.  My school, Indashakirwa College, was a boarding school of about 300 students.  Class sizes range from 50 to 70 students, with students sharing desks to save space. 

The students do not get breakfast but eat a communal lunch provided by the school.  At 6 pm, the students eat a second communal meal.  Almost all meals are eaten in the classrooms and must be cleaned after the meal.  Their meals generally consist of rice, potatoes, and beans.  No meat, no fruit.  There is no privacy here: showers are communal, students share beds in cramped quarters, students share desks and even pens. 

The village has no electricity, so for two hours each night a generator is brought in to the school to light the classrooms to allow the students to study.  The light is poor and the students try to huddle together to get the best light each night.  While the students sit in the classroom all day and learn, they return at night to study in bad light. 

The school schedule is much different from America.  Here is a schedule of an 8^th grade class at my school: 

If you are keeping track, that is four languages, three sciences, and fourteen subjects total they learn.  Furthermore, the students’ native language is Kinyarwanda, but all subjects are taught in English.  Between the schedule, chores, and expectations, a student’s life in Rwanda is all-encompassing during the school year. 

Fetching Water

On our way down to the bottom of the valley.

The watering station where I get all of my water.  My house boy sits and waits patiently for the buckets to be filled up. 

A typical scene: farmers doing their daily cultivating down by the watering hole. 

Hiking back up to my house (the tin roof building at the top of the picture) with 55 pounds of water. 

In America, we’re so lucky with the basics of life.  We can wake up and get fresh, clean water easily from a tap, then go to the bathroom and easily flush it away.  That just isn’t the case in the rest of the world.  Here in Rwanda, we have to go fetch our water, or as they say “kuvoma” (coo-vo-ma).

For my house, fetching water is a major process, so I thought I would bring you along for the morning ritual of kuvoma. 

My house boy comes to my house around 7:30 in the morning.  After doing a few quick chores, he sets off with a 20 liter container and 5 liter container to fetch water.  These containers are sold as cooking oil buckets, but once the containers are empty, people all over Rwanda use them to store either milk or water.  They are ubiquitous in Rwanda.  The only problem is that these containers are used for years, so bacteria and diseases start to fester in these containers which begin to deteriorate the health of these people.

The house boy and I leave at 8:00 am exactly and depart down the steep slope to the bottom of the valley for water.  When we get to the water station we place the containers under the running water.  Fortunately for us today, we don’t have to wait in line.  In some other parts of the country you can wait up to four hours in line for your turn.  Also fortunately for us, this water station has flowing water year round.  In the eastern, and much drier, part of the country their water fetching stations will dry up.  This forces Rwandans to go much further distances to wait in what is likely a very long line. 

It takes only eight minutes to fill up 25 liters of water.  Once we’re done, it’s back up the mountain to my house.  My house boy takes the 44 pound, 20 liter container on his head and carries the 11 pound, 5 liter container in his hand.  That’s 55 pounds of water he is carrying up a mountain, about 1 kilometer in distance, back to my house.  It takes serious strength to do this, and these Rwandans do it EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Once we get to my house, that’s it!  We arrive back at 8:27 am, so it only took us 27 minutes total to get 25 liters of water.  We’re ready to use the water for flushing, cooking, cleaning, and bathing.  We are good to go until we run out of 25 liters of water and have to go back down the mountain, of course…