1 Corinthians 4:2 “It is required that those who have been given a trust prove faithful”.

Last week Mark, Kirsten and I were up in a little town called Byumba an hour and a half away from Kigali. For three days we were part of a 35 person Task Force tasked with finalizing the development of key policies and actions recommended at the national Teacher Education and Management Reform Summit held in Kigali a couple of months ago. I was so pleased about the opportunity to be of service to Rwanda’s education sector, contributing our ideas and expertise as an organization in the specific area that we have invested ourselves into over the past number of years. I recognize that as part of our twofold mission, “the development of schools and empowerment of Rwandan teachers”, nothing is more critical to Rwanda’s future success that the proper equipping and encouraging the teachers who are presently training the next generation of Rwandan leaders.

We approached our participation in this dialogue at the national level with humility and a recognition of the limited scope of our work over the past few years compared with the scale of the challenges the education sector faces across a whole country. Our Whole School Development Program has been working with 6 primary schools out of approximately 2400 primary schools Nation-wide. On the one hand, what we have done is a drop in the bucket. Nonetheless, ours has been a very relevant drop in the bucket.

When we started working on in service teacher training back in 2005, access to education was necessarily the key priority for the sector. At that time we went about trying to address the quality of what was happening in the classroom, in keeping with the country’s long term vision of developing a knowledge-based economy. We have been chipping away at addressing quality, and now, five years later, it has become the buzzword and priority for the sector. So having humbly and quietly worked on things that are really important, we have been invited to be part of the strategic dialogue on how to address quality in teacher education and management. Having “proved faithful” with the little that we have been entrusted with up to this point in time, we are now gaining more of a voice in how Rwanda thinks about the future of education. I pray that by God’s grace we will continue to prove faithful, and continue to have a part in shaping what this beautiful little country will become.

Click here to read From telecom to education, what a journey it's been by David Poilisi

Ever since I came to Rwanda in 1998, I’ve been enjoying figuring out how to pronounce and discern the meaning of incredibly hard Rwandan names. “Twajirimana” means “it is only God who can save us”, “Hatangimbabazi” means roughly “the One who is merciful is the one who can give all things”.

In Rwanda, a child is usually named a week after they are born. The parents invite their friends and members of the community to come and share some refreshments together and suggest names for their newborn child. Starting with the youngest children present at the ceremony, everyone comes and offers a name. The whole process is one of pronouncing blessings upon the child and hopes for what they will become. After getting back to Rwanda in mid January and getting over our jetlag, we invited our friends together to give our son his Rwandan name.

I never thought that the flash of a welder’s rod or blinding reflection off of a brand new piece of galvanized steel sheet could look so good!  This week I have taken a great deal of pleasure in seeing the finishing work on our second Secondary School building getting going.  Following the initiative of Wellspring donors from Vernon and Kelowna, we have “raised the roof” on the building that will serve as our program kitchen and training room over the next couple years before being handed over to the Wellspring Academy Secondary Section.