Hope for a Better Future
On a rainy, muddy Friday afternoon, I took our team of trainers to Gasabo District’s Kabuga II Primary School. Our purpose was to introduce the Whole School Development Program to the teachers and representatives of the parent community. As we waited for the meeting to begin I took a tour around the school and saw many of the 2000+ bright eyed little people that are taught by just 31 teachers. The school painted for me the perfect picture of what is happening in education in Rwanda today.
On the one end of the school are extremely run down mud brick buildings whose plaster is falling off. The roofs look more like colanders than the much more unyielding material you would expect metal roof sheets to be. The children crowded around the little desks strain their eyes to see a blackboard in 18’ x 24’ rooms with only two little wood-shuttered windows on one side. But just outside of the classrooms are bright little garden patches with some of Rwanda’s most beautiful plants and flowers blossoming right there. The P3 class taught by the school’s Deputy Athanazi Ntaganira was surprisingly quiet as I entered it, and the children rose to their feet immediately.
After greeting me ever so politely in unison, in French, Athanazi asked them to sing a song about Rwanda. I didn’t understand the words they were saying, but it was a beautiful, hopeful, energetic song. I thanked them for their song, and looked at the lessons on the board that were there for them to copy into their notebooks. There was a French lesson, some Science notes, and something in Kinyarwanda that I couldn’t quite make out. I realized that our meeting was about to begin, so excused myself and walked past the Rwandan flag flying proudly in the middle of the drab, bumpy courtyard that serves as the school’s only play space. On the other side of the courtyard some workers were putting up the last few courses of fired bricks onto a bright new classroom block with lots of windows and ventilation on the sides (instead of inadvertently on the top).
Parents had been streaming into the school while we had been touring around, and the classroom was already filling up. Over the next two and a half hours, about 175 of the school’s parents plus 28 teachers sat nearly atop each other to listen to a presentation about how we can partner together to see education improved in their school. 25 more parents stood outside peering through the windows the entire time eagerly listening to what a better quality education can look like, and how that will be achieved.
As the meeting drew to a close, a representative of the school asked our team of trainers to pray God’s blessing on the program they were about to embark upon. Here we were in a public school that serves thousands of Rwanda’s next generation of leaders, telling the teachers and parents about a program that has been developed from a Christ centered perspective, endorsed by the Government, AND we were being asked to pray with them! The prayer ended with “In the name of Jesus” and everyone said “Amen” and I said “oh wow!”
