Wednesday to Friday this week were entirely taken up with preparations for and receiving visits from the Belgian Ambassador and Cherie Blair.
Two buildings that have remained unfinished for months were given 100% attention by the building boys. A room that had been festooned with trailing wires and pockmarked with unfilled sockets was completed, painted and cleaned in a matter of hours. Worry not that only half the sockets actually work - five minutes before the Ambassador was due to arrive, computers were being carried from the room in which they have been locked and languishing ever since I arrived and no doubt for months before. Rapid and slightly panicky connections were made and hey presto! 3 computers function!
Meanwhile the show classroom was spring cleaned and repainted so that the visitors could see sparkling walls and windows! I suggested that this might be the moment to make 1 or 2 other much needed repairs like fixing door handles to other classrooms but my remarks were greeted with dismissive impatience! Children were then put to work hauling sacks of stones from a perfectly good path to be replaced with sand which will of course get filthy every time we do the nettoyage and will run all over the classrooms when it rains and floods. Evidently sand is more aesthetically pleasing than stones!
Teachers wearily followed instructions murmering about obedience and I pushed off to town to pay my electrogaz bill!
Eventually all was ready for the visitors, dancing girls in their finery, drums beating gifts prepared and it all went very smoothly for the Ambassador who seemed impressed with everything and half promised to see if he could get funding for repairing the swimming pool. A very charming and good looking young man with a very pleasant wife they were the aperitif before the entourage from British Embassy and various Rwandan dignitaries arrived a mere 2 hours later than expected by which time teachers and children were wilting and hungry! Once again the performance commenced and Mrs B. was very gracious and looked both interested and energetic, not easy when she had to listen to a rather painful and unintelligible reading in Kinyarwanda presented by one of the Deaf pupils. I read the English translation which was an ingratiating plea for more funds - I do feel that in some ways these children are very lucky - they do have desks and books and teachers who are usually there, while there are schools in the country where the children sit in classrooms with mud walls, sit on logs and have nothing resembling a desk and there might be 60 children in a class. Mrs B did have quite a friendly exchange with me and Ruth and was quick to respond when I said that I'd been working in Wales, not England! She was accompanied by a BBC film crew and a very cheerful handmaid. The British Ambassador who is a splendid character, very well informed, amusing and approachable had evidently decided that this was not the day for sartorial elegance - he opted for the rumpled look with open necked shirt really very open!!
Ah well! After all this excitement life may return to normal next week.
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