I left Butare on Wednesday to go to Giterama where I was to visit an orpanage and training Centre run by an organisation called JAM. there are some Deaf children there and I had been invited to see what they are doing - or so I thought - when I got there I found 4 expectant teachers armed with pens and notepads all ready for me to deliver a day's training. I had nothing other than my somewhat addled wits and a rush of adrenalin! Somehow we muddled through the morning with practice in lipreading and diagrams of the ear and spent the afternoon playing with sand and making things with glue and loo rolls. There was an added drama to the day as we were informed at dawn that one of the house mothers had just died -alarm and despodancy all round and a deputation was sent off to Kigali to find out about funeral arrangements. At lunch time came the message that she was not dead after all - critical yes but still breathing. I'm not certain if she'd been lowered ito her coffin....
I've just spent 2 days in Kigali helping to put together Amakuru the VSO Rwanda magazine -in which some of you may feature - please don't sue me for copyright - Happily a French volunteer Laetitia has been about in the office waiting to hear whether she has a new VSO job and therefore a visa, so she did all the French English translation - which was great and Inga who is to do the desk top publishing was also there some of the time so we had a little Welsh update.
We also had a Disability Working Group meeting: more events planned as VSO now has oodles of money to spend on Disability. Including an all day meeting next Thursday with partners and stake holders to discuss funding and grants. I think I may be going to Uganda in 2 weeks to do some research for a Deaf Conference to be held in October.
Meanwhile I've been trying to put together a programme for a Sign Language workshop to take place next week. I hope that I'm going to meet 5 Deaf students at the bus stop tomorrow who are going to do the teaching at the Atelier. It won't be so easy to "wing it" for 3 days if they don't show up!
This morning Meg, with whom I'm staying, promised a lie in - it was not to be as her Domestique was there soon after dawn crashing around with buckets and mops- still it enabled me to write out the agenda for the Volunteer Committee meeting which took most of the morning as vols have not been at all happy lately and it could have been rather acrimonious. Happily most of the hot issues were discussed in rational manner and maybe things will improve!
I recommend you to read Cathy's blog for quite lyrical description of how the country is looking just now.
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