Postcards from Rwanda

You know that I work at a Primary Teaching Training Centre.  Well, obviously one of the most important classes that the students take is Psychology-Pedagogy.  I used to find it shocking and now I simply find it frustrating when I hear what the students are learning in these classes.  One day in my first year during an agree/disagree exercise in my English class, a student stood up and said “Well as we learn in psychology, girls are not as intelligent as boys….” I didn’t hear the rest as I was already bending my knees in preparation to jump down his throat.  A while later a teacher showed me the notes that he was about to give in his class.  There were line drawings of men with different body-shapes and next to the drawings were descriptions of the personalities associated with those body types.  I wondered if the next unit of study would be phrenology or perhaps palm-reading.  Then a few days ago I was supervising an psychology exam when the teacher came in to read out a question that had been misprinted on the exam paper.  He said “Différenciez entre un débile et un imbécile au niveau du raisonnement”.  For those who don’t speak French… Differenciate between an idiot and an imbecile in terms of their ability to reason!  I’m learning to swallow up the frustrations as I know that there’s no way I can begin to tackle the problem of teachers teaching out-dated theories.  

I am sitting in the internet cafe right now and I have to add to my list of strange behaviour that I will never understand… groups of boys and sometimes even groups of girls, huddled together giggling over internet porn not in the least embarrassed or ashamed by the fact that everyone in the café can see what little pervs they are.  Not even when the woman directly to the left of them is a nun!

Well.  First I’d like to say sorry for being out of touch for so long.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m getting married in less than 3 months and so life has been a bit busy.  Plans for the future are also a bit uncertain as we are starting to negotiate the Canadian Immigration system.  As a result I’m looking at staying here longer and working in a different place for a short-term contract.  I won’t go into detail about that just now but I just wanted to let you  all know that I’m still breathing, all is well if uncertain.