Gisneyi 2.0 (Friday – Monday)

So once we had finished the hard labor of farming on a mountainside, sweating more than we do in our spinning class at the WSC – we had a pretty downhill last two days of work in Gisenyi. Friday morning we headed in to what can only be described as an 1800s style sewing circle. The women had HUGE bedsheets which they sketched some designs on. They used these big, cloth sewing circles to cross-stitch yarn into the designs they had put on the sheets. The designs were beautiful and since they were using yarn, the patterns showed up bright and thick against the thin bedsheets. RA1 came up with ideas for pillowcases, which she will be expanding on upon her return to America.

After about 3 hours of sewing, we ran out for a quick samosa and came back to a bead making factory that had been concocted while we were gone. Beadmaking kind of goes like this:

1) Cut measured strips of glossy paper (posters, calendars, etc). They are fat at the top (inside of the bead) and taper down into a point.
2) Take tiny strips and start rolling. If your fingers start to burn or cramp up you know you are doing it correctly.
3) After about 15 minutes of rolling, you get to the end. If your bead doesn’t look lopsided you have successfully made a bead. If lopsidedness does occur – start at #2 and try again.

After 4 tries, 45 minutes and a few sweaty fingers, RA1 finished a bead. Perhaps the woman was humoring RA1 and just let her use the gluestick to finish the bead, or perhaps she was actually successful. We will never know.

Next, we went around the corner to teach a class in a nearby building. Of course (per TIA standards) no one had come to unlock the door so the neighborhood hauled out a chalkboard – where they found it and hauled it from, we will surely never know – and we began our English lesson with about 15 adults. We did very basic greetings, counting to ten and family describers. We know – from our years of teaching experience and our short weeks of teaching Rwandan children – that attention spans basically crap out around 45 – 60 minutes. As we ended the lesson, we noticed that a large contingent of boys had gathered outside the building walls and were listening to our lesson. As the adults left we heard cheers – yes cheers – of “Teach us English!” “We know English, teach us!” RA1 heaved a sigh of acquiecense while RA2 stepped up and taught a full-on English Grammar lesson. She rocked these kids’ worlds with things like “Who, What, When, Where” and introductory phrases. Then she pulled out the smoking gun of English teaching in Africa (again, per our years of teaching experience) and started a game of Simon Says. We were barely winded after an hour with these kids and if we didn’t already know about the time/retention ratio previously referenced, we would have kept teaching them until the sun set. They were such an antithesis to our Kigali kids who are so privileged to be able to hear a lot of English in their daily lives just by shear fact of living in the capital city. These kids were quite literally dying and crying and shouting to learn as much English as we would teach them. It was an amazing way to end the week.

We had an amazingly relaxing weekend to prepare us for the last day of work (and a full day of travel) so we were excited to go to the activity marked “marshrooms” on our schedule. However (per TIA standards) we arrived to a tye-dye making plant being operated out of one of the womens’ front yard. (Sidenote: In Kigali, there are no yards. There are shanties upon shanties upon hole-in-the-wall restos and cafes. In Gisenyi, people have yards, bigger houses and generally more space.) There were about 10 buckets full of dye, at least 40 different tyed sheets and many, many helpers; not including the 20 children that followed us from the road shouting muzungu and being generally excited to see exactly where these crazy white girls were going up the side of a mountain on a Monday morning.

As the sheets were immersed in the dye buckets, the final products became some of the most beautiful patterns and sheets we had ever seen. In Africa, you can use these bolts of cloth for tons of things: dresses, shirts, sarongs, etc. Although RA1 has a staunch rule against tye-dye in any part of her clothing regimen, a few of the sheets were starting to look like pretty amazing sarong options. Then, as we were standing up to leave the women stopped us and said they were making us lunch. We literally feasted on some of the best burnt corn and rice/sauce/meat combo we had had since we’d been in Gisenyi. It was so good and the meat was super tender and the corn was amazing. Then one of the ladies that we’ve been working with almost everyday brought in fresh squeezed pineapple juice, which had clearly been touched by God. It was so sweet and fresh that I started to loathe Dole and their weak attempts to create this taste anywhere but where pineapples grow naturally.

So, besides the general lack of most of our quasi-modern conveniences afforded to us at our guesthouse in Kigali, Gisenyi was a wonderful place to spend a week. We were able to meet new women, interact and share with them in a brand new way and feel that we had given these women a new found connection to the Kigali office that they hadn’t felt before. We may have boggled their minds when we jumped out into the fields with them to hoe right along beside them, but we had never felt more welcomed than when they invited us into their homes and hearts to listen to them.