Telling Tall Tales in Rwanda

We're back to our "real lives" in Kigali, and hope to update you soon on our last few days in Gisinye, which were productive and beautiful, because time in Gisinye generally is. But here in the present, there are small children with eager faces and short attention spans to be attended to (and we don't just mean Ian and Drew), and today was absolutely my favorite day of teaching so far.

Since the older kids have gone back to school for half days and now only require tutoring, I had a class of just 4 - a 9 yr old boy who was way ahead in both English and math, a 7 yr old boy and a 7 yr old girl on roughly the same levels, and a 3 yr old girl who I thankfully had the time to do special lessons with, since there were so few students. We started with numbers; they can count 1-10 in English, but they can't identify the numbers individually or out of order. Then we switched to English for the end of the class.

Coming up with creative ways to teach the alphabet has been a challenge for all of us. Last time, my class got through the letter H, and I had pictures with words underneath to help them remember ("ant", "bat", "hands" etc). This time, the printer was broken, so I decided to try something I'd been thinking of for awhile: fairy tales. I'm hoping if the kids catch on, eventually they'll tell me Rwandan fairy tales. I took a class on the origins and sociology of folk tales in college, and I found it fascinating. If you look at early fairy tales - Grimms, for example - they're simply re-told popular folk tales absolutely soaked in Christian moralizing. Also, they're brutally violent. For the most part these stories were told to children to illustrate what was good and what was bad behavior, and to imply that if you behaved badly you might, just MIGHT, be thrown into an oven and eaten for dinner. And the bad guy would only bother to cook you first if you were really, really lucky.

So we skipped the moralizing and the scary, for the most part, and I told them a simplified version of Little Red Riding Hood. Afterwards we talked about "big" and "bad" and "little", and then, my kids acted out scenes. I told them they could do it in Kinyarwandan if they would use the English words they'd learned as well, and it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The little boy playing the big bad wolf gave himself a deep raspy growl and chased the girls with maybe a bit too much enthusiasm, and the shy little 3 yr old got right up and told him what big eyes, ears and teeth he had. But the best part was the basket.

I had told them that Little Red Riding Hood carried a basket to grandmother's house, and without my suggesting it, they reached for props, using the chalk box as a basket. And the little girl stuck it right on her head. It hadn't occurred to me they would think of a basket going anywhere but over their arms (and I should have known better!!); it hadn't occurred to them that a basket of goodies would go anywhere but on top of their heads. It made me want to re-write and re-illustrate a series of American/European fairy tales specifically for them. Think of Conderella here!! Jealous stepmothers and stepsisters, girls being forced to work and miss school - that happens here every day. But at the end of THIS Cinderella story, Cinderella isn't going to be saved by a Prince. She's going to be saved by a local woman with HIV whom she always cooks for when she has time, who decides to sponsor her for school. HA! How's that for moralizing? I'm going to spend the rest of the day re-writing Sleeping Beauty. This will be the best new game EVER.

I also need to learn how to say "Be your own hero" in Kinyarwandan.