I have been out of touch for the last couple of weeks other than the odd snatched headline from the BBC world service on my rather crackly radio. I have been in the eastern highlands of equatorial Rwanda, a small country the size of Wales in the heart of Africa. It came to public attention briefly in 1994 when, over a period of 100 days of genocide, one million were killed, well over 10% of the population. The reasons for the genocide are many and complex and stretch back into the colonial past, but there can be no doubt that it was carefully planned and executed. The perpetrators calculated, rightly as it turned out, that the UN, over-committed in the Balkans and reeling from a disastrous intervention in Somalia, would prefer to look the other way rather than intervene in inter tribal massacres with a long history. However we might excuse the preoccupations of the UN, or explain the ethnic, economic, and other tensions in Rwanda there is no getting away from the blunt reality: wickedness. There can be no other explanation for going out armed with a machete to slaughter your neighbour, his wife and his children, or to go to a church or a girl’s boarding school for the same purpose.
The catastrophe of 1994 has left Rwanda a deeply traumatised society and among the poorest in the world. It lost a high proportion of its educated, professional, managerial and economically productive people. Over the last decade it has been struggling to recover in the face of enormous problems, not least a criminal justice system overloaded with the crimes of 1994 (1 million murdered means an awful lot of murderers awaiting justice). In addition there are still 8000 armed supporters of the former regime in the Congo with the intention of returning to finish the job they started in 1994.
Notwithstanding these difficulties Rwanda is making progress. Although authoritarian, the government is democratic and broadly based. There is no corruption and virtually no crime. Ethnicity is now an unmentionable subject: everyone is just a Rwandan now. The economy remains reliant on subsistence farming, bananas and coffee, but an amazing effort is being made to bring the country into the modern world with fibre optic cable being laid absolutely everywhere. In the small town of Rwamagana where I was based you could not buy so much as a razor blade or even a ball( children made their own with rags and string), but there were three internet cafes and total mobile phone coverage.
100 Conservatives, including 12 MPs, went out for two weeks, all self financing or generously sponsored. According to our expertise: nurses, doctors and dentists to went to work on healthcare projects; lawyers to help with the legal system; financiers and entrepreneurs to advise on the new stock exchange microfinance projects; willing hands to build and furnish a community centre; and 30 of us to teach English. I was one of 11 such teachers that went off the eastern highlands were 500 Rwandan primary school teachers were gathered for the course which we were to provide for two intensive weeks. I did not know what to expect and as it turned out my lesson plans were of far too basic a level. My class of 50 teachers ranging in age from 23 to 60 (quite an achievement when the average life expectancy is under 50) were experts in English grammar with a textbook knowledge vastly exceeding my own. What they really needed was exposure to spoken English: I could not understand what they were saying, nor could they understand me. At first we communicated only by writing sentences to each other on the blackboard, then by speaking really slowly, but by the end we could get along very well. My lesson plans were not wasted because we used them all as the basis for discussions and practice on how to teach involving songs and games, the teachers loved the creativity and, as important, the men from the Rwandan education ministry were pleased too. The teachers came with nothing but their enthusiasm and we had to issue them with pens exercise books and dictionaries. We taught in classrooms that were absolutely bare aside form the rough desks, benches and a blackboard, there weren’t even window panes. They had lovely names: in my class I had Joan of Arc; two named John of Love, an Ezekiel, a Zacchaeus, an Amos and a Paul Damascene. I found the teaching exhausting and at the end of each day I was good for nothing but a few beers, the local banana liqueur and bed. One quickly acclimatises to doing without hot or running water.
Is any of this important or is this just my essay that we all used to get at the start of term ‘what I did in the holidays’?
I do think it is important that politicians take an active interest in international development despite the fact that it doesn’t count for many votes. Many of my constituents write to me about their worries over immigration and I think they are right to do so. Although many of the teachers asked me for books and bibles most of their requests were for advice on how to get to England. If we are to reduce the desire to escape poverty and migrate to Europe, we will have to do more to tackle that poverty at source. |
