From Pittsburgh to Rwanda

A record of ten weeks working at the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda with CMU's Technology Consulting in the Global Community program.

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Back to our normally scheduled non-political programming: reminder that Africa isn’t all mud huts and zebras! David and I have been working the past two days from a bookstore cafe straight out of NYC, except with a better view and half the books in French...

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Election Day

It’s election day here, and, as a Rwandan friend said, they have advanced technology - they know who will win before they even vote! Paul Kagame, president since 2000 and commander of the forces that ended the genocide, is running an essentially unopposed campaign after the constitution was changed in 2015 to let him run for a third term. Traveling through Rwanda, you see lots of billboards and rallies in his support and literally nothing for any other candidate.

I have many reservations about the level of political discourse and participation here, about the oppression of opposition views, and about how the country will eventually transition to full democracy. However, Rwanda’s recent transformation, from utter devastation after the genocide to one of the highest-performing, fastest-growing African countries, is astonishing. In some ways, this makes the oppression even more frustrating - it seems like an open election would surely have the same results as a rigged one, and an opening of political space would only create more benefits for the country.

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Ninth Week Roundup

Work

Last week was essentially the last week of work, as the school term ended on Friday so this week all the teachers and most administrators are on vacation. David and I presented our work and the Moodle project in particular was very well received. We got the go-ahead from the Executive Director and the Finance Department to purchase a one-year VPS plan, so ASYV will very soon have full access to Moodle!

This week I’m just wrapping up some things, such as finishing documentation, scheduling some administrative trainings that still need to be done, and writing recommendations for future usage.

Life

On Friday, I traveled to Gisenyi, a town on Lake Kivu that also borders the DRC. Early Saturday morning I set off on a six hour, fifteen kilometer kayaking excursion on the lake (pictures to come). It was a blast, although the wind got pretty strong late in the morning and paddling through the choppy waves quickly became exhausting.

After kayaking, I met a Peace Corps Volunteer who recently finished her service in Namibia. She invited me to crash her friend’s wedding, which was on the lakefront and incredibly beautiful. We finished the night listening to a live Congolese band at a bar, and it was overall a fantastic, memorable Saturday.

Unfortunately, when I returned to Kigali the next day, I learned that a friend from ASYV was sick with malaria and in the hospital. Another friend asked if I would be able to spend the night with her, since it’s understandably unpleasant to spend the night alone in a hospital in a foreign country, so I ended up spending my Sunday night sleeping on the floor next to her bed in a shared room with 8 sick Rwandans! While that wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined I’d spend my Sunday, I was glad to be able to stay and support her.

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Yesterday the students had an inter-grade arts competition, with singing, dancing, modeling, and painting. The students here are ridiculously talented and it was so much fun to watch them perform and cheer on the representatives from each grade!

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Eighth Week Roundup

Work

This morning, David and I had a meeting with all the administrators who are stakeholders in the Moodle project, who I will henceforth refer to as the bigwigs. I presented the platform to them, showcasing the work I’ve done with Emile, Ernest, and Raoul, an entrepreneurship teacher who recently reached out to me about collaborating. Working with the teachers has been great - they’re super excited about the potential Moodle has for them and their students and have picked thing up really quickly - but because it’s the end of the school term, they’re all really busy, which means we still don’t have that much content up, which made me a bit nervous about the presentation. My worries were for nothing, though; the bigwigs absolutely loved the platform and were incredibly excited about its potential and happy with the work done so far.

Our one major remaining roadblock, and the real reason for the meeting, was hosting Moodle. The school’s server is ancient and weak, and we were worried that virtual hosting options were a bit costly for a school that runs entirely off of donations. David gave a great cost-benefit analysis of various hosting options and we made a recommendation to use a VPS (virtual private server) for at least one year, then consider migrating to the new, more powerful in-house server they’ll (hopefully) have at that point... and the bigwigs were like “yep okay sounds great” and had literally no qualms about the cost. Worrying for nothing again, and now the last roadblock is gone!

ASYV’s Executive Director also independently proposed something I’d been considering: an incentivized workshop for the teachers, where they’ll learn how to use Moodle and upload at least one term’s worth of content. The incentive part is actually what I was most happy about; people want to think that everyone acts for solely altruistic reasons, but monetary or social incentives almost always give them more motivation to complete a project, especially when they’re already really busy! The workshop will be led by the teachers I’m training and a couple school administrators, and hearing it proposed independently by the head of ASYV made me very optimistic about the continuation of the project after I’m gone.

Life

It’s the last week of the school term! The students finished their final exams last week, and this week is grading week with no formal classes, which seems like an absolutely absurd waste of contact hours but is apparently just how things are done in Rwanda. Instead of formal classes, the students have various workshops, events, sports competitions, and a whole lot of free time.

It’s also my second-to-last week here, and the last week that David and I will be able to get much done, since most of the staff will leave once the term ends. It’s gone unbelievably fast and I don’t really want to leave yet, but I’m really happy with where I’m leaving the Moodle project and have at least one last bit of travel planned, to Lake Kivu this weekend.

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10 Steps to Perfectly Clean Laundry Without a Machine

1. Grab at least two, and preferably three, buckets for washing and rinsing.

2. Realize that your only bucket is broken, borrow a bucket from the kids next door, and resign yourself to the soapy, improperly-rinsed mess that is one-bucket laundry.

3. Fill the bucket about halfway with water, add detergent and soap until it’s a bit sudsy, and then dump in as many clothes as can fit.

4. Let the clothes soak for thirty minutes.

5. After five minutes have passed, realize you put off doing laundry for so long that you really need to start now or the clothes won’t dry before sundown. Forgo soaking.

6. Start scrubbing the clothes, using your palm and upper wrist to rub the fabric against itself. Avoid using your knuckles unless you want to look like an extra in Fight Club.

7. Scrub the armpits of all your shirts and then decide that that’s probably clean enough.

8. Never wash your sheets because it’s just really hard to scrub that much fabric, you know?

9. Dump out the sudsy water, refill the bucket with clean water, and ignore the fact that the water immediately becomes soapy again and nothing’s ever truly rinsed.

10. Hang everything up to dry inside-out, to prevent colors fading in the sun. Feel accomplished that no one’s called you smelly yet. To your face, at least.

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Seventh Week Roundup/I Went on Safari

As with last week, work’s been much less interesting than life, so I’ll update on that later and in the meantime here’s a bunch of pictures of animals.

David and I were lucky enough to go on a safari to Akagera National Park in east Rwanda, as some visitors to ASYV had two open seats in their car. It was a fantastic experience; we woke at 4:30 AM, got to the park by 8, and spent six hours driving through. We saw giraffes, hippos, buffalo, zebras, impala, topi, waterbuck, warthogs, baboons, monkeys, and more. The giraffes were by far my favorite; we saw two up close at the beginning of the day, and at the very end of the day saw a huge group of ten to twenty from afar, which was genuinely a magical moment. 

Amusingly, as we were viewing some hippos our car’s battery died and we had to push it into first.

Other than that (and, really, even including that, since it was pretty funny), it was a flawless day. More pictures below the cut!

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Work Update

We

have

CONTENT!

Admittedly... not a lot of content. But I’ve had a very fruitful couple weeks working with Emile and Ernest, who are excited about the project, quickly learning how to use Moodle, and taking ownership by volunteering to create all the course content themselves. I have a defined, achievable list of things to do in the next three (!) weeks, and am overall quite happy with the way things are progressing. While there’s no guarantee that the project will continue after I’m gone, it’s always a very good sign when people are excited and willing to do the work themselves!

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Sixth Week Roundup/I Went to Uganda

Work’s been going surprisingly well - update to come on that later, because I went to Uganda for a long weekend, which is way more interesting!

Six of us who work at ASYV traveled to Lake Bunyonyi in the far south of Uganda. Saturday morning we were lucky to arrive at the Kigali bus station exactly when the bus we needed was leaving, so the trip took only three hours, including time spent going through immigration. We paid about $3.50 per person for the 2.5 hour drive to nearby city Kabale, $2 for a taxi ride to the lake, and $1 for a boat ride to our lodgings.

The Rwanda-Uganda border crossing was busy but relatively painless. We walked across the border, surrounded by dodgy men offering to exchange our money, and re-boarded our bus on the other side.

The lodge, Byoona Amagara, was a beautiful, secluded space on an island in the middle of the lake. We slept in a geodome with an open front that looked out on the lake and with birds singing noisily around us.

The lake is in a very hilly area and is studded with islands that used to be the peaks of hills. It’s the second deepest lake in Africa, with a maximum depth of 900 meters!

We went canoeing twice in giant canoes made from hollowed out tree trunks that were extremely difficult to steer. Both times we canoed a mile out to a special island where we saw...

ZEBRAS! And waterbuck, something adjacent to an antelope whose name I’ve forgotten, an otter, and the Gray Crowned Crane which is Uganda’s national bird and stands a meter tall. Not exactly a safari but it was still pretty fantastic.

Hello from Zebra Island! In conclusion: 10/10 vacation, highly recommend.

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Fifth Week Roundup

I’m now halfway through my time here - crazy!

Work

I’ve begun working with Ernest (physics) and Emile (IT) and we are sloooowly but steadily making progress to digitize their course materials. Due to some holidays this week I’m a little concerned about the time remaining; it’s difficult for the teachers to meet on days other than Monday and Tuesday due to other commitments, so our time together is pretty limited. At this point the project is more people management than anything else, and people are always tricky, but I’ll keep working at it and hope for the best!

Life

It’s a four day weekend! July 3rd is the celebration of Rwandan Independence Day (independence from Belgian colonialism on July 1, 1962) and July 4th is Liberation Day (end of the genocide). I’m taking the long weekend in Kigali; unfortunately, my stomach of steel has forsaken me a bit, so I haven’t been able to enjoy the great food here as much as I wanted. But yesterday I did manage to get out of the house for most of the day, enjoying swimming and a buffet at Mille Collines, and then checking out a cool local art gallery and studio, Inema Arts Center.

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How dangerous is Africa?

According to World Economic Forum (WEF) Rwanda ranked 9th in the list of the Top 20 safest countries in the world.

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Fourth Week Roundup

Steadily becoming more belated with these updates - I’ll try to right things this weekend!

Work

Moodle is installed on the server, we’re trialing a cloud version as a backup in case the server keeps crashing, and I’ve identified and met with two teachers whose courses will be digitized. Ernest teaches physics and Emile teaches IT, and has actually developed Moodle courses before. Progress continues slowly but surely!

Life

On Saturday, we trekked five miles to Lake Mugesera on a field trip with the first year students. They got to ride in a boat, which many of them have never done, and there were activities and good food. It was a lot of fun but very exhausting - it’s dry season so the days are starting to get hot and sunny!

The water looked super refreshing, but we weren’t allowed to swim out of health/sanitation concerns; a lot of the students don’t know how to swim anyhow. Boys from the nearby village were splashing around, though.

We’re on a boat ♫ The boys were super excited and were singing/chanting almost the entire time. I was both impressed by the number of life jackets available and unconvinced that the life jackets would accomplish anything were we to actually capsize (which, since they were patching the boat’s walls with pieces of straw, seemed a possibility).

Some cross cultural exchange with the village boys who loved our American football.

This was the event of the year for the village kids. White people! Music! Food! Basically a circus.

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Guess who finally got Moodle up and running on ASYV’s server? ...Not me, because I don’t computer so good, but that’s what David’s here for! This is a very exciting moment because the server, pictured above, is ten years old, has 2GB of RAM, and runs on an unlicensed version of Windows 2012, so it kept crashing when we tried to install Moodle. But it works! People can actually access it! We did a thing!

(Note: standing in the server room is Deo, ASYV’s lone, astonishingly overworked IT guy. He’s great and has helped us a lot.)

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Third Week Roundup

Work

Last Tuesday, we visited CMU Africa in Kigali to speak with a professor and get advice on our projects. (Side note, since I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet: TCinGC generally sends consultants Noah’s Ark-style, in pairs; my co-consultant is David, a CMU Master’s of Information Systems Management student, who’s working on a data management project.)

It was a fantastic visit. The professor we met has taught in African universities for almost a decade and had a long career in computer science and information management. He was very passionate about using technology appropriately for development and emphasized the importance of using local solutions. He quite bluntly told us we were going about things the wrong way - I was aiming too big with my project, and David’s project needed to utilize simpler technologies that were supported by Rwandan companies. Despite the shock of being literally told “that won’t work,” I was very inspired by the meeting, and feel like I have better direction for the next seven weeks.

CMU Africa is also fascinating - it offers only two Master’s programs, in IT and electrical and computer engineering, and its programs are essentially identical to those offered at CMU Pittsburgh, in both course requirements and difficulty. Courses are, however, tailored towards the unique technology and business landscape of Africa, and the vast majority (95% +) of graduates stay in Africa. This makes the school pretty unique in both providing an exceptional education and successfully fighting brain drain.

Life

Enough words, here’s a picture of the pomegranate tree behind my office in literal paradise.

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Road to Bunnies

I step out of the office and am greeted with a lovely view of the center of the village. I need a break. It’s bunny time.

The path is lined with pretty flowering bushes, which temporarily distract me from Bunny Quest 2k17.

I enter the farms on the outskirts of ASYV’s land. I pass cabbages, avocados, bananas, guava. Eating the produce is not permitted unless it’s already fallen from a tree. I contemplate throwing rocks at trees until something falls down and then decide that maybe I shouldn’t steal food from an orphanage.

The bunnies are near - I can smell them. Literally. Gross.

Bunny Quest 2k17: success. I relish the thought that these bunnies will have long, fruitful, fulfilling lives. And/or get sold to villagers for dinner. #bunnylife

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Second Week Roundup

Work

I work in the administration building, pictured above. Work this week has been largely Excel-based, preparing spreadsheets of students and courses for bulk upload once Moodle is installed. CMU friends can guess how proud of myself I was when I wrote a nearly 500-character function filled with if statements and vlookups...

Next week we hope to install Moodle on the server and start training sessions for administrators. Things are progressing nicely so far!

Life

“Village time” takes place every Friday night. It’s basically a talent show, with students singing, dancing, performing skits, and reading poetry and testimonials in front of their peers. Students at ASYV are encouraged to take up artistic extracurricular activities in addition to their normal coursework, and a lot of the students really thrive in the arts - some graduates are now professional musicians and artists with songs on the radio and paintings in galleries!

We, of course, were not allowed to get off scot-free and had to give impromptu introductions in front of a couple hundred students. Awkward as always, but at least we didn’t have to dance.