Broadneck residents Phil Greenfield and Carolyn Sonnen spent six weeks in Rwanda this summer as part of a collaboration between the United States and Rwandan teachers.
Both are over 65 years old, but were adventurous enough to spend their summer in another country and culture volunteer teaching. Phil is a retired Anne Arundel County Public Schools teacher, who spent his 30-plus year career at Annapolis and Meade High Schools.
Connect Rwanda was an outgrowth of the year in Rwandan spent by First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis congregation members Hays and his wife, Claudia. Claudia, a physician, was contracted to teach and train Rwandan resident physicians. Steve volunteered at a Rwandan boys’ orphanage teaching English and taught in Rwandan schools.
During their time in Rwanda, they were visited by friends Bill Hathaway, senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church and Rev. Alison Halsey, who was at the time at First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. They encouraged the Hays to continue outreach work once they came back to Annapolis. They helped to get the program initiated and approved by the church, and obtain initial and ongoing funding.
Connect Rwanda will be expanding after this year’s teacher exchange program. While the Program Rwanda is still a committee under the Mission Committee of First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis, paperwork is in the process for Connect Rwanda to become organized as its own nonprofit.
The program’s partner school, the Association of Parents for Cooperation and Promotion of Education) has 1,400 K-12 students, and few resources (the school only has about 100 books.) This summer, the team was tasked with assessing the situation at the school, and teaching best practices.
The teachers demonstrated lesson techniques, and encouraged visual learning methods, music, movement, and technology to supplement the very traditional, largely rote memorization curriculum. LeBlanc’s IT experience along with donated computer equipment, as Greenfield says, “put them on the map electronically,” and the school now has Wi-Fi.
Sonnen integrated music into the curriculum. The students explored different ways to be creative in music in their traditional harmonies as well as learning fundamentals of reading music and basic instruments. Because the students mostly learn by memorization, they are adept at learning music, and they incorporated body rhythms, use of movement, and traditional folk songs and spirituals empathizing unity, which is a major cultural theme in Rwanda.
It was a trip of firsts for Greenfield, “first trip to Rwanda, first trip to Africa, first time south of the Equator, and my first extended time in the classroom since retirement.” He writes about experiences as varied as the crowded hallway of a Rwandan fabric exchange surrounded by stalls of brilliantly colored cloth and dozens of strikingly dressed Rwandans all playing “Let’s Make a Deal” at the same time.
Greenfield recalls the somber border crossing at the Democratic Republic of Congo, “While the frontier is one of the busiest border crossings in the world … it’s less noisy than you’d think given the numbers involved, and there is a grimness to it all. Heavily armed soldiers are everywhere. Poverty is in the air in both countries, but there is a grayness to the squalor across the DRC line that changes the lighting in the distance.” Yet, despite the past, he marvels at the resilience and kindness of the people of Rwanda,
“If any nation could be excused for pitying itself into the doldrums or tying itself up in knots of endless recrimination, it would be Rwanda,” he said. “But a little over two decades removed from the 1994 genocide that claimed nearly a million of its people, Rwanda is a country full of kind, friendly souls doing their best to forgive and move on with life.
“The survivors have remade the notion of family, as uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends have come together to live as de facto parents, sisters, and brothers. Some of the country’s 30-somethings are so hungry for a family that they’ll happily embrace white school teachers from Maryland as their surrogate mothers and fathers. So however painful its past or precarious its future, Rwanda’s present is a tribute to hope and reconciliation. And after living and teaching there for six weeks, I can tell you that they have blessed the world with children as smart, as beautiful, as friendly, and as precious as any on earth. May God be gracious to them all.”
If you have an interest in helping this endeavor or in teaching at APACOPE, contact Steve Hays at stevehays@stevehays.net.