Meeting the team and the students!

Somewhere amid my wearied 29 hour trip, I wondered if it was all worth it; it was probably somewhere during the sleepless portion of my long flight that I had hoped to sleep through.  Eventually I rolled into Rwanda about 12:30 pm, got my temperature checked for Ebola, and was greeted by our entire team.  It only took a few hours of hanging out with them to realize the answer was an emphatic yes!  There is Yung, who I met in Ethiopia, and we were sandwiched around a Rwandan student on the flight that we peppered with questions.  There is another American Andy who is here to take pictures and videos and who I give a hard time about how Portland he is.  There is an American, Tina, that runs TNHF in Rwanda and lives here.  There is the vibrant personality of Beata that runs the program in South Africa.  There is Justin: the man, the myth, the legend.  And finally there are two Rwandan ladies working for TNHF: Scovia and Jackie.

My first impression of Rwanda is that it is remarkably clean and well kept.  The government ensures this with stiff fines for things like speeding, walking on the grass, and trash.  On one Saturday every month (it happened this morning), the entire country stops everything from 9 - 11 to clean their
neighborhood.  The food is made up of mostly starches and the Rwandan ladies try eat chicken, rice, and chips (french fries) as much as they can -- seriously.  We dined last night at a beautiful Italian restaurant with around 100 different types of pizza.

This morning, two of the Rwandan students, met us for breakfast: Fred and Arnold.  I ended up hanging out with the two of them after breakfast for quite some time.  They were both studying Computer Science so I talked with them quite a bit about my experience in the field.  We talked of many other things like their background, soccer, church, etc.

In the afternoon, we headed to a large school run by New Horizon Church out of Portland.  Most of the 47 University students who are in the Rwandan program met us for training.  They are a pretty reserved and soft spoken bunch.  Justin shared about a program TNHF is doing called Impact Circles where they have a bio on the web site and people around the world can help sponsor and connect with them around a shared field of study (e.g. Civil Engineering) or a shared interest or something else.  Check them out!  http://www.thesenumbers.org/meet-our-students. Beata shared about what is happening with TNHF in South Africa as well as female empowerment and her own experiences overcoming failure.  Fred got up and led an ice breaker where both teams did a rock, paper, scissors variation with arrows, rabbits, and walls.  He then broke down the leadership lessons in the game such as teamwork.

I concluded the training with a session on writing CV's (resume) and on how to interview.  The students were remarkably engaged by the session.  I got Fred to come up to the front demonstrating a problem solving question: "How many tennis balls can you put into a van?".  I wasn't sure that he had seen a tennis ball yet so I asked him and lo and behold he pulled one out of his bag in a very comical moment!  They had been very reluctant to ask questions or speak up earlier in the day, but when I got to questions, there were a lot of questions.  Even after the session, several of the students came up to me to ask me questions or talk about my field of study.  These are remarkable students and most of them are near the top of their class and they are studying things like Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine, Biotechnology, Business, and much more!

And to end the day, several of the boys were eager to geth back to our hotel to watch the Barcelona / Real Madrid soccer game.  Several of the boys were supporting Real and enjoyed giving Justin and me a hard time as we were going for Barca and Barca lost 3-1.

I've caught a little bit of our agenda for the week and a lot of amazing things to come!