Tuesday 29th

We had our first English lesson at Ubuzima today. For weeks the women have been begging us to teach them English but until now we haven't really had the time. And it's a challenging job in that they have no foundation in English and don't speak any French. But Praise the LORD, my Kinyarwanda is now just about good enough to translate everything I need in order to conduct a successful lesson. And because I’ll just be teaching them the basics of English, we should be fine for the duration. Boo ya.


And after my mum's inspirational performance of 'Jesus' love is very wonderful' at Yvette's a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to teach them a song at the end of every lesson. It's gonna be awesome. Lesser persons might be afraid to teach singing without having had any formal training themselves, but I draw my confidence from knowing that I am my father's daughter, and that despite a few minor hospitalisations, his singing hasn't caused any serious injuries or deaths. That we know of. Yet. What I’m saying is that there's no way I could be worse than him, so I feel confident that the singing will be a success.

We're using the covered outside area at the church as a classroom, and Shumbusho managed to dig out an old blackboard for us to use. As we can see, I am well on my way to founding 'Nicole's School of English for those students who don't mind the occasional missing punctuation mark or frequent spelling mistake'.



I’m sorry, but who knew there was no 'u' in forty? It doesn't make sense.


After the lesson I tutored Jean Claude for a couple of hours. The reason it took so long is not because there was a lot of material to cover but because there was an exponential amount of fart acting going on. We were covering a section entitled Business Ethics and Morality, which despite being part of a business textbook, looked suspiciously philosophical. There is a good reason why no one calls me socrates. And not just because I’m a girl and I’m not Greek.

I had to talk really, really slowly and start sentences with phrases like, 'mmm, this is a very interesting point,' or 'ah yes, I know all about blah blah', just so I had enough time to figure out what I could possibly say that would explain the point without exposing me as a fraud. But the end of the afternoon I was ready to hit my head against the wall. Or drink hemlock or something.