During my time in Rwanda, I was a lecturer at the Kigali Health Institute - a university that specializes in training healthcare professionals. I was in the physiotherapy department and was responsible for teaching physiology courses. I was lucky enough to work with a bunch of great people who made me feel very welcome at KHI. But my time there wasn't always easy...
My Building
Walking to work
There are SO many challenges to face when working in a foreign environment. The language barrier was always the most difficult to deal with. Rwandan students who barely know English openly laugh at my ‘American English’ even though it’s my native language. They comment that I say words in a strange way and don't pronounce the words correctly...go figure....It made my job difficult in that when students did not understand concepts, they didn’t always take responsibility or make the initiative to truly learn. Rather, some of them blamed it on my ‘difficult English’ and concluded that they weren’t doing well simply because of me. That was really hard to deal with and inevitably left me wondering if I was really qualified for this job....
But when a student finally understood a difficult concept and thanked me endlessly while grinning ear to ear, it reminded me that I am totally qualified and could do this. I think the highlight of my time with the students was at the end of a debate in my exercise therapy course. We were talking about the different energy sources used in basketball and football and the students just loved this. At the end of the debate, one of them yelled “you are the coolest teacher ever!” and everyone cheered. It was awesome and left me smiling all day :)
Working in a male-dominated environment was also challenging. Most of the employees here were very respectful. However, there were the few that would make inappropriate comments or look at me in a manner that made me very uncomfortable. There were also the few that were just a little ‘too’ nice and it’s not cool when you just want to be treated like any other employee.
Resources were sometimes a problem as well. You need classrooms to teach and sometimes there just simply wasn’t one available. And you’d find out the day of your lecture. So you just have to bite the bullet, cancel the class, and cram the material in with the remaining time. Scheduling is a bit of a foreign concept here too. Although schedules DID exist, they weren’t necessarily abided by. This made things very frustrating. When I wanted to scream, I just tried to remember how the students must feel – it’s a lot more stressful being a student with exams that are constantly changing dates than it is to be the lecturer. I sometimes wonder how the students did it….
My first year orthopaedic students and I
I guess I'll summarize by saying that working at KHI has taught me the value of patience, flexibility, and adaptability. KHI definitely has a long way to go but I feel lucky to have had the chance to contribute to KHI and to the development of healthcare in Rwanda as a whole. I truly love this country and see the potential it has. Despite all the challenges, I will miss KHI and Rwanda dearly and hope to one day return and continue my work in Rwanda.
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