AITI: Day 1 and Day 2

Hey Everyone! Sorry I've been silent for the past few days. A lot has been going on in Kigali as we officially started our AITI course this past Monday. I woke up so nervous early Monday morning as Zach and I were getting ready to head to KIST. My thoughts included: "Are you really about to teach computer science?", "What if you speak too fast or too slow?", "What if you tell them something that is completely wrong?"...

Once we finally got in the room, though, my excitement grew much more. When our students would walk in, I would go up to them and greet them with a Rwandan "Good Morning"--'Mwaramutse". Each one of them smiled, probably because I was saying it slightly wrong and probably because it was just humorous to see a "Muzungu" (White Person) speaking Kinyarwanda. At 8:00AM, when class was supposed to start, we had this many students...

We were expecting 46! What happened to all of them!!?!!? By 9:00AM we had somewhere around 32 students, which made us feel a lot better. On the first day, we basically ran through logistics and gave an introduction to the course. Christina ran a really good ideation exercise getting the students to try to come up with solutions to the problem of "Traffic in Kigali". I thought it really got some of the students thinking like entrepreneurs (or at least like Urban Planners {<3 you, Najah Shakir}). Some solutions included a carpooling system, building more roads throughout the city and letting people drive only on certain days of the week.

After that we kinda had to do the boring part of the course and go through the logistics, expectations, rules, etc, which actually took a bit of time. But the big event of the day was a presentation from a company that formed out of last year's AITI Rwanda group--HeHe Ltd. They presented to the students how they were able to start of as just students at KIST and transform into a company that has been standing strong for 1 year already. Many of the students had questions for them, inquiring as to how they came up with their projects last year. All in all, Day 1 seemed like a huge success!

Day 2 was a a bit more....frustrating. We gave the students a Diagnostic test to assess their programming skills and find out what concepts they knew from their previous classes in JAVA and C.We tried to get into the lab yesterday to do all the installations we had to do (Python, Django, Google App Engine) and to make sure the diagnostic as well as the necessary files were available to the students, but there were classes in there up until 8:30PM and Zach and I were exhausted so we decided we could just come in the morning and finish it. It took a LOT longer than we thought. Unfortunately, we ended up giving them the wrong files and we got delayed a good 15 to 20 minutes. We ultimately had to throw out questions 5 and 6 from the exam. Overall, though, the introductory lecture to the Python Material really got people going! We tried to make the point that they already knew a lot of the concepts, they just needed to learn some of Python's syntax!

So far, I'm really enjoying our course and I hope that we can get Python as well as Django to help these students make some great mobile applications! Off to get ready for Day 3, but before I go...here's the sunrise that I woke up to early this morning :) :) :) <3

A Beautiful Day to Play on Clay

The level of excitement and happiness running through my body still has not fully subsided. Today was just one of those extraordinary days where everything just goes unbelievably perfectly. When I found out I was coming to Rwanda this summer, I was a bit worried that my ultimate desire and sometimes seeming necessity to play tennis would make me homesick for ubiquitous hard-court America. When Google Maps showed me that there were a few locations in Kigali with not only tennis courts, but CLAY COURTS, I was ecstatic. I've been playing on hard courts in the United States for the last 7 years and I've sat and watched both the French Open and Wimbledon (play for the 2011 tournament starts on June 20!!!!) wanting to play on surfaces that aren't as accessible in America (unless you have a club membership somewhere...).

Well, it turns out that the opposite is true in other parts of the world. Kigali has only clay courts throughout the entire city. When I found out about a sports facility known as Cercle Sportif de Kigali I knew I had to go! It turns out that today was the day to do just that...and what a day it was! As soon as I saw these babies...I gasped.

Finally, an accessible clay court for this Cuban boy! The cost to play was only ₣3,000 ($5) for the day, so we went right in. We immediately met this guy named Olivier who tried to sell us his court for ₣1,000 ($1.67) since there was a decent wait line. Not long after, we found out that he was actually pretty drunk (and was pretty well known for being so throughout the tennis facility). Not long after, a tall kid came up to us and told us not to pay attention to Olivier since he tends to get pretty drunk and doesn't really know what he's doing (as we were being told this, Olivier had walked right into the middle of another match going on between two people and tried to tell them to get off...). He introduced himself as Hakim and told us that we could always contact him if we needed to reserve a court.

This is where fate comes into the picture. Zach and I started to make casual conversation with the kid, asking him if played tennis at all. Not only did he play tennis, he turned out to be a Junior player for the COUNTRY of Rwanda! I had just shaken hands with one of the best players in the country...I was speechless. Hakim told us that he could help us get a court and would love to play with us. I was a extremely intimidated. I picked up tennis at the age of 15 after watching Maria Sharapova defeat Serena Williams in the Wimbledon Final (2004). We could never afford to coach me and my high school didn't have a team, so I've basically just kinda taught myself over the years. This guy has undoubtedly put countless hours into perfecting aspects of his game to compete in East African Tournaments. But I wasn't going to turn the chance down...


From the very first shot he hit, I was impressed. I was given a partner named Prince (like the racket brand) and we played doubles against Zach and Hakim. All these guys were great. Solid ground strokes, great serves...everything. They weren't just hitting as hard as they could, they were successfully hitting the ball in 98% of the time. It felt great at times to be told I had hit a great shot, especially by these guys. Right when we were about to start playing a set, we got kicked off because someone else had reserved the court...guess we'd have to wait a bit.


In that time, I was able to make some Rwandan friends. Although they were about half my age, they were all really eager to talk to me. They asked me what I was doing in Rwanda. Where I lived in America. How long I'm here. Whether I was learning Kinyarwanda, etc. I also got the opportunity to watch true African Football (Though Zach and I are looking into going to see a game at the Stadium at some point next week)! (I dedicate this moment to Sam Acquah)


Immediately afterwards, we finally got play our set. I felt good that I could keep up with what these guys were throwing at me (though I know it wasn't what they are truly capable of). I also finally got my taste of African rain. It felt amazing and really helped cool me down when we were playing. I thought it was interesting how much longer you could play on clay courts when it is raining compared to hard court. The clay kinda soaks up a bit of the rain, so you only really have to stop if it REALLY pours....which it did! Ultimately, we had some amazing points and great shots from all sides. The score ultimately ended up being 6-1, 1-6. Guess we were evenly matched! Of course I got a picture with such amazing players before we returned back to the house!The rain fell pretty heavily here in Rwanda tonight, but it felt great! Zach and I walked back to the house in the middle of some heavy rains, but it felt AMAZING. I hope it happens again while I'm here. And in case you've been wondering what my dinners are like, here's a little peek into my food life (which I will make a separate blog post about soon!)


All in all, life is pretty damn good right now....:) ONE MORE DAY TIL WE START TEACHING!

A Major History Lesson

When I told people that I was coming to Rwanda for the summer, everyone seemed to be shocked that I would be willing to go to a place that had a Civil War only 15 years ago. To be honest, even I had my doubts for a time, but I knew the country was in much better shape than most people probably thought. Today, Zach and I decided to go and find out the story behind it all, so we got ourselves to the Rwandan Genocide Memorial and learned all about an event that still affects the people of Rwanda.


The memorial was...intense, not necessarily from the beginning, but it builds up while you walk from one section to the next. There are videos of survivors describing how they lost their moms, dads, sisters and brothers. Even scarier, there are videos of people describing how family friends went from being like brothers and sisters in their homes, eating meals together and ultimately turned on them, trying to kill them during the genocide. It was really sad. But I think the room that affected me the most, was this one...

This room has pictures of those who died during the Rwandan genocide back in 1994. It is definitely one thing to hear about a massive group of people dying, but it is another to actually be able to look them in the eye. I sat down for a few minutes to take it all in. As I looked from one family to another, I couldn't help but wonder how the surviving friends and family of these people are doing without their relatives and friends. I asked God to watch over these people...

I think the Memorial is designed in a way to alleviate the intensity of this section because right after this came a BEAUTIFUL Garden! So many palm trees, water fountains and sculptures! I don't think I could have taken more pictures of it. As I was walking around in the garden, this woman was sweeping. I was going to ask her to take a picture of me with the fountain, but then she asked me for some money and kept starting at me when I didn't have any small bills to give her.
Monkey on a cellphone :)

Zach and I came back and had an AWESOME lunch ready for us! I'm really getting spoiled by this Rwandan food. We have pineapple and rice with every meal (which I love because Hispanic food always has rice and pineapples remind me of Hawai'i <3). Our cook is so nice, she tries to teach me some Kinyarwanda almost every meal so I can better communicate here in Kigali, hopefully I'm a pro by the time we go back to America!

Later, Zach and I went to KIST to make sure that our lab would be working and had all the necessary software that the students would need (Python, Django, Google AppEngine). We had a lab technician help us install everything. We also interviewed students who were in the AITI program last year so they could help us by being teaching assistance this year. All these kids are amazing (I probably shouldn't call them kids since they're probably my age lol)! We had a meeting with one particular group from last year that started a company called HeHe. They are really excited about AITI this year and they are willing to help is out in so many ways! We really wanted to get feedback from them on what worked in last year's course and what we could change a bit about the one we'll be running starting MONDAY!

We finished the night with our first complete team meeting! At this place called REPUBLICA. It had a great view of the Rwandan hills and some pretty good food too! Zach, Christina and I just kinda recapped a lot of the program, got to know each other a bit better and set up some times to talk about what's coming up next week with the start of the course. It's really starting to come all together. This is our last weekend before we finally meet the students on Monday morning and start teaching!!!!

A Change of Venue

Things are getting underway quickly here in Kigali. Zach and I have been meeting and setting up meetings with a lot of people lately! We finally met Santhi an instructor at KIST and the person who is essentially responsible for maintaining the contact with MIT AITI. Her Indian accent really made me miss my Indian friends back at MIT (<3)! At KIST they have an interesting system where each class year has a student representative and he was gracious enough to take us around the campus and show us the lab facilities and lecture halls we'll be teaching in. They're pretty nice! :)

It turns out that our class is pretty popular! There are 46 students who ask every single day whether they'll be allowed to take it. Zach and I have a hard time turning them down, so we're going to try to find some assistance to make sure that we can accommodate all of them. That's a huge number though...guess we're just gonna have to work EXTRA hard! We have been doing quite a bit of hard work on everything though. I don't think there's been a single day since Zach and I have been here in Rwanda, where we haven't sat at Bourbon Coffee to go through lectures on Python. We are thinking a lot of things through. We even decided to make worksheets to go with our lectures and we're making additional updates and changes to a lot of the lectures that were made by other teams. I think this is great though, we're going to be really prepared come crunch time! I guess the one thing I am really grateful for is the fact that Zach and I seem to work really well together. We hear each other out and are not really critical of one another. We also are not scared to say what we think. We have some lucky students :)

Today was quite a day, if I do say so myself. Zach was feeling a bit sick last night so he went to bed a bit early and I was looking up some stuff to learn Kinyarwanda. Since we've been here, we've been waking up around 7 or 7:30, but I think I woke up around 8:30 today, which felt great! We woke up to an email from Zach's mom that mentioned that she had some friends that might be able to set us up in an another place closer to KIST. Zach and I thought that was a great idea and after meeting with a few people, we are now staying....HERE!


We immediately fell in love with the place! It is actually not too far from the place where the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, lives! We had to give up having our own rooms, but there is more than enough space for us to work. We have running water and the best part is....WE HAVE OUR OWN COOK! We just had our first hand-cooked Rwandan meal. SO GOOD!

I tried to find the name of our meal, but it didn't seem to come up in Google. I'll try to ask our cook tomorrow. One thing I think I realized today is how truly and genuinely nice the people or Rwanda are. People not only help you, but they want to keep helping you to make sure that you're okay. After we agreed to move into this new place, we were told, just let us know if you need anything else! When we got to the actual place our housemaid came out and as I stretched out my hand to greet her (as I usually done with people here in Rwanda), she just went right around me and gave me a hug. We had a driver today that took us to get our stuff from the old place were staying and help us bring it up here to our new home. Zach and I decided that he went out of his way to help us (especially since he got a traffic ticket waiting for us at our old place) that we decided to give him ₣5000 (that's Francs, the currency in Rwanda). He even offered to drive us anywhere where we might need to go and what do you know, we had planned to go and visit the Genocide Memorial! Turns out that by the time we were done with all of this moving and settling in, it was already late afternoon and the Memorial closes at 4PM. We decided it would actually be better to go tomorrow morning, so our buddy John will be picking us up bright and early at 8:30AM (after our cook makes us breakfast)! Don't worry, my camera is already charging :)

As I've learned to say in Kinyarwanda, Ijoro Rwiza! Good Night!

Murakaza neza Rwanda! Welcome to Rwanda!

Well Everyone.....I Made it! Currently in Kigali, Rwanda with my teaching partner, roommate for the next 2 months and of course, friend, Zach Hynes (<--Read his Adventures)!

It took quite awhile to get here:

LAX-->ORD (4 hours)
ORD-->Brussels, Belgium (8 hours)
Brussels, Belgium--> Kigali, Rwanda (8 hours)

Including layovers, it essentially took me an entire 24 hours to get to Africa, but I'm here! And by here, I mean...HERE!


This is our apartment in Kigali (at least for now). Zach and I actually don't mind it too much, but there is one major problem that can't be overlooked: No Running Water! This is why we haven't taken showers in the last two days/why we have to use outside bathrooms as much as possible. But overall, Africa is great! We walk along the street and people try to sell us maps of Rwanda and this one kid is so insistent on selling us a 32GB flash drive. I just wish we knew how to communicate with people here. People here speak quite a few things, most prevalent is Kinyarwanda, though many people also speak French and Keyswahili. Zach and I are going to try to look into taking a class that will help us learn to speak, especially since that's something I'm definitely interested in.

I woke up Sunday morning around 6am, not too sure why I woke up that early, but the first thing I did was look outside! We have such an amazing view of the Rwandan hills!
I'll try to get a night picture up soon too! Since Zach was still asleep, I decided to work on some pleasure reading, something that MIT doesn't really let me do too much of. I'm currently reading Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, great read about my heritage :) Once Zach woke up (and we still couldn't shower) we head out into the city to get a feel for what's around us. We're actually pretty close to a ton of stuff, the mall, the bank the University we'll be teaching at, even the Swiss, Russian and Chinese Embassies. Our main goal of the day was essentially to get FOOD and INTERNET.

First meal in Africa was....PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICH! Mmmm! I don't know if it was because I was hungry or not, but PB & J in Africa is pretty damn good! Once we settled in and got our internet working we decided it would probably be a good idea to go and see the campus we'd be teaching at....and here she is!

The campus is actually really gorgeous. There are so many nice plants and the architecture is so new. We caught the students in the middle of final exams for this past semester. Summer session starts next week with our class. We're actually going today to meet the people we'll be working with, see our facilities, check our classrooms and just run over logistics. Things are starting to get underway!

After visiting KIST (Kigali Institute of Science and Technology) we made a stop at Bourbon Coffee, which we quickly found out was the place where all the foreigners hang out. We basically just wanted to grab a quick snack, but we ended up staying to watch the FRENCH OPEN FINAL! Since Djokovic lost to Federer in the Semis, I was rooting for Rafael Nadal (Who ended up winning his SIXTH French Open Title)! We went back to the apartment, kinda relaxed a bit, talked about the curriculum, sent some emails and ultimately I went to bed around 11:30PM.

So far, Africa is proving to a very interesting and exciting experience for me. I can't wait to actually start teaching :) It's 4:09AM in California and 7:09AM in Boston...good night, America!

9 hours until Rwanda...

This is it everybody, I'm so nervous. Everything is packed up except for my laptop and a few books, but other than that I'm ready to venture off to AFRICA! I just have to survive almost a full day of flying. I leave LAX at 10AM (about 9.5 hours), fly through Chicago to Brussels, Belgium and finally to Kigali, Rwanda! I honestly just kinda want to sleep the whole time on the flight and I hope I get a window seat because I hate long flights that aren't window seats...The next blog I post is either going to be from Kigali itself or from one of my stops! Be on the lookout!

P.S. Today, it took me ~36 seconds to swallow my pill as compared to the escapade you read in my last entry which took about an hour lol

Will

I Did It!....Sorta...

If going to Africa in and of itself is not an adventure....swallowing my first pill certainly was. In my last blog entry, I mentioned how I had never swallowed a pill before...well, right now, I have one of THESE babies floating around inside my stomach! This is what the Doctors call Doxycycline, a drug that is (hopefully) going to keep me from contracting malaria. It is essentially an antibiotic that is used against all kinds of things, but I don't want to bore you with the details of the drug. What you really want to know about is how it got down my throat....

Well, it wasn't easy, I'll tell you that much. I went out to eat at a Cuban Restaurant tonight with my aunt and I told myself I was going to take it during dinner. I even told the waitress I couldn't eat any dairy products with my meal since it wouldn't settle well with the pill. As I took the pill out, I was intimidated by its size, plus, I realized that I had eaten butter during dinner and I didn't want to know what would happen when Dairy met Doxycycline (I think the result also starts with a D....Diarrhea). So I gave up and decided that I would just do it when I got home.

Take 2: Got home and immediately wanted to get it over with. Went to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of H2O and told myself "You WILL do this, Will!" (lol) My siblings (ages 11 and 12) were mocking me saying, "Come on, Willy, you're 22 and can't swallow a pill"!? My brother even swallowed a bean to prove to me that it was 'effortless'. I went to a little corner where no one would see me, so I could have alone time to accomplish my feat. Just me and the blue pill.

Put it in my mouth, drank nearly half the bottle of water and....nothing. The pill was still there on my tongue as if it hadn't moved one inch. UGH! "Why is this so hard!?" I realized that I couldn't be the only one in this world who has this difficulty, so I went to none other than YouTube. I figured someone had to have posted something. I immediately found this video and connected with the guy. He said he learned to swallow pills when he was 21 and I am 22. He described EXACTLY what it felt like when the pill would just float around in the water and not go down. I knew this was the start to my answer. He essentially gave 4 easy steps:

1. Go to the mirror and open your mouth real wide to show yourself how much room the pill has to go down.
2. Place the pill at the back of your mouth (which is further than where you think it is)...this was SO true for me, I was putting it essentially at the front of my mouth
3. close your mouth and let your tongue fall back into your throat (with the pill)
4. Drink Water if you start to choke

Even though I had outlined the steps over in my head, I still wanted to find a way out of actually swallowing the pill. Some of my friends told me I could just uncap it and mix the powder with water. I really wanted to do this, but after researching it a bit, I decided that they put the damn coat on the pill for a reason and I should just go for it. So I ran to the restroom, opened up my mouth REAL wide and said, yup, the pill can definitely fit down there (Step 1). Put the pill further back in my throat (Step 2) and simply closed my mouth (Step 3). It wasn't exactly how the guy in the video said it would be. Although the pill kinda fell into the place at the back of my throat, I gagged it back up and it was in that same position in the middle of my mouth. I was determined to get this pill down, so I pushed it back again and gave it another shot. Same result.

At this point, I had to act fast. My saliva was starting to melt the coat and I was starting to taste the inside. I had already thrown one failed pill away and I was not going to waste another. I pushed the pill back with my tongue, swallowed a gulp of water and...voilà! It was gone and I could only assume that it went down my throat. I don't know whether I can call it all a success, but I'm one step closer to being able to actually swallow pills! :)

Down to just about my last 30 hours in California. Tomorrow is going to be a long day. But now that I feel a bit more protected against Malaria...I'm ready to start my summer in Kigali :)