Starting Monday, the students began work at their individual service-learning sites. Among their placements include working with doctors and nurses at We-Actx, musicians and music teachers at Rwandan Youth Music, Rwanda Men's Resource Centre (RWAMREC), and the Prison Fellowship.
I don’t have many pictures from this week from the students because, well, they were out in the field doing their own thing. However, I did get to go with Lilly, who was working with Rwandan Youth Music. This organization is amazing. It’s a pretty cohesive organization of musicians who are also music teachers. They teach in Not only do they do music lessons for youth with HIV in conjunction with We-Actx, they also teach music at some primary schools in the area (and possibly secondary schools?). I am learning that this is basically all of the music that students get. And if RYM doesn’t come to your school, you will likely not have music. It is officially a requirement that every student has music at the elementary level, but the reality is that the government expects classroom teachers to provide it. So if the teachers are not comfortable doing music, they are not going to do music, and no one is going to check up on them. So what I learned is that some headmistresses and headmasters really value music and want to have it in their schools in a real way. So they will use some of their budget money and allocate it to paying people to come in and teach it. This is how RYM gets paid. They essentially tell schools to pay what they can, and if they can pay something, they send teachers and the teachers come on a weekly basis and teach students traditional Rwandan dancing and singing. My friend who I made at RYM, Eric, is in charge of finding schools who want their services and then organizing teachers to go to the schools. So he explained a lot of this to me. He said that basically they only service private schools because they are willing to pay; the public schools want them to come and do it for free because they have less money. But this is their income so they don’t do it for free. I think this is a smart business move and I don’t blame them one bit for not teaching for free! And I really appreciate that there are head teachers who value music enough to allocate budget money to have specialists come in. This is the best news I have heard about music education in Africa, between Ghana and Rwanda! It’s so great that they get to teach the music that they think is most relevant, and they are choosing to teach Rwandan music, with very little restriction! I LOVE it!
These are pics from Lilly's internship with Rwandan Youth Music. There's a short video as well, when we went out to a primary school and they were working with kids.
And I got some photos from Genna and Emily, who went out into the field with RWAMREC to learn how they counsel people in the villages who are having issues with things like domestic problems. Here are a couple of those photos. It sounded like they learned a ton by going and shadowing the counselors and other works. What an incredible experience for these students!
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