This first week in Rwanda has been a little overwhelming. There are so many things that are different from the United States that I was not expecting. From getting off the plane I have noticed everyone here is so caring. I wrote before, I had heard unity was huge in Rwanda and it is so true. Everyone here seems to be so thankful and welcoming and it is really helping me work on my mindset. I want to become a more positive person and I can see this opportunity helping me grow in this area of my life.

Amazingly, I have already been growing and learning in ways I never thought of before coming on this trip. I thought, going into a teach abroad program, all my learning would be coming from becoming an educator and what can I learn from the schools, teachers and students here about educating. While I have been learning a lot about education, I have been learning a lot about myself. I believe I am with very special people that I came here with who are helping me learn and pointing out the positive things I am learning to love about myself. I am learning about others and how to interact with them to be a better person overall.

In the schools, I have been very shocked. I did not know what exactly I was expecting, but I am both surprised and amazed. The children here are performing at extremely high levels with such high self-motivation to be the best they can be with less than half of the resources we have in America. They have such a high expectation of America and schools back home without realizing they are doing amazing, especially considering how little they have. I have so much respect for the teachers and students who are so willing to learn and grow, they don’t necessarily need all the technology we have. It is making me question and want to push my future students to meet their highest potential, which I know is already so high and even higher with the resources available to them.

We spent the first day with students getting to know them. I loved learning about their hopes, dreams and goals, and letting them ask us questions to get to know us and America. It was very interesting to me that a lot of Rwandan students were under the impression that schools in America were more about drama and relationships with little learning happening. This is what they see in movies, so isn’t it what is true? I was glad I could teach them about our school culture in America and while it is very different from the schools here, there is still so much learning happening. Another question that came up a lot was about me being a teacher for elementary or what they call primary here. In Rwanda, you just have to have a high school diploma to teach primary students, so they were confused as to why we were attending the University of Missouri to get a degree in this. Once we cleared up the differing qualifications in the different countries, the students were telling me how it is shameful to be a primary teacher in Rwanda and asked if I felt proud to be an elementary teacher. This hurt my ego a little bit but then I remembered teachers are overlooked at home, too. Teachers do amazing, difficult work and don’t get enough credit.