CO’s recommendations, secular work

We just had the visit of the circuit overseer, and this is the latest. He recommended that we set up a public witnessing cart in Chinese (yes!). In response to his inquiry I suggested that it could be placed in town, close to the T2000 building (which has a Chinese supermarket and restaurant), perhaps on Saturday morning or afternoon, because that is when the Chinese come to town to do their shopping.

Also, we meet the requirements for becoming a group, except that we don’t yet have a weekly meeting in Chinese, but that can easily be handled by starting a Watchtower Study every Sunday. So the body of elders needs to write to the Service Department (which basically means my coordinator, since he works there) across the street at Bethel. We are moving ahead!

At the beginning of this month (June) I got this secular job teaching Chinese to Rwandans at a place called Creme College in town. It would be three nights a week, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., with the addition of two hours of roundtrip bus commute time in rush-hour traffic. I ended up with six students in my class, but not all of them have shown up at the same time. And like most other language classes I’ve taught, there are students who catch on quickly, and others who appear clueless. So it proved to be a challenge going at a pace that the slower students can follow and at the same time keeping the sharper students interested.

They gave us this room, not more than 20 square meters, with a very small freestanding whiteboard. The door of the room has a sign above it that says “Administration.” And because the walls don’t reach to the ceiling and the room adjoins Reception, you hear all kinds of noise and talking. That includes the ranting and raving of this live preacher on a radio station right across the hall.

OK, I thought, the job doesn’t pay tremendously, but it gives me something to do for the next few months at the end of the service year, when pioneer hours are not under pressure. Also, my having this job might be good when the time comes next year to possibly renew my residency permit at immigration.

Well, all went fine for a while, but at the beginning of the fourth week, the director called me and said that he would be cancelling the class, or at least that I wouldn’t need to come and teach any longer. The reason? The students complained that they didn’t understand my English, even though I tried to speak slowly and simply. This is the same problem that the teacher prior to me had, namely, that the Chinese class was taught using English. The students were expecting, if you can believe this, that they would have a Rwandan person teaching them Chinese using Kinyarwanda. The irony is that some of these students are businessmen who deal with Chinese regularly, so the question is, don’t they use English to communicate with them? Also, two of the students have plans to attend universities in China, where they will study subjects such as computers and economics in English. So just try to figure this out.

My understanding is that now the college is in the process of interviewing a Rwandan teacher of Chinese, but according to the director, “we don’t know how good he is because we don’t know Chinese.” Oh, well.

Another interesting thing is that when I went to the college to collect my salary for three weeks’ work, they gave it to me in cash, which is rather suspicious. So it may be just as one of the brothers in the congregation said: this is called a college, but in reality it is just a private venture masquerading as a college.

To be honest, it has been a relief not to have this job any longer because working in the evening, including the hassle of the commute (e.g., standing in a 100-meter line of people for a half-hour wait to board a bus to return home), I discovered, is very tiring.

So now I’m back to my normal life of free evenings to study, watch videos on YouTube, and listen to my neighbor kids whooping it up.

By the way, here is the finished Kigali Convention Center (the “egg house”) in all its glory.

This building was originally handled by a Chinese construction company, which had as many as 500 workers, but then due to slowness of progress and reports of fraud, the Rwandan government cancelled the contract with the Chinese and gave it to a Turkish company to finish the job. So now, believe it or not, we have an order in the congregation for Turkish literature!