Week Three

I am now in my third week of teaching in Kigali. This morning I taught the 200-person general physics class. Tomorrow is statistical physics, Thursday I have my computational physics class and lab (a total of five hours), and Friday I have five hours of labs for general physics.

I think things are generally going pretty well, but it has been exhausting. Last week I felt fatigued almost all the time. Students here have very limited access to textbooks. This means that I need to provide notes that essentially serve as a textbook for them. Writing these notes takes a good bit of time. I want to make them as thorough and helpful as possible. But I also want to make them short, since students need to pay for photocopies on their own. I provide a few copies to class representatives who then distribute the notes amongst their peers.

This week things seem to be going a little better. I'm not sure if my classes are going better, but at least I have more energy. Over the weekend Doreen and I went to Volcanoes national park in the Northwest of Rwanda and saw mountain gorillas. It was amazing. I will write about the gorillas in another post. (There are some pictures up on facebook. I'll post some here when I get a chance.) It was also great to have some time to relax a little. I didn't check email for two entire days. This was the first time I've been away from email for more than a day since early September. I needed the break more than I realized.

I am now sitting in my office which is on the fourth floor of the building called KIST three. It is cloudy out and I can see an impressive rain cloud rapidly approaching from the east. It is getting darker and darker and the rain has now arrived. I can hear students yelping below as they seek cover. Thunder rumbles gently. The rains here are impressive. I like them.

The rain is falling steadily now and the view from my window is wet and misty. I will try now to tear myself away from the view outside the window and to focus on some of the many tasks I need to complete this afternoon and evening.