Dear Mr President

Mr Paul Kagame is the President of Rwanda. He is a very popular person. Everyone talking to me about him has said the same thing: ‘He is a good man, he really has brought the people of Rwanda together and he cares about everybody. He wants every child to have access to education and he is a firm believer in equal opportunities for women. I have every reason to believe that all this is correct. With this in mind, I decide to write him a letter...

Jose Pavis
Volunteer for NGO Abana

Dear Mr Kagame,
I am not sure whether this letter will ever reach you but I will write it anyway. Writing it will help me gain a bit more clarity about what I am doing in your beautiful country.
My name is Jose Pavis, I am a muzugo from Australia doing some volunteer work for three months with a very small NGO (Abana), whose president is an expatriate from Rwanda (Christine Murorunkwere) married to an Australian and living in Sydney. He heart is still in her native village of Rugerero (South Province, Nyaraguru district, Kivu sector) and we are trying to help the management, the teachers and the children of this isolated, rural school.
I have been a teacher for 35 years and, of course, I may have a bias in believing that education is a major contributor to the harmonious development of a child and of the nation where s/he lives. The pillar and foundation of any educational system is its primary school level, where it all starts, where failing means educating fewer doctors, engineers, architects, businessmen, teachers...
I have been in Rwanda for four weeks only and it would be quite vain for me to claim that I know how to overcome the challenges of providing basic education to all children in Rwanda. I am in fact very impressed by what has been achieved already and I have been impressed by the good will, determination and expertise of stakeholders in the field of education that I have met.
With the kind help of Dr Alfred Ndahiro, I have been able to met some key people at the Kigali Institute of Technology and at the Ministry of Education and this has really helped me to understand the complexity of the task.
One important goal of my transient work here was to connect the local teachers who0 have received no teacher training whatsoever with an institution that would provide distance primary school teacher education. Such yung people, who have just completed their secondary education would thenbe able to work and study at the same time.
The quality of their teaching would thereby improve drastically and the success rate for the secondary school entrance examination would rise very rapidly.
I went to the Kigali Institute of Education and a meeting with the acting vice chancellor and a couple of his colleagues. Regretfully we came to the conclusion that such a course does not exist. WE all agreed that for the thousands of young, unqualified primary school teachers who have received no training in the art of teaching, this is a serious problem. It would not be difficult to create such a diploma, which would be prepared from a distance and examined at the end of each year.
The academic staff at the Kigali Institute of Education told me that they could easily do so.
The purpose of this letter is therefore to ask you if you could give some attention to this matter.
In the meantime, I can assure you that there are many wonderful people in rural Rwanda who are doing what they can to educated the young people of this beautiful country and I will modestly do what I can to help them.
Yours sincerely,
Jose Pavis