Connecting to Rwanda

I knew about Rwanda, saw heart-yanking images and read articles of the 1994 genocide that left a nation scarred. But I didn't really feel the connection until my friend Elizabeth returned from working in the African country, where she'd educated and empwered women to take political stances and position as Rwanda slowly rebuilt. Elizabeth had also founded a nonprofit organization there, Every Child Is My Child, which funds education for children in Rwanda and Burundi. 

She invited me to watch a marketing video and give feedback on Every Child's social media strategy, and even as I fed ideas and talked through content tactics, I was churning inside. With a volunteer staff and board, and only a few hundred dollars in donations, the organization provides tuition, uniforms, books and school supplies to enough kids that it the community has shifted. The cost is minimal -- less than my cable and phone bills for the month -- and investment is so critical -- kids having a backpack of what they need to enter a classroom, consider college, think about how to raise up Rwanda even more. 

I felt just as heartened when I was introduced to Indego Africa, an organization that partners with 400 women artisans in Rwanda, with the same spirit of empowerment and access to resources, education and audience. 

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Reading is the new playing

He used run nakey to the tub, arms full of tiny plastic guys that he would line up on the ledge. He would only agree to veer away from athletic pants because he could carry Legos in his cargo pockets. He vroomed and whooshed and turned any little thing -- one of my hairbands, a milk ring, a wine cork, a gray rock from someone's gangway -- into a toy, most often a guy, a guy and a car if there was two little things.

Cleaning house was a process of herding toys from every room back to his, where bins of dinosaurs and birthday party goody-bag stuff and fire trucks with sirens that went off at all hours and games with half the pices missing and whistles and Star Wars figures spilled out on to the floor and were hidden under the bed and tucked into the dresser drawers and sometimes creeped into the hamper or my room or seventeen tote bags shoved into the closet. 

Play is a child's work, my educator mother told me over and over. And time and again, I watched my boy punch the clock. The plastic ticky clock that only displays one-half of each number and plays an aggravating, sugary Sesame Street tune on the hour.

But over the last few months, playing has been demoted. Reading has soared from middle manager to the big boss. Reading is so in charge that no Lego chef guy's plastic baguette or the mostly put-together Millennium Falcon or the low-tech video game that plugs into the TV barely get any projects at all. They just all hang out in the break room, waiting. Watching that broken clock tick until it sings again.

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The problem with chaperoning a field trip

It isn't that there are one thousand second-graders carrying paper lunch bags that are torn or half-open with bags of Sun Chips and baby carrots and hot Cheetos spilling out.

Or that they are supposed to be making notes on worksheets they've been given that are tucked into clipboards with pencils that have chewed off erasers. And that they must come to a dead stop to make those notes in the middle of a crowd of other school children that has a current that sweeps even the adults away quickly.

It isn't the bumpy, slightly stenchy, hot bus that makes even the most iron-bellied passengers feel nauseous.

It isn't that there is always one half of a seatbelt missing so that one of the three students squeezed into the bus seat cries when she has to sit with other kids, alone, or worse, the chaperone.

It isn't that the hours tick slowly, and that there are always too many hours to spend at the zoo, the museum, listening to a tour guide use that annoying baby-talk voice he thinks will engage kids who are in no way engaged.

It isn't the gripping fear that one child in your care will flee, vanish, pause momentarily, wander off, accidentally cling to another group or get pulled under in the current of kids in the ape house, backstage at the theater, while boarding the bus -- and will be gone. Like, REALLY GONE.

And it will be the child who has been whining, kicking, bullying, accidentally-on-purpose poking at your boob, pouting, talking incessantly, causing you to spontaneously think without thinking, "Wow, it's so gloriously quiet" in the split second after you realize he's not there.

It's not the guilt that follows that thought. Nor the panic after that. Not even the deep, ojai breathing you learned in sweaty yoga, therapy, Lamaze class, during the worst finals test ever to keep yourself just barely calm enough to see your way through a crisis and FIND THAT KID.

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