Notes From the Land of a Thousand Hills

James Cowan, 2008

Earlier this week, my wife and I visited the journalism department’s administrative office. As newcomers to Rwanda and academic life, we frequently pester the administrative staff with questions about scheduling and photocopying and tracking down errant students. The staff tolerates our inquiries with a mixture of befuddlement and patience. As I was leaving the office, the administrative secretary asked me something in French. At first, I did not understand, but she repeated the question and I realized she was inquiring if Mary and I were romantically linked.

 “Oui,” I said proudly. “Mary est mon fils!”

 English subtitle: “Yes! Mary is my son!”

Such is life for a one-language man in a three-language country. Rwanda’s complicated history has rendered it trilingual. Several decades of Belgian colonialism meant Rwandans who actually grew up in Rwanda learned French in school. At the same time, 35 years of war meant many people were raised in Uganda, learning English rather than French. Most everyone speaks Kinyarwanda and it is lingua franca of day-to-day life.

 Sadly, my Kinyarwanda is limited to a few awkward phrases such as “How are you?”, “Let’s go”, and “I want a cold beer.”  I often find myself relying on my deplorable French to communicate. I stumble over tenses, forget to conjugate verbs and occasionally issue strange pronouncements on my familial relationships.

 But what I find remarkable is the great patience with which both my Kinyarwanda and French are treated. Having spent four years in Montreal, I am accustomed to Francophones quickly (and sometimes haughtily) switching to English the moment I butcher my first sentence. But here, people tolerate the errors and nod encouragingly as I stumble forward. There seems to be some recognition that we are both speaking a second language, finding a middle ground so we can understand each other.

While I more or less survive in French, there have been incidents. I was recently approached outside our home by one of the many traveling Congolese art dealers who sell masks and other trinkets to tourists. Not in the mood to shop, I mumbled something in French about how my wife had taken most of our money to Kigali for the day. He nodded and left, while I went to have lunch.

As I ate,  my excuse traveled along a multilingual grapevine. As I returned my dishes to the kitchen, Jean, the Rwanda Initiative’s cook and resident sage, asked if Mary had stolen my money and run off to Kigali. My fib had been repeated by the art dealer to our groundskeeper (in Kinyarwanda), who told it to Jean (still in Kinyarwanda), who then translated back into French to ask me what happened.  I assured him everything was fine, and then went in search of a French-English dictionary to try and discovered how I had misspoke (I remain lost in translation).

Juggling multiple languages does take its toll. Many residents flip between languages constantly, beginning a sentence in Kinyarwanda, throwing in a French word or two and then concluding in English. For example, last week I have caught myself telling a waiter: “Ndashaka Coca, s’il tu plait.”

English translation of Kinyarwanda: “I want a Coke.”

English translation of French: “if you please.”

He turned to the student I was sitting beside and said something in French about how I was trying to be Rwandan.  Then he slapped me on the back, chuckled for a moment, and went to get my Coke.

James Cowan, 2008

Back in Canada, finding a professor to interview is a simple task. Schools publish lists of media-friendly experts, phone directories are readily available on the internet and, if a reporter feels particularly lazy, they can contact a university’s communications department and have them track down the instructor.  Such luxuries do not exist in Rwanda.

While I am teaching in Rwanda, I have been doing a little bit of actual journalism as well. For one story, I wanted to interview a particular instructor at the National University of Rwanda. I assumed it would take an afternoon to find the gentleman. Three weeks later, I emerged from the quest successful but humbled.

I started my search on the university’s website. There was a phone list, but it was old and did not include the first names of most professors. I tried a wider internet search, hoping to find his email address attached to an academic paper or other document. This effort also failed.

Next, I decided to locate his office and introduce myself in person. I knew he was a member of the education faculty, so I asked a colleague where that department was located. It turned out that it was not part of the main campus, but someplace downtown. I hiked downtown only to discover that my colleague had sent me to the school of public health. Further inquiries led me to a third campus, where I found the education department tucked on a dirt road behind the law school. Alas, when I arrived I was informed the offices were closed. Could I come back later?

My mission resumed the next day. While I arrived to find the offices, no one had heard of the professor I wanted. However, one secretary thought he had perhaps been promoted. She sent me to an administrative office located across a dusty courtyard. I arrived to find the office empty.

So I tried a new strategy. I went to the journalism department and asked if anyone there knew my target. The administrative assistant sent me to the director, who said he thought my professor now worked in the distance education department. The director sent me to one building, but when I arrived a man standing on the front step redirected me to a different office across the street. But no one in that office had heard of my elusive instructor either. After a brief conference between staff members, they decided he worked in the administrative office that I had visited the day before.

I went back and discovered a young man in a t-shirt hunched at a desk listening to his radio. I explained my situation. While he had not heard of my professor either, it turned out I had stumbled into the office that held the employment records for the entire university. After a brief conversation in muddled English and French, the clerk yanked my subject’s employment record from a filing cabinet. Sadly, it contained no contact information.

I trudged back to town feeling slightly incompetent and ready to renounce my journalism career. As is often the case, it was at this moment that I finally had a bit of good luck. Sitting in my email inbox was a message from a representative of a group in New York City. My professor had done some work with her organization and I had contacted them two weeks earlier for some background information.  The relevant staff person had been away but finally returned and eager to help. Within minutes, I had a cellphone number for my enigmatic educator.

But there was one final complication. After three weeks of searching, I contacted the professor on the eve of a four-month trip to Stockholm. Fortunately, he was willing to squeeze me into his schedule. And so, I conducted the interview the following day seated at our dining room table in the midst of a power failure.  It should eventually make for a good article, although far less dramatic than the search that went into it.

James Cowan, 2008

For the past few weeks, a cowlick has stood atop my head in staunch defiance of my receding hairline while tufts of hair covered my ears and curled over my collar. Being so hirsute in the Rwandan heat is unpleasant and so, this Saturday, I set off for a haircut.

Finding a barbershop was not a problem. Unlike its spotty electrical grid or its unreliable water supply, Rwanda’s hairstyling infrastructure is top notch. Any community with more than four homes has a “saloon,” the local name for a haircutting establishment, and some towns seem to have more saloons than they do residents. In Huye, there are at least three along the main drag, with names like the Glory Beauty Saloon. All seem to cater to women, but I eventually found a manly place to get shorn: a stall in the market.

Contained within a concrete slab wall, the Huye market is an entrepreneurial shantytown, with rows of vendors selling piles of dried fish and high-heeled shoes and bolts of brightly patterned cloth and rusted hunks of unidentifiable metal. Just inside the front gate - across from the pastel men’s slacks and close to the women running sewing machines in the afternoon sun - is a string of shacks offering hairstyling. All the barbers are men, although there were a few female clients in the chairs. I stood outside trying to determine whether the stalls were separate shops or all part of one operation. A man in the doorway of the shack closest to the gate smiled and motioned me inside.

“Come, come,” he said. They were the last words spoken to me until my cut was complete.

The gentleman (whom I quickly figured out was the owner or manager, based on the fact that he carried the shop’s till in a fanny pack around his waist), pointed me at a wooden kitchen chair close to the door. A silent barber in a lime green shirt wrapped a smock around my neck and began to oil his clippers. There was no discussion of style or length. Within a minute, he was cutting.

The shack, roughly the size of a garden shed, contained about a dozen people, including a vocal barber in a San Jose Sharks jersey who occasionally wandered over to observe my progress. Sitting in the cramped quarters with a corrugated steel roof above my head, I sweated profusely. My barber used a paintbrush (about the right size for finishing trim) to keep the torrents of water away from my eyes. The same brush served to flick away the hair he had removed with the clippers. At times, my sweat flowed in such great volumes that a second man assisted with the wiping. But he quickly became overwhelmed as well and dropped an oil-stained rag on my forehead to staunch the flow.

Meanwhile, my barber worked with trim brush in one hand and clippers in the other. He switched blades several times, but completed the entire haircut without ever resorting to scissors. A crooked mirror hung on the wall in front of me, allowing me to track the progress. Above the mirror there was a small barred window, where passersby occasionally stuck their faces to watch the freakish spectacle of a white guy getting shorn.

While no one spoke to me, it was very clear that everyone in the shed was talking about me. The two Kinyrwanda words I picked out of the conversation again and again were “white person” and “money.” It seemed the crowd thought my barber would be able to send at least one of his kids to college based on the price I would pay for this one haircut.

It took about 35 minutes for the barber to work his way around the sides of my head and then over the top, finishing by working the clippers over each ear with the safety guard removed. After he carefully flicked a few remaining bits of hair from my collar with the trim brush, it was time to pay. The sign on the wall seemed to indicate I owed 300 francs (or roughly sixty cents), but according to my barber, I misunderstood the finer points of Rwandan signage. I owed 3,000 francs, he said. Upon hearing the audacity of his request, the other barbers in the shack - and I wish I was making this up - began to applaud.

What choice did I have? I paid the man his asking price and then, playing to the crowd, tipped him another thousand. In the end, my haircut cost roughly eight dollars — better than Top Cuts but ludicrous by local standards. I had been fleeced, literally and figuratively.

James Cowan, 2008

In a better world, I would stride into the classroom each day and unleash a lecture packed with tales of intrigued, sermons on ethical fortitude and easy tips for landing on the front page. Afterwards, I would wait the standing ovation to end and then stroll into town for a bagel, latté and the latest issue of the Atlantic. Or maybe Entertainment Weekly. It depends how cerebral I feel in my daydream.

There are no bagels in Huye and the only readily available publications are day-old copies of the New Times. To be honest, neither of these facts bother me much. However, the gap between my dream journalism class and the classes I found myself teaching lately has worried me. This has nothing to do with the students or myself – we all work hard and get along fine, thanks very much. My problem relates to one of the uncomfortable truths about journalism as a profession: sometimes, it’s pretty darn dull. And unfortunately, my students need to learn about the boring parts too.

The first two units of my course, focusing on newsgathering fundamentals and interview techniques, went remarkably well. Both provided plenty of room for lively discussion and classroom role-playing, along with opportunities to send the class out into the streets of town to practice what I preached. But our third unit concentrated on working with written sources such as press releases and government  reports. When I planned the course, I thought this would be an important topic. Rwanda is jammed full of foreign agencies, charities and government ministries, all of whom love to churn out media releases, annual surveys, audits, newsletters, discussion papers and announcements. What I failed to consider in my course planning is how hard it might be to convince my students of the inherent glory of a freshly printed Auditor General’s report.

The problem, I think, was twofold. Firstly, there is nothing inherently dramatic in a written report. There is nothing I can do to make it visually entertaining for my class, except perhaps setting the document alight and juggling the burning paper. More importantly, finding a story buried in a government report can be difficult even when it is written in your native tongue. But when you’re struggling with something produced in your second or third language, you try parsing a sentence such as:

“The Auditor General of State Finances pointed out that there is a step forward by various institutions in the management and effective utilization of state property because it was found that 81.5% of the institutions were able to prepare a financial statement of 2006, and the books of the accounts of which they were unable to prepare before.”

Despite the Sahara-like dryness of the material, the class and I survived. The topic inspired a number of good discussions, like whether it is acceptable to read a press release on the radio and pretend it’s a story. Or what happens when the person who sent you a press release doesn’t like what you wrote. Or what the difference is between an advertisement and a press release. The fact the class has started to think about these questions makes me think the lessons were worthwhile.

James Cowan, 2008

We cannot spend every night enjoying vegetable brochettes at the restaurant beside our house, or dining on platters of fried tofu at the town’s lone Chinese restaurant, or pretending to be characters in a Graham Greene novel on the patio of the Ibis hotel.

On some evenings in the quiet college town of Huye, where my wife and I have now lived for a month, you need to make your own fun. There are nights when our novels no longer interest us and we have exhausted our supply of New Yorker back issues and we find ourselves wishing we packed a Monopoly board. It was on a night such as this that I discovered the crossword puzzle in the New Times.

The New Times strives to be Rwanda’s newspaper of record, boasting extensive political coverage, a hefty sports section, international wire copy and editorial cartoons that retell the news rather than satirizing it. The crossword, to which I am now addicted, appears on the same page as the listings for the country’s only TV channel and the paper’s movie reviews, which occasionally tackle films that the reviewer freely admits he has not seen.

The crossword poses different challenges than those found at home. It is occasionally cryptic but never intentionally so, with clues that range from depressingly easy:

4 Down: American Broadcasting Corporation (abbr.) (3)

To clues that seem to have been ripped from a chemistry textbook:

20 Down: A dark brown or black bituminous usually odorous viscous liquid obtained by destructive distillation of organic material (as wood, coal or peat) (3).

The answer is “tar,” for those of you playing along at home.

But it is not just the clues that puzzle me; the construction of the crossword itself can be confusing.

As I pondered yesterday’s crossword, the first clue to spark inspiration was this one:

8 Across: A natural luminous body visible in the sky especially at night (4)

“Star,” I wrote confidently, quickly turning my attention to:

8 Down: The house of piglets (3)

Using the “S” from star, the answer seemed to be “sticks” or “straw,” but neither fit in the three spaces provided. While I suspected an error, I continued, inserting the word “sow” in the spot (A liberal interpretation of the clue, but reasonably accurate). Was it right? I try to check by looking at 13 Across, which uses the “W” from sow as its first letter.

Sadly, there is no clue provided for 13 Across. There is no clue for 3 Down either, I soon discover, just four vertical boxes begging for closure. I ignore their pleas and move on:

14 Down: Uttered by the mouth (4)

“Said,” I said. There were even enough spots - perhaps too many. Two separate slots on the board were designated for 14 Down.

It is at this point that I turn to the business section.

While the New Times crossword tests your patience along with you intellect, it also rewards those who tackle it on a regular basis. Indeed, clues are regularly recycled to the point where I am now disappointed if I am not asked to identify “a snake-like fish” or “the night before an important event.” That would be eel and eve, respectively.

The crossword is one of the few sections of the New Times I have not yet discussed with my students, but I may mention it soon. It would provide an excellent lesson in proof reading, if nothing else.

UPDATE: As I stared at my morning coffee this morning, it occured to be that “sty” was likely the correct solution to the piggy problem. This perhaps illustrates another frustration of the New Times crossword — just when you think they’ve made another foolish mistake, it turns they’re not the fools.

James Cowan, 2008

There is a television in my classroom. I often arrive at school to find it blasting CNN footage, rap videos or gospel concerts — it depends which student has the remote control.

This week, a half dozen students were watching a rerun starring Ashton Kutcher on MTV. As I hovered in the back, one student turned his head just far enough to make eye contact.

“What is Punk’d?” he asked. “What is this word?”

A slang term for being tricked or fooled, I explained, praying nobody would ask about the eccentric spelling.

“And why does it have a punctuation mark in it?” asked the same student.

Because Ashton Kutcher hates both the English language and me, I thought.

“To make the show look cool,” I said.

And so it goes. In addition to teaching the fundamentals of newsgathering, a fair portion of my time is spent offering impromptu ESL tutorials. At the end of another class, a student stopped me in the hallway, wearing the expression of a man in need of a deadline extension. But it quickly became clear it was not class work causing his anxiety.

“There is a Latin proverb, ‘When there is no wind, row.’ What is row?”  he asked.  His  confusion was understandable,  given Rwanda is an landlocked nation.

Other words I have been asked to define this week: cull, boring, dumb.

Like any group of students, my class approach their work with varying levels of enthusiasm and skill. There is no denying
there are frustrations. Nothing is worse than having just eight out of 22 students show up for class. Or emphasizing the importance of deadlines and then having a group take an extra half-hour to complete an in-class assignment at a leisurely pace. Or discovering that the guy in the back of the class is nodding not because he agrees with you, but because he thinks it will make you teach faster.

For all these annoyances, the students are making progress. Their leads are becoming sharper and their questions more focused. They even seem to be developing a healthy respect for the clock (In fact, the students now taunt tardy classmates with a murmured chanted of “deadline, deadline, deadline,” a practice I confess I have not discouraged).

The students are maturing in other ways as well. An example came this week during a discussion of basic interviewing skills. I explained that, in general, an interview should begin with broad, easy questions and progress to questions that were detailed or might make the subject uncomfortable. As an example, we discussed Tony Blair’s visit to Rwanda. The former British Prime Minister recently agreed to act as an unpaid advisor to the Rwandan government  and spent a couple of days visiting with officials this week.

“What would you ask him if you were granted a five-minute interview?”  I said.

The class had no problems coming up with some nice softball questions for the former PM.

“What do you think of Rwanda?”

“How is your wife?”

Tougher questions eluded them, which is not entirely surprising. The Rwandan media is generally deferential to authority and highly unlikely to ask hard questions of a visiting dignitary. Nonetheless, they kept thinking and, with some gentle prodding, their questions demonstrated  a modicum of backbone.

“Why do you think your experience as an European leader is relevant in Africa?”

As we kept talking, there was still one question that needed to be asked, but one I doubted any of the students would consider. But then, one raised his hand.
“Was he Prime Minister in 1994?” the student asked.

“He was certainly a leading politician,” I responded.

(In fact, Mr. Blair was running to be leader of the Labour Party as the Genocide was taking place).

“Then we should ask ‘Why is he helping us now if he didn’t help us then?’”

Indeed, a question about Britain’s indifference to the Genocide seemed like one a reporter should have in their notebook. I am under no illusion that my class will become crusading investigative reporters, asking hard-hitting questions of public figures at every opportunity. Rwanda is not Canada and the freedoms enjoyed by North American journalists do not always exist here. But the point of the discussion, I guess, was to get the students to at least consider a possibility. Whether they choose to ask such questions will be up to them, but they should at least know the questions are there to be asked.

James Cowan, 2008

In the evening before each class, I write out my final lesson plan, the list of teaching points and excercises I want to cover the next day. But as I settle into life as a university lecturer, I’m learning classrooms are great places for improv.

Take today’s class, which focused on techniques for interviewing eyewitnesses. In the lesson plan, I plotted out a relatively simple activity to introduce the topic. I divided the class in two, keeping half of the students in the room and sending the others outside to relax for a couple of minutes in the bright morning sun. I then put on a little show for the students still in the room: sitting down and standing up repeatedly, balancing on one leg, moving furniture and dropping my notebook to the ground. When I finished, I called the other students back inside and told them to interview their compatriots about what just happened. The idea was to illustrate the unreliability of eyewitnesses and open a discussion about interviewing techniques.

All went according to plan, until I asked the reporters to share what they had learned.

“Share or show?” asked one of the students.

Share, I clarified, before realizing that showing might make more sense — and be funnier as well. And so, three of the reporters took a turn at the front of the class, doing their best to recreate my variety act. Even one of the eyewitnesses took the stage, but none of them came close to correctly portraying the sequence of events. Even the small variations were instructive. Some gently placed my notebook on the floor while others slammed it down with a vicious “thump.” Some sat down for just a second while others lingered for close to a minute. When the performaces were finished, we had an energetic discussion about the limitations of eyewitness accounts and how to overcome them, followed by a quick review of basic interviewing skills.

The lesson proved instructive for both my students and myself. The slight change in my plan meant even the students who struggle with English could glean something from the class, thanks to the performances of their classmates.

Writing teachers often instruct their students to “show, don’t tell.” More and more, I’m learning it is advice for teachers to heed as well.

James Cowan, 2008

George W. Bush visited Kigali this Tuesday, spending eight hours in Rwanda’s capital. The instructors from the Rwanda Initiative decided to take our students on a field trip. Their assignment was to show how the visit effected average Rwandans and they spent the day gathering tape, photographs and notes. Herewith, three scenes from the day.

Scene #1: Up The Hill

I am supervising two sets of students — one assigned to cover Bush’s visit to Kigali’s Genocide Memorial, the other his lunch with President Paul Kagame. When the students and I arrive at the memorial, we discover a security perimeter has been established and no one is allowed within a half kilometre of the site. So we stand with hundreds of others, staring at the distant memorial atop one of Kigali’s many hills. Then, without explanation, pedestrians are allowed past the barricades and we begin walking towards the site. I am about halfway up the hill when the motorcade roars past. There is neither a sidewalk nor a fence separating me from the road, so I drop down into a drainage ditch to avoid being hit by speeding black SUVs. The vehicles past so close that I can see the backseats packed with men wearing black suits with big guns tucked between their knees. In the midst of the motorcade is an SUV identical to the others, save for the Rwandan flags on the front and the U.S. presidential seal on the side. Then come the buses filled with media and more cars. They descend the valley and roar up the other side, leaving a dust clouded and slightly baffled Rwandans in their wake.

Scene #2: On the Hill

The guide who gave Bush the tour of the Genocide memorial does not want to speak with my students. Dressed in a pale blue suit, he sits well behind the front desk at the education centre, working on a computer. I decided to ask him myself, mentioning I am a Canadian reporter who is currently teaching at the university. Would he have a moment for my students? Yes, he says. Give him five minutes. So five minutes pass and he steps out front. Could we tell him in advance what we will be asking? No, no, I say. No need for that, we just want to chat about the visit. So I pull out my digital recorder and the students yank out their own. I start asking questions, but within a minute, the students take over. What began as a teaching exercise became a scrum. I feel very proud.

Scene #3: Down the Hill

As I leave the memorial, students from the local schools are headed home for lunch. Their uniforms consist of brightly-coloured checked shirts and as they walk up the hill, they cover the road with patches of red, blue and green. Closer, they look like tiny members of a country western band. They want to say hello (Bonjour!) or shake my hand. Then, a commotion breaks out in the midst of one of the groups of children. A small boy — no older than six — bursts from the pack and firmly embraces my knees. I bend over and hug him back for a second and then he is gone, back into the throngs of colour.

James Cowan, 2008

She is lying down, her head lifted and turned slightly to one side. Her skin is bleached white. Her eyes are neither missing nor entirely there – just two indented ovals with what looks like taut skin stretched over them. Her hair is missing but her teeth are intact; her arms are raised to her collarbone and her legs bend inward like a frog’s. She lies on a raised wooden frame – an old bed, perhaps – among six or seven others. She is small enough to be a child, but I can’t be sure. To tell the truth, I am not certain she is woman. She died 14 years ago. Burial, exhumation, time and lime have desiccated her body.

She is a victim of Murambi, the half-finished technical school that became an extermination camp during the Rwandan Genocide. More than 50,000 people died on its grounds over four days. They gathered on its ground thinking it would serve as a sanctuary. But Hutu extremists attacked, killing with grenades and machetes and then dumping into mass graves. You can read all the books on the Genocide, stack the facts up one at a time: one-tenth of the Rwanda’s population killed, a slaughter committed in just 100 days with greater efficiency than the Holocaust, a mass murder facilitated by the ignorance and indifference of the international community. Once you see Murambi, all these facts seem like footnotes in a poorly researched academic paper.

Other participants in the Rwanda Initiative have visited Murambi. I encourage you to read their reflections as well (You can read some here, here, and here). We could probably publish a hundred accounts and never come close to conveying how horrible it is.

The 30-kilometre drive from Huye to Murambi is gorgeous, through terraced fields and rust-coloured villages. The facility itself sits on the outskirts of the village of Gikongoro. Drive through the town, take a couple of swift turns and follow a dirt road that hugs the edge of a long valley. Looming on the other side is Murabi’s main building, a dull bureaucratic structure made of glass and artificial marble, a modernist incongruity in the midst of farm country. The building disappears from view as the car skirts the valley edge, only to reemerge on the right-hand side, set back from the road behind a large parking lot with a limp Rwandan flag stuck at its centre.

When we arrive, there is only other vehicle in the parking lot. A caretaker emerges from the main building and speaks to our driver in Kinyarwanda, telling him to take us around back. We follow him past a marked mass grave, a series of concrete slabs with metal crosses at either end. Fifty thousand people are buried in these tombs, our driver tells us without slowing his step. Handles stick out of one end of the burial plot, seemingly denoting a hatch left so that other bodies can be added as they are found.

Behind the main building are three derelict cement mixers, reminders that Murambi was still a school under construction when it became a killing ground. Following the path, we approach a series of long bungalows resembling roadside motels.

The site is a memorial under development and there are no signs telling visitors what to expect, no audio tours or explanatory pamphlets or interactive displays. You walk along a dirt path, step through the first bungalow’s doorway and find yourself staring a room filled with preserved bodies. There are 24 of these rooms and you are welcome to see them all.

Death has immediacy here. You can step into each room and survey the corpses – there is nothing to stop someone from touching them if they wanted. Each room has a stench like mildew and wet clay, the smell of the bodies that were pulled from makeshift graves and then treated with lyme to preserve them and contain disease. At first, it just looked like body after body after body, but then I noticed the details: the foot bones dangling from the leg from where they were severed with a machete, the clumps of hair, the babies with fractured skulls, the bodies with their rib cages crushed. The details make everything worse.

I walk through a dozen rooms and decide that a dozen is enough. But as I walk to my wife, Mary, she points to another door and says the caretaker has opened an extra room, especially for us. Inside is a table covered in skulls and a pile of femurs two feet high.

We conclude our tour at the main building, which houses washrooms and administrative offices and hints of a museum to come. The caretaker hands us a guest book and we puzzle over what to put in the comments space. As we think, we flip through the pages and see visitors from the United States and Great Britain and the Netherlands. There are few Rwandans listed, but the caretaker assures us that they do come. And then, as if to prove his point, two buses arrive carrying Rwandans dressed in church clothes. The caretaker is excited to have his country people visiting and quickly sends us on our way. We climb back in the car and drive away, leaving Rwanda’s dead and its living with each other.

James Cowan, 2008

Today I attended the first journalism class of my life - and I was teaching it.

Having become a reporter without earning a journalism degree, the notion of formal instruction in the field has long perplexed me. I do not oppose the idea, but I just could never imagine an instructor asking a class to recite the “five Ws.” Today, I was that teacher.

The course is second-year “Information Gathering.” While other classes at the university aim to polish writing skills and explain editing, my job is to focus on research. For the next five weeks, my second-year students will practice interviewing experts and eyewitnesses, learn to love documents and discover there is more to the Internet than bootleg music videos.

The mission for our first class, however, was establishing what the students already know. I was warned their grasp on some fundamental skills might be shaky and told it was worth taking time to assess their abilities. So we began with the basics: Who, what, where, when and why - the basic building blocks of any news story. I confess I have never actually heard the illustrious “five Ws” mentioned in a working newsroom. But it is a concept that easily bridges language barriers and made it possible to get a taste of what my students know.

They named each “W” in rapid succession and quickly identified them in stories. They wrote their own leads to the story ideas we discussed. They proposed excellent sources for writing a feature on George W. Bush’s visit to this country next week (albeit, it took prodding to get them to suggest sources beyond the Rwandan and American governments). We finished work I thought would take two hours in just 40 minutes.

As we discussed the basic components of a news story, I encouraged the class to keep a question in mind: So what? That is, why is this story important? Why will their readers care? While the class proved adept at identifying the who, what and why of a news story, they struggled a bit with the concept of “so what?” Part of the problem, I suspect, was my decision to use a colloquial English expression to explain an amorphous idea. Indeed, after trying to explain it to one student for 10 minutes, her eyes lit with recognition and she said:
“Oh. You mean ‘the hook’ for my story.” Turns out these kids know more than I thought.

While I am impressed with my students’ abilities, they seem unsure about mine. At the start of class, I gave them a 30-second description of my career. But this was not enough for one student, who took time to grill me about my credentials after class. What kinds of stories had I covered? How big was the newspaper where I worked? Am I married?
In an effort to reassure my students, I told them I had covered a number of big stories, including the election of Canada’s Prime Minister.

“You covered the Prime Minister’s erection?” the student responded, speaking with the traditional Rwandan habit of exchanging the “L” and “R” in English.

This seemed like a strong enough credential for him.