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Teachers in Rwanda Unable to Follow Switch to English
At the Kacyiru 1 primary school, it's not the pupils chanting 'this is my ear, this is my hair' and pointing to the board as they learn rudimentary English.
It's the teachers.
They've been sent back to school as part of a Rwandan government drive to switch to English instead of French as the routine language of instruction for the nation's schoolchildren.
That's no easy task for teachers brought up speaking French in this former Belgian colony. They now find themselves having to brush up their English, or in many cases learn it from scratch.
Often they struggle to keep pace with their own pupils, Education Minister Charles Murigande admitted in a recent interview.
"It's not the children you should be feeling sorry for, they are picking it up quickly," he said. "It's the teachers who are having difficulties."
Critics say the switch to English in education has been rushed through and was politically motivated, but Murigande said it was "a logical choice" given where Rwandans do business -- he cited Dubai, Malaysia, China and Japan.
Such a change would be a challenge for any country, but it is particularly difficult for Rwanda, which had virtually to start from scratch after the 1994 genocide.
Many teachers were among the dead when 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, were slaughtered in an orgy of bloodletting in the central African nation.
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