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If you are looking for a good Kinyarwanda dictionary, you might find the following links useful.

http://www.freelang.net/online/kinyarwanda.php

http://morganinafrica.blogspot.com/2006/02/rwandan-dictionary-kinyarwanda-english.html

THERE is a Kinyarwanda word that means a lot of things depending on the context. That word is itorero. For a Kinyarwanda 101 student like me, I always knew that it meant church. That was until recently, when I got to know that it also meant the traditional school of yore. I stand to be corrected.

Throughout Africa, and perhaps much of the world, the traditional school was used to pass on vital life skills to the young ones of the community. Whether it was the traditional schools of the Akan in Ghana or elsewhere, children were equipped with the basics of agriculture, the history of the tribe and the particular trade of the father.

However, there was also something else in which the traditional school excelled over our modern educational school. It was the whole concept of mentoring. In addition to the basic necessities, and love, a child needs a mentor. A mentor can be described as a significantly older person who takes an interest in a learner, and is ever ready to pass on his life’s experiences to the learner.

In the traditional schools of Africa, the mentors were ever present. In the village set-up, a child could easily learn from a wide array of same-sex relatives including his father or mother, grandparents, uncles and aunties.

Owing to the changes wrought on the African continent over the last half a century, this system of mentoring has widely collapsed, especially in the urban areas. Due to distance and time constraints many children are growing up without an effective mentoring program. At best it tends to be haphazard, with a little coming from parents, teachers, the clergy and others. Yet, for all the subjects learnt in the classroom, there is need for the passing on of other life’s experiences be it in the family, work and the community.

The modern young African is left in a canyon. It is unlikely that he would be able to go back to the days of ancient Africa. It is a world that he would not fit in much less understand. Neither is he completely in the post-Enlightenment reality that characterizes Western thought. So what is a young African going to do?

It is in this area that the opportunity lies. Thanks to mass communication today’s young person has access to millions of people from around the world, each with their own unique experience. Human endeavour has opened up so many fields of learning.

The world today is like a supermarket of ideas and experiences. It is from this rich resource that a young person can find suitable mentors. You need not restrict yourself to just one. It is often possible to find an array of them, each with something different that can point you in the right direction.

Unlike our forbearers who hardly ventured out of the village, we are a generation that is bound to be highly mobile. We will have a wider range of experiences and a higher number of options. To successfully navigate through all these options, we will need access to a greater range of mentors, who have specialized in one area or another. So how will we do it?

We will have to read as many autobiographies as possible. It is not always that an autobiographical narrative is honest. It is human to want to embellish our lives. However, occasionally one comes across honest accounts in which authors share with readers their highs and lows. These are the books to read.

We will have to look for role models on whom we can shape our values. Some of these role models will not always be the leading lights, but it could be people who by their drive, competence or common touch inspire others to be better human beings. One would also be careful on what to pick from whichever mentor you choose.

It becomes necessary to do so since your mentor may not always be a role model in every area of life.

So as you study, look out for people that you would like to become. That will help frame whatever it is that you would like to become. Learn from their successes and their failures, and keep moving on the road of life.

WHILE growing up, I remember an insurance commercial that was often aired on the local TV station. The commercial showed a group of children who each had goals for their future. As would be expected, the usual roll was called out. The roll that included doctor, engineer, pilot and as the commercial wound down it featured the punchline of one boy who wanted to be like his father.

In that commercial I never heard once the phrase that one of the children would have wanted to be an entrepreneur. Many a time, becoming an entrepreneur is often thought as a profession of last resort; something that you do when all else has failed.

To be sure, entrepreneurship is never for the fainthearted. But then again, faint hearts never won a fair lady. Many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs had to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. It is ever so much easier to sit and wait for a job to come knocking at our doors.

It is in times like this that I remember something that was said by General Colin Powell. In his famous presentation, 18 Rules of Command he said that as a leader one has to keep looking below surface appearances, that one should never accept the attitude that if it ain’t broke then there is no need to fix it.

In today’s world, with the rate of change being faster than ever before, it is likely that sooner or later our jobs are going to become obsolete. So, what is one to do in the face of these trends?

It is easy to say that what one needs is to acquire more education, to enrol in night school so as to retain the competitive edge. However when one looks at data on the kind of people who have been affected by company lay-offs, it reveals a slightly different perception. It turns out that even those with very high qualifications are also losing their jobs. For too long, college degrees have been seen as security in a changing job market. It now turns out that they are no longer what they were once cut out to be. One town in the good ol’ USA has been laying off its MBAs and advertising for more truck drivers.

So what is someone in school supposed to make out of all of this? Does it mean that it no longer matters whether one studies or not? Not really.

Why? Well here is an example. In the more arid plains of Africa, there is to be found a very adaptive animal called the gerenuk. The gerenuk lives in areas that a lot of other animals would find quite inhospitable. One would imagine that it would have an insatiable thirst. However the gerenuk has been able to adapt to such harsh areas. Rather than look for water, it has developed the amazing capacity to extract water from the leaves of trees. In the wilds of Africa, there is little opportunity for the conventional eight glasses. Still the gerenuk is able to while away the days of its life in these harsh and inhospitable areas.

Recent global economic data does show that the international financial system is threatened with collapse. Countries in Europe such as
Iceland and Ireland have had to put in place strong measures to save their banking systems. The United States has basically nationalized major banks in everything but name, ditto the United Kingdom. So what will that mean for us in Africa?

It would mean that we will see decreased revenues from our traditional export commodities. That may mean that we will also have to deal with more company lay-offs, or pay cuts. So, the emphasis now should be on equipping students with the entrepreneurship mentality to avoid future handicaps. To extend the metaphor, it will mean that rather than wait for water to come in the form of eight glasses, we should also be prepared to extract it from leaves, a la the gerenuk!

By the time a child sits for his basic education certificate he should be equipped with the skills needed to start and run his own business, or at least employ himself. Albert Einstein was right when he said, that in the midst of difficulty lies opportunity. Since the difficulties are about to reach our soil, it is time to prepare the future of Rwanda for these emerging difficulties.

WHAT would you give up in your quest for a better life? What perils, what travails would you suffer to attain your dreams?

Every time we come across someone who has achieved something against all odds, we feel inspired. We wish sometimes that we could have the same inner strength that would see us through any adversity. It could be the frail but winning smile that came from terminally ill Nkosi Johnson in South Africa. Or, it might be from the millions of anonymous citizens of this country who have heroically rebuilt their lives over the last fifteen years.

Some years ago, CNN journalist Jonathan Mann produced a series showing the hazards that prospective immigrants to Europe have to go through, in their bid to achieve a better life. The series followed a group of four Nigerians who were intent on getting into Europe.

For this particular group, the series followed them from their village in Nigeria. The next stop was to go through the Sahara and the Sahel, a trip that would take them through Burkina Faso and Mali. After a trip across the deserts of about 3,000 kilometres they ended up in Tangier, Morocco. On the northernmost tip of Africa, separated from Europe by only 30 kilometres, they planned and executed a daring entry into Spain. It was daring because every day, bodies of Africans wash up on Spanish shores. Bodies that speak silently but solemnly of those who never made it. It is a story that is repeated every day, be it in Tangier, Morocco, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico or Beitsbridge, South Africa.

Immigration is a hot potato the world over. It is even too hot handle in this article, so I will not discuss it. I bring it up because for all the perils that stand in the way of would be immigrants, for all the hazards that they confront, there is one thing that stands about them – their determination to live a better life, their quest for something better than what they have previously known.

All of these fetes, large and small would not have been possible without the requisite determination to overcome. It is that iron will determination that counts in life, and there is no better place to learn it in this day and age than in school.

Students often complain that they cannot see the practical value of everything that they learn in school. It is a charge that many teachers are often hard put to explain away. But does the fact that you cannot see where you will apply integral calculus after school, mean that you should not bother with it? Most of us will never go to the moon, so why learn about Kepler’s Laws of interplanetary motion? Through the eyes of a student, it can all look like a lot of striving after wind.

The purpose of a good education is not to fill the mind with an impressive array of facts and figures. They would be pretty much useless if you don’t do anything with them.

The purpose of learning is to develop vital skills that you would need in life. In addition to language skills, it is also important to have numeric skills, knowledge of history and other subjects. But the overriding skill that a good student should develop is the ability to know how to look for knowledge, how to find answers to whatever subject matter is at hand. These skills take time to develop. They require patience and determination. Very often such skills are especially honed when studying harder concepts.

School also teaches us self-discipline. Many of us do not remember the-waking-up-at-five routine with fond memories. Many times, we wished that it was different. But then we also remember those who quit, those who gave up, and we thank that strict parent or that stern schoolmaster who egged us on. But more often than not we fail to recognize the determination that we summoned to see us through to graduation. For the same determination is what has helped you achieve all other goals in your life.

It reminds me of an illustration that was given to us by a deputy principal once. He gave us the example of a warthog. Now, everything has been said about a warthog’s aesthetic appeal. But here is an amusing anecdote about this creature. Many times it shares water holes with lions, crocodiles and other predators. Its life is constantly in danger. So what is a warthog to do? It usually does a quick about-face and gets into the water from the rear, the doing of which enables it to drink and face any predator with its deadly tusks! With those twin objectives accomplished it can then trot into its foxhole.

So like those who brave the Sahara in their quest for a better life, or like the lowly warthog, as a student you should be determined to succeed at whatever you undertake. By doing that you will learn how to set goals and achieve them, a quality that separates the winners from the losers in life.

TODAY’s article begins with a word that you may never have heard of: aliteracy. It is a word that even the version of Microsoft Word that I am using does not recognize. It simply means “the quality or state of being able to read but [being] uninterested in doing so.” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition).

It is a trite reminder, if you have gone through the school system, that you need to read “very hard” to pass your examinations. It has been so since the beginning of formal schooling. The trouble is that soon reading becomes associated with examinations. So, it follows, that if there are no examinations then one should not read. That tends to define the implied lifestyle of many people after school. Reading has been made to look like a chore.

That we also have attention-grabbing media such as the television does not help much either. Estimates indicate that you will spend years in front of the television over the course of a lifetime.

It was the custom back where I lived for primary school leavers to burn all their books immediately after national examinations. To them, it tended to be mostly a symbolic act. It symbolized that the person had now been set free from the yoke of having to read so hard. It soon became evident that such an attitude led to poorer performance in high school. By the time someone is through with the schooling system, any little love of reading has been completely destroyed. That is why I would like to talk about aliteracy.

Like French philosopher René Descartes once observed, when we take a book to read it is like ‘having a conversation with men of good breeding.’ In our emerging information age, it requires us to wade through tons and tomes of reading material. Often, all this reading can leave us mentally tired, with little energy to engage with any men of good breeding. Then again like English philosopher Francis Bacon, some books are to be chewed and digested, which can take up an awfully long time!

Still there are good reasons for developing a love of reading. Reading improves our abilities in three ways.

One, reading stimulates the imagination. It is popular to have television drama series based on novels. It has always occurred to me that when I read the novel, then watch the television production, my mind is always engaged in some sort of comparison. Why do I say that? As I read the novel, my mind conjures up scenes based on my experiences, and so as I watch I am always looking for confirmation of what I conceived. That can do wonders for anyone’s critical thinking skills.

Secondly, reading develops verbal skills. It has been observed that sharp, articulate users of any language also tend to be very good readers. If therefore you want to grow your English vocabulary, then there are no shortcuts. And I might perhaps add that television is a very poor substitute for improving verbal skills.

Reading promotes patience. When watching television, hundreds of images flash across the screen in an instant. All of these images leave the viewer with no time to reflect on what he is watching. This contributes to developing a short attention span. Interestingly, this creates the same effects both in children and adults, the major effect being impulsiveness in decision making. Reading on the other hand requires patience. It is not always that information on a page flows in an intuitive manner. Reading requires that the reader handle a variety of mental decoding processes at the same time. So if you want your mind to atrophy, then don’t read anything at all!

This week I have just finished reading The Audacity of Hope, a book written by the sitting US President. It is a book in which the author shares with us his values, his love for his country, and his experiences in politics, especially at state level. He develops his views on these and other subjects notably faith, race and religion. It becomes clear, especially as he develops his views on the roles of the US, that this is one man who knows the history of his country very well. Maybe it comes from his background as a law professor. It is an interesting read, it helps you strip away all the hype to understand what Barack Obama really believes in.

The point being, that as you read, you might begin to see things from a completely different viewpoint. It perhaps becomes a much more educated viewpoint that does two things. First, it broadens your understanding of issues, it opens you up to new choices never considered, even within your own community. Second, based on the quality, it might just teach you something that will stand the test of time.

So, go on, form a book club today and hopefully like Descartes said, begin to associate with men of good breeding.

While studying Arabic at the university, our lecturer chose to share with us a few Arabic proverbs. One of the most memorable went something like Al-Wakti sayaf. I remember it because he repeated often. In English, that proverb means that time is like a sword. The rest of the proverb continues by saying that, if you don’t handle it carefully, it will cut you.

The imagery of this saying may be severe, but the point it illustrates is clear – that for you to make a success of anything in life, you have to manage time effectively. Nowhere is the need to do this more pronounced than in the academic environment, especially when preparing for examinations.

Unlike the traditional African school whose lessons were inculcated over a lifetime, formal schooling is predicated on passing a lot of skills and knowledge within a very limited time. Therein lies the challenge for students, young and mature alike.

It would probably help if we looked to the man who is considered the Grandfather of Modern Education, John Amos Comenius who lived in the 17^th century in what is now the Czech Republic. One of the principles he espoused on successful learning was that

“ we should read a thing once to find out what it contains; a second time, to understand it; a third time, to imprint it on our memory; the fourth time we should repeat it silently to test ourselves whether we have firmly mastered it.”

If you noticed, Comenius advocates for learning in small incremental steps. This enables concepts to be mastered slowly over time. But the question may arise, if I have so many other competing demands on my time, how can I make a success of my studying?

It has often been observed that if you want something done well, give it to a busy person. That may sound like a paradox. Your being busy is not an excuse for inaction; instead it is a call to arms. Busy people are aware that their time is limited, hence the need to prioritize. A key to prioritizing well is to begin a task with the end in mind.

The end of most education today is to pass examinations, such as are provided by the RNEC. Most students’ thoughts end at that, along with the satisfaction of seeing good results, considered to be the ticket to a dream life. However, that goal is a limited one.

To explain why I say so, let me borrow another quote from Comenius. He says,

“To understand anything is largely a matter of perceiving why and how that thing in any one of its parts is related to something else and how and to what extent it differs from other things that are similar to it.”

Let us digest that statement. The objective of a good education is to open the mind, to discover new horizons and to perceive interconnections. We differentiate into subjects so as to manage the enormous amount of information available. But to paraphrase Albert Einstein, we should “ integrate empirically.”

If our education is done with this objective, then we will turn studying and preparing for examinations from being a necessary evil into a pleasurable task. It will stop being about rote memorizing, or what is called ‘cramming’.

Cramming is good for passing examinations, but it does not develop an educated mind. To enable an educated mind, we will need to set strategies on doing a little learning every day from the first day of the term. Each day, will be a day to do some little reading. By exam time, the concepts that we need to learn will have become so firmly embedded in our minds that we will only need to do a little revision. As we study our goal will be developing thinking and analytical abilities. We will also want to see how the parts of all that we are learning relate to the whole. That is what it means to integrate empirically.

That ability to integrate information is what will save you in the examination room. For no matter how hard you have studied, there will always be questions that you did not expect, or that require deductive reasoning. Questions that require you to do more than just regurgitate information gleaned from textbooks.

So dear student, it is still in the early in the school year. Start learning a little at a time this evening, and do the same thing tomorrow evening. When the exams come later this year, you will find that your load is a little lighter, and the examinations less scary. Let me end this article with another saying than the one I started with, time is a good slave but a bad master.

THIS week’s article is dedicated to all those who have just finished high school.

A couple of years ago, I received a thought provoking e-mail from a friend, who thought I needed it more than he did. It was a copy of a speech that was given by Steve Jobs to the graduating class at Stanford University. Before I go into what it was all about, here are a few quick definitions. Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc., the company that produced those lovely iPods that you like. Stanford University is a prestigious university in the United States.

Usually after finishing high school, students tend to heave a sigh of relief. The promise of not having to study so hard for a while, is always very attractive. However, after a few months that life becomes rather boring, and students are suddenly faced with a question that is exciting and at the same time frightening. The question is, what will I do with my life? It is a question that many adults complete a whole life without ever answering to their satisfaction. American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once observed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

That is why I want to talk about what Steve Jobs told that graduating class. He built his entire speech around three main points. One, he talked about being able to join the dots. Two, he talked about love and loss and finally he concluded his speech with the reality of death.

At the age of 17, Steve Jobs dropped out of college. To many that would have seemed to be a foolish thing to do. His parents had worked hard and saved some money that would put him through college. Half way through the first year, he discovered that he had no interest in the course that took him to college in the first place. So, he instead enrolled for a calligraphy course. In his words “ it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

At the time, none of what he had learnt in the calligraphy course seemed practical but he took the course anyway. However, ten years later as they were designing the first Macintosh computer, what he had learnt in that course came back. As a result, Macintosh was the first computer with beautiful typography. He could never have understood it all at the age of 17.

The second story was about love and loss. When Steve Jobs was 20, he started Apple Inc. with a friend. They worked from their parents’ garage and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of them in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. At the height of his success, he lost his job due to corporate politics. He says it was very painful and embarrassing.

At that low point in his life, he felt like doing only what is so natural to a dejected human being, and that was to run away from the Silicon Valley. He chose not to run, but to start all over again. It so happened that his being fired from his job, was a blessing disguised. He says that it opened up one of the most creative periods in his life. Finally, Apple Inc. invited him back.

Finally, he talked about death. In 2004, he was diagnosed with cancer. The doctor’s prognosis was rather grim. But he survived to tell the tale.

My précis does no justice to what was a thought provoking speech. I would only ask you to look for it and read it. But here are a few points that I learnt. One, as a young person you have to look forward to the future, by joining the dots from the past. Where you excel, may perhaps not be the most lucrative, or prestigious, but it is the thing that would make you wake up every day and look forward to work with enthusiasm, with passion.

Sometimes, you may have to try a few things first before you hit on one that you would like to stick to. And once you have found it, keep the faith that it will succeed. For that faith is what would anchor you even when the sky is falling over your head.

The second lesson is that even when you succeed, life may sometimes hit you with a brick in the face. If that happens, don’t despair. Mourn if you have to but be willing to start over again. It may be that the best was still yet to come.

The third lesson has to do with being able to confront your own mortality. None of us is comfortable with the fact that one day we will not exist any more. A common advice, often misapplied is that you should live each day as though it will be your last. One of these days, you will be right. It will be your last day. That thought will always enable you determine what is truly important in life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Find what you love.

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