In class

Communication is definitely an issue.  When the change from French to English has been in place long enough that students arrive at the university with many years of English study behind them, it will be much easier, but the current students have only been studying English for a few years.  In addition, the English of instruction comes with a wide variety of accents:  Russian, Indian, Korean among others, and my American accent is difficult for them to understand.  Part of my solution is speaking slowly and writing everything I say on the board, but that is an incomplete solution.

In today's class, I went over some problems of the type "Is this function a solution to the given differential equations?"  Each had a yes or no answer, so to break the ice, I answered on Kinyarwanda:  Yego or Oya.  The class loved this.  Later in class I asked a question and a student came to the board to answer; I asked him to explain his response to the class, and that he could use whatever language he chose, so he chose Kinyarwanda.  The class was very attentive and also participated in the solution - this was a very good part of the class.

At the end of class they taught me a new word in Kinyarwanda:  "nahabutaha"   which means "see you later".  And now I must do my homework and learn it.