The children she teaches call her teacher while the community where she stays knows her as Mama Kelly. However, her real name is Epaphrodite Uwingabiye.

For her, the year 2010 remains the darkest period in her life. This is the year the cruel hand of death robbed her of her beloved husband, and for a period of three years, she was in perpetual grief.

"I was just still a young mother at only 30 years, and for death to visit and rob me of my husband at that age really struck at the core of my heart. I felt that life had no more meaning to me. I felt lost,” she tells me as I sit down to interview her for this story.

But just some moments back, as I walked around Sahara slums in Kimihurura on my way to her house, something hit me. Going past the shops that are scattered around this slum, I saw a group of young, idle school-going children in front of them huddled around another group of idle adults, doing nothing but playing cards and draft. I thought that these children had nothing to do there since they should have been somewhere in their respective homes, doing their homework, perhaps.

Letting tears dry

And that was what Uwingabiye saw last year, after that dark period of mourning her husband had passed. "I woke up one day and said that I would not mourn for the rest of my life. I had to wake up from my grief and start a new life. After all, he was gone, and no amount of tears would bring him back.”

Having made that decision of letting her desolation go, Uwingabiye thought hard about what she wanted to do with her life. "I realised that God has plans for everybody and having seen me through my darkest period, it was the time to pay back for the strength He had bestowed on me to endure my travails. It was just a matter of thinking hard how I would do it.”

Uwingabiye says she didn’t have that passion to be a teacher when she was growing up in Muganza village, Kamonye District.

"All along when I was still a student, my ambition was to be a nurse. Growing up, I saw how people were suffering from various ailments in the village and I used to tell myself that when I finished school, I would enroll in to a nursing college and become a nurse. That was my burning ambition when growing up.”

But the gods had charted a different course for her. When she finished her secondary school at Remera-Lukoma at the level of senior six, she went searching for work in Kirehe District and the first job she landed was as a teacher in a local private primary school. She says that from that moment on, the teaching bug bit her and she has never thought of dropping the chalk again.

New passion

Today, like the proverbial phoenix, she’s risen from the ashes and found a new passion that, as she says, has partly helped her obliterate the memory of her husband that from that moment he breathed his last under her arms had stubbornly refused to go away. She has embarked on a mission to educate slum children every evening at her one roomed house in Sahara slums.

Each evening when the children come from school, they troop to her house, where from 5p.m in the evening till 8p.m, she sits down with them and for those three hours, she will be busy not only teaching them new concept but also revising with them what they didn’t understand during the normal lessons in their respective schools.

"I realized that majority of parents here in the slums are too busy searching for what their family would eat that they push the education needs of their children in the back-burner. But to put it more succinctly, most of them are not educated therefore, they cannot help their children even with their homework,” she says.

Birth of passion

But what made her have this deep passion to start inviting the children to come to her house where she would be with them for those hours? I ask her. Uwingabiye says that when she came into this slum early last year, she saw that the children had nothing to do in the evenings after they had come back from school but just to loiter along the roads aimlessly. Some of them would be seen just watching adults playing cards and drafts, something they were also becoming hooked to.

"I had to tap their shoulders and invite them to my house so that we could do something productive. Some of them I’m now taking care of were more than willing to be part of this evening educational program.”

She adds that she didn’t meet any kind of resistance from their parents. "Being the only teacher from this slum, the parents were excited to hand over their children to me. As time went by, more and more came. I now take care of some 15 children and more are still coming.”

Visiting Uwingabiye’s room deep inside the slum was an eye-opening experience. A group of 15 children, aged between six and fifteen were huddled around her, as she taught them English, something she says she has discovered is wanting here in Rwanda since a number of teachers don’t have a strong background in the language.

"I’m lucky that I had a strong background in English in my secondary school. After that, I was taught English by a team of volunteers from the VSO, and they facilitated me to go to England four ago. However, the problem with English instruction here is that many teachers have no strong background in the language.”

She adds that her trip to London also opened her eyes to so many things. "It was a humbling experience, seeing the huge disparity about the rudimentary way we taught in class then here and the highly technological way they did in England,” she says. "I had to experiment with what I experienced there.”

But how? I ask her. "I realized that there was a maternal way you can engage your pupils without an intimidating environment, that there are several ways you can engage them when you want them to understand a concept. That’s what I’m practicing with them here. I want them to draw, to write stories, to read anything. We normally do storytelling. I want them to take education not as a torture but as a fun.” On her four walls are some of the drawings from the children, and they look stunningly beautiful.

A teacher at Ecole Internationale de Kigali, a private school in Kimihurura where she teaches English, Math and sciences, Uwingabiye says that even though she has never attended a teacher training college, but which she plans to join this October because she has saved some money to enable her take enroll to Kigali College of Education, what’s important is the heart and passion a person has for what he or she’s doing.

"My passion is to teach young children. It doesn’t matter whether I have PhD or not. What matters is the heart that you’ve for something you are doing.”

Parents happy

Theophile Nkurunziza, one of the parents of the children Uwingabiye teaches is full of praise for her. "She’s has made a big difference to the children. We have seen some marked improvement ever since she started taking care of them. They are now busy in the evenings and we really appreciate her selfless and concerted efforts.”

"Absolutely, a blessing to us,” adds another parent, Julian Hitimana. "Even though we give her nothing for taking care of our children, we normally pray for her to continue having the strength to help our children. The teacher is such a blessing to this poor community.”

Uwingabiye’s typical day

Selfless indeed! Uwingabiye day starts very early in the morning where she walks to her school in Kimihurura and comes back in the evening. After one hour or so, the pupils start streaming in, and whether she had a tiring day or not, she will collect herself and be ready for them.

I ask her about her children. "The two of them are at home with my parents. When I’m with these children, my heart also feels close to my own children. They fill the void that my own children’s absence around me has left.”

But not only that: "They have given me an opportunity to forget about the past, about the grim reaper that robbed me of someone I loved and cherished in my heart. I feel alive again when at the end of the day, I feel that I have done something to change a person’s life, even if they are still young and growing children, it’s just that strong cathartic effect I feel inside me,” she concludes.