Today, we started to organise the workshops and the key engineering disciplines that we want to showcase at our school visits. The girls were split up according to their discipline and tasked with creating engaging workshops that we could take out to schools with us. The disciplines are;

Civil Engineering and Architecture

Mechanical Engineering

Biomedical Engineering and Science

Electrical Engineering

Aeronautical Engineering

Mining engineering

Our Aeronautical girls teamed up with the Electrical engineering students from the University of Rwanda as Aeronautical is not currently offered, however, many students enrolled in Mechanical engineering are keen to go into the Aeronautical sector after graduating. It was great to see the girls working together to come up with ideas for the workshops and testing the equipment that we had brought over with us – courtesy of ESPRC Circuits Team and STAR Refrigeration. Things are now coming together as the team prepare posters and gather equipment to take out to schools in the next week.

It was a later start for the girls as we got our bearings and headed down for breakfast to meet the full Rwanda Team for the first time.  Full of chapatti and African tea, all team members headed up to the university where we would be working over the next week to come up with the workshops. To start things off, we played some fun icebreaker games and got to learn more about each other and the Rwandan culture. Some of the more competitive games were made up by the Rwandan High School graduates that saw some team bonding over an intense game of snap. It was exciting to start seeing the team come together and get to know the girls that we would be working with over the month.

 

We have arrived in Rwanda! After a 4am start and over 12 hours of traveling, and despite some puzzled looks from fellow passengers due to our unconventional piece of hand luggage – courtesy of the EPSRC Circuits Team –  our girls made to Kigali and were greeted by some of the Rwanda team around 9pm.

The team, exhausted but excited nonetheless, headed back to the hostel to see where they would be staying for the month and the girls got to meet our beloved bus driver, Gratien, who has been with FemEng in Rwanda since the first trip in 2016.