My own furrow

From above the falls, we could see the line of trucks waiting to enter Rwanda from Tanzania. There is no railway so everything comes in like this.


Dorothy is putting a base layer of seed pods and twigs into her new compost pit.

Weds 21 October, 6.30am
Lonely? Isolated? Unsupported? No, those are all too strong. Yet mine is for the moment a project with only one worker. From Sunday to Tuesday I’ve had a brief experience of a different way of being 'muzungu' (rich white) and working not for profit in Rwanda.

Through a mutual friend, I’ve been in touch with Dorothy, a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteer working as a primary schools adviser in Kirehe District, in the south east. She has a small house, rented by VSO for her predecessor and kept on for her, in a small town on the main road to the Tanzanian border. She met me off the bus, walked me a couple of hundred yards to home, and there were two more VSO’s, one from Quebec and one from south west Ireland. Christine from Quebec is living with Dorothy until her own house in a nearby village is habitable. Karen was visiting from a different province.

An expedition to the Rusumo Falls, on the Akagere River which forms the national border, had been arranged with yet another VSO from a bigger town some 20 kilometers towards Kigali. In the event the two younger women didn’t come because one had been ill overnight; Dorothy and I had a good walk – my first – and met up for lunch with Jason, English, an enraptured amateur ornithologist on his second placement after 2 years in Eritrea. Evidence of colleagues, contracts, in-country training, health and safety advice, water filters and motor cycle helmets…. Up till now I had chatted for a few minutes after church with some American Friends Church missionaries, arranged a useful meeting with a Canadian Mennonite couple attached to Friends Peace House as capacity builders, and had good contact with Dave Zarembka, AGLI co-ordinator, whose visit to projects in the region happened to coincide with my being here. (I did see a surprisingly large number of white people on Saturday, shopping in the Europeanised mini-market where Antoine took me to buy the food for the meal I cooked, but I have no idea what any of them are doing in Rwanda.)

Experiencing Dorothy’s wide circle of contacts emphasised my cocooning. She employs a ‘domestique’; she shopped for breakfast each morning (and chose what to have for breakfast each morning!); she uses a particular moto taxi driver several times a week to get to different schools, and on Tuesday morning he brought two colleagues so three of us could go together; she has to get the solar panel engineer to return because the system bleeps loudly in the night; she is glad to use the services of a couple of young ‘Mr Fixit’s for finding people to do various jobs and negotiating the price. On Monday morning she started to dig a small compost pit in her garden to my recommended pattern. Immediately her neighbour landlord came to see what was going on, and he and the domestique had to be reassured this was a modern project for gardening, not a bad old-fashioned rubbish pit. (In Kinyarwanda the same word is ordinarily used for rubbish and compost – which illustrates the difficulty of teaching different habits.)

In some ways my life is much easier. And of course being here only for short periods makes a big difference. I probably work more intensively than she does. I couldn’t run my own household without much more training and back up. I would have to learn to speak Kinyarwanda beyond my few polite phrases and isolated words. I made a clear decision not to be a VSO again, as I was in 1965-6 in Singapore, and I’m not regretting it. Still, it was a thought-provoking visit.

Now I’m about to be summoned to a quick breakfast with Antoine before he sets off for school and David B collects me for the first of two days at Bihembe, wherever that may be. More later, perhaps, about being an adult baby, or maybe a cultural orphan.