In Kamembe

Written on Monday evening 15 Feb

A new bedroom, a new set of plusses and minuses.

The plusses: an electric socket in the bedroom and another in the bathroom, both working (except during power cuts), so I can charge both laptop and camera batteries; a light strong enough to read by (and they moved me from the room down the corridor where the light only stayed on if you kept pulling the switch cord); two pillows (I brought the second one from the abandoned room); a couple of hours to myself before it's time to sleep. The big minus: the water tub is empty, the tap is dry and it's raining far too heavily to negotiate the steps and courtyards btween here and reception. I have drinking water so I can clean my teeth – washing and flushing must wait.

Most of today has been spent on the bus between Kigali and Cyangugu, in the south west corner of the country, with DRC on the other side of the river outlet from Lake Kivu. Antoine, who is now superintendent of the 4 Friends Schools, has brought me and made the introductions. We shall breakfast and sup together but otherwise go our separate ways. I have met my two organisers – one from the church to accompany me and translate for the two women's groups in the mornings – Tues-Weds and Thurs-Fri – and the head from the school who is drafting 8 teachers – preferably of science subjects – for afternoon sessions on Tues and Weds. Photocopies have been made of Anne's sheet on childhood diarrhoea, which was very well reeived last time at CGFK. Tertullian, my translator, has taken the bag garden diagramme overnight to make sure he can assemble all the materials I shall need.

And we've done the budget – quite an achievement. Josephine, the Freinds Peace House accountant, has given Antoine a bundle of cash but it turns out to be less than we need. It will be the middle of next week before I can see J to sort out the discrepancy. Meanwhile we make the best of what we have. Arrangements for mid morning snacks and lunches have not been made. We consider using the services of the restaurant at the hotel but by the time we've added in extra for transporting the food and considered the mediocre quality of our supper it's decided to use the school kitchen, with the added benefit that there will be fruit with lunch. That's all for Tues and Weds; on Thurs and Friday the women's group is at an outlying church and they will provide the lunch themselves (so the cash will have to be got to them to buy ingredients).

I have fetched pen and paper. Writing and counting in a mixture of French and English, handling input from 5 voluble men, and still getting confused over the number of zeros on everything (1,000 Rwandan francs is just over £1), I do a less than perfect job, though the discrepancy that needs sorting out is under £5. Antoine's bundle contributes 145,000 rwf; I add 23,000 from my personal money, to be squared with Josephine later. My hotel room is ridiculously cheap by Kigali standards, at 5,000 rwf per night. The programme budget is not going to be over-stretched.

It's still raining. I shall clean my teeth, spread the mosquito net, and relax with a book of short stories by Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest the blurb tells me, borrowed from Ruth and Krystan, the Canadians to whom I bequeath my spare books.



The view over Lake Kivu to DRC from outside our lodging

After my own heart

Written and posted on Sunday 14th

The wife of the newly appointed pastor in Byumba, Yvette Marcelline, is the star of the class from October. It is to their garden that we repaired on Thursday and Friday to construct a keyhole garden. When I asked for compost it came – and nearly free of rubish. As we heaped the soil round the central basket Francois-Xavier, the pastor (and HROC facilitator) suggested cow manure, and that too arrived by the bagful. 'That could be enough', I suggested after 4 or 5 bags had been emptied. 'We have plenty,' he said.

Would they show me where the manure was coming from? They led me round the back of the outhouse, through a low gateway where we had to duck, and onto a small area of compost heaps - turned and new; manure heaps and a pool of black liquid; 3 storey planting of beans, cassava and fruit trees; senna branches with pods, to keep the cows healthy; a glorious view of the hills beyond. Then to the cowshed. Was that a native breed? No, she's a jersey, and we have 3 more out at pasture. (It was her slim build that misled me.) As we completed the circuit F-X showed me the wood stove with a chimney vent to protect the cook from smoke inhalation, and then his newest pride and joy – an avocado plant about a foot high, twice grafted, from which he hopes to get 3 varieties.

When I was doing VSO in Singapore in the mid 60s, travelling between school terms to Borneo, Thailand and Cambodia, I found myself frequently taking pictures of plants and cultivation to send home for my father. (The slides have faded badly: how will today's digital records fare?) In his childhood in Edwardian London he knew hunger. It was from him that I learnt about grafting fruit trees – not something I've yet tried for myself. Is it from his influence that I am doing this work now, encouraging sustainable cultivation and better nutrition? I'm certainly no expert. I wish I could find the way to recruit some volunteers withbettr knowledge and training. Meanwhile I offer what I can; I genuinely protest that there is much my Rwandan students understand far bettter than I do about their soil, their climate, their plant varieties. It was not a reasoned decision that brought me here: I am following a path with heart.

[pics to follow]

After the break

After the break, back to work with a vengeance.

It's now Thursday evening, 11 Feb, and I'm in the Anglican guest house in Byumba, chosen in preference to going back to Kigali by bus this evening and out again tomorrow morning, an hour and a half's ride each time. The evening meal is billed to start at 7.30 but it's now 7.55 and the dishes are not yet being lined up for the buffet service. Fortunately I can see from my room so I don't have to keep going to look.

This morning was the start of my fourth group in as many days. On Monday and Tuesday mornings I constructed a keyhole garden with the workers (ground staff) from CGFK, working in French with Antoine as my translator; in the afternoons I worked with a group of 8 CGFK teachers in English, discussing nutrition and development; yesterday I had a day with 15 women from Kagarama who had worked with me before but not all in the same group, with good English translation from Joyce, whom I first met two years ago; today it was pretty much the same group of 15 at Byumba as in October, but working in French not English. (Bonheur is in South Africa. My translator here is Eugene, who was the pastor here in October but has now gone to take charge of all the training work at Friends Peace House in Kigali: he is stopped every few yards in the street by people wanting to greet him.)

Keyhole gardens - so called because the footprint is like an old-fashioned keyhole, with a pathway to a circular compost basket in the centre - are fairly common here. I've seen some very productive ones, and some that look OK from a distance but are missing either the enriched soil or the essential central compost basket. I'm told the government is promoting their construction and that people avoid possible trouble by constructing something that looks right even if the principles have not been grasped.

At CGFK you might say we were denying the essential principle by putting our construction in an already productive vegetable patch, but I told the group they were learning the technique so they could apply it elsewhere. Similarly today in Byumba we worked in an already well-tended garden, with a good collection of sacks established since October. But I don't have time to coax a group to assemble materials and make progress in a difficult location, and people are constantly assuring me that what I teach is passed on. All I can do is trust.



Caption 1: the CGFK workers begin to heap soil round the compost basket.



At 8.25 the young man from reception knocks on my door. 'The meal is ready now.' 'Thank you but I've decided not to eat this evening.' (Fortunately I was not able to pay in advance because there was no change.) Really I don't need another meal and I could do with the sleep. I do hope breakfast is ready in the morning early enough for me to get some before leaving for an 8 am start.


Caption 2: I demonstrate how to strengthen the basket with string. Behind us is the productive garden, with local greens I have yet to identify.

[CGFK is the College George Fox a Kagarama, one of 4 Friends Schools in Rwanda. Sorry, but I can't do accents. Kagarama is a suburb of Kigali, the base for the Friends Church.]

Kigali genocide memorial

Two British brothers who were profoundly moved by Yad Vashem, the genocide memorial in Jerusalem, as I had been in 1964, founded the Aegis Trust, to enable the creation of this memorial on the edge of Kigali. I knew I had to visit. The information is no longer new to me – how the Belgian colonisers fixed the previously fluid categories of Hutu and Tutsi; how having ruled through the Tutsi minority they started promoting Hutu in the last years before independence; how violence kept breaking out; how the genocide flared in April 1994 and the international community did nothing to stop it, even withdrawing UN forces after evacuating the white people...

Beginning with the outside part of the memorial, as recommended, after walking around and between the mass graves where new bodies are still being interred, I visited a series of gardens. At first I thought them simplistic but now in retrospect their simplicity creates thoughtfulness without analysis.

Inside I read every word in English, watched every video clip, looked at every photo. I wasn't hassled out into the rain at closing time but given a few extra minutes. The final section presents other genocides throughout the twentieth century in Namibia (the Herero people), Armenia, Germany, Bosnia... What is there to say? 'Never again'? If only!

Business and pleasure

Writen on Friday evening, 5 Feb


Friday morning
I spend a couple of hours at Friends Peace House. My first task is explaining what will be needed for follow-on workshops where I'm hoping the groups will construct a keyhole garden. I was delighted yesterday to see some very healthy bag gardens. (To the left: onions and kale; above: tomatoes, parsley and Rwandan spinach, all in the school and church grounds.) I am reasonably confident that what I start will be continued – a necessary condition for even short-lived success since the planting can't be done till the soil has settled for a week or two, by which time I will have moved on.

Then there is the budget negotiation. For the first time I am an active participant. In October I was present but the 'owners' of the various groups, working in Kinyarwanda which I couldn't follow, shared out the total I had brought, and when I later saw the accounts each event had cost exactly 100,000 or 150,000 Rwandan francs as budgeted, though some involved travelling and/or translation and others didn't. David has suggested using exact figures for costings this time, as is done for HROC events, which are also funded by AGLI.

This time the programme money, from UK and US donors, has already been sent by AGLI to Josephine, the Friends Peace House accountant. It is almost exactly the same amount as I brought last time. I am prepared to top it up if necessary, rather than trim my schedule, but I'd like to see the figures first.

To work, then. Yesterday David asked how many participants I thought there should be at each event. Already the phoning round has begun, alerting local organisers to how many to recruit. We establish a daily price for meals and 'tea breaks' at each location (dearer in Kigali) and arrive at an exact sum for participants' food – a major item at each event. We add my food, travel and out-of-town accommodation; communication (by phone); translators' fees, food etc; seeds. I say we don't need to provide notebooks and pens for the small amount of optional note taking. I am surprised and relieved to see the interim total is comfortably within budget, though some of the travel and accommodation costs for later weeks are not yet known. If necessary the budget will stretch to buying sacks or other materials, and paying for some photocopying. It might cover a private taxi into town for an early bus a couple of times. There is even a small contingency fund, in dollars not yet converted.

At the evaluation meeting at the end of my last visit, I asked to be more of a participant in decisions being made concerning my work. I feel pleased that has happened over the budget as well as over my schedule. Good.



We finish at noon. Regular readers will remember how much of my time and energy has been taken up on previous visits by struggles to get enough internet time. There is a new phone and internet provider in Rwanda whose prices are said to be very reasonable; I decide to buy a modem/dongle for my netbook, and put an end to using other people's computers and office space.

Jean Baptiste, a young yearly meeting employee, whom I also know as choir leader at Gasharu Church, is released from other duties for an hour or two to accompany me to the shop where I shall get set up. He is happily using Tigo, the new provider, and his office netbook is almost identical to mine.

I buy the modem, which plugs neatly into a USB port. Baptiste almost doesn't want to wait to load it but I say I shall be happier doing it where help is available if needed. Connection should happen automatically and in seconds. But it doesn't. The first assistant has no success trouble-shooting and turns to a colleague who has no success either and phones a boss who will be there in 20 minutes. Baptiste gives his phone number to the assistant and we go to look for something to drink, at least. It is now 1.30. We try to order a quick lunch, but anything will take at least 40 minutes so we make do with a cold drink.

The boss arrives on time, and goes ever deeper into the Linux operating system. Meanwhile I read the user guide, which mentions Mac and otherwise assumes Windows. I am advised to install some Linux updates, which I can't do here because I'm not connected! The two big supermarkets in town have free internet access. The deal is that I'll take the modem and go and try to do what has been suggested. If it doesn't work they'll give me my money back. The netbook battery is down to 40%.

Jean Baptiste phones David Bucura, his boss, and gets permission to accompany me. This is nice, though not strictly necessary as I am confident of every bit of the process apart from finding the bus boarding point to get back to Tigo if I have to. We get to Simba Supermarket at 3.30. I offer to buy us both lunch. Baptiste has been here before several times, and has been introduced to the beefburger. I learn that he is a theology graduate from Kampala, which explains his good English.

I am given the internet password, and google as instructed. Now what? There are discussions of named updates, descriptions of updates to come, theoretical articles about updating... But where is the item that says 'Click here to update your Linux'? I hunt, Baptiste hunts. My battery is getting lower. Food comes. Enough!

Baptiste's phone rings: it's his father, who is not often in Kigali and is hoping to see him, having sought him in vain at the church office. We've done all the work we can, so we invite him to join us. He turns out to be a long-time colleague of David B, from when Friends first came to Rwanda 20 years ago and the yearly meeting was established. I buy him a drink. Baptiste gently mentions that his father has had no lunch; I invite him to eat and Baptise encourages him to try a beefburger. While we wait for the food, he asks about my work. Fortunately I thinned the images on my camera card last night, so I am able to show a brief selection from Burundi, including some bag garden classics of hands around sacks. Father and son are delighted to see pictures of the new church construction as well. Friends here admire the pioneering work of Burundi Friends, the first church to move into war-torn Kamenge. They are pleased to hear that David Nyonzima is still pastor there.

At 4.30 Jean Baptiste's father has eaten his beefburger and chips and smilingly shows off his empty plate – he has passed the test! With distinction, I add. He sets off across the road for his bus home to Ruhengeri. I shall go back to Tigo. Baptiste has choir practice at 5 but he does have time to help me find the right bus – not where he had expected. I get my refund and directions for the 10 minute walk to Remera bus garage, where I learnt from Rachel two days ago how to get home.

I pick my way down the rutted lane, now nearly dry. I walk into the house just after 6pm. No modem, but a thoroughly pleasant 6 hours nonetheless.

Rain and roads

Written on Friday morning, 5 Feb

The heatwave is over. Yesterday at the end of the afternoon it poured with rain as David and I were in his car. The window on the passenger side is stuck half open and he hasn't got round to having it fixed. (The practical priority at the moment is getting a couple of doors re-hung in the house. Yesterday morning he fetched the workman and took him to the house, but the electricity was out and the man now depends on power tools.) For most of the journey it wasn't too bad, then we changed direction. My waterproof jacket was at home but I had an umbrella. Opened inside the window it didn't d0 a bad job.

David and his nine-year-old daughter Dina were about to set off for a keep fit class at his church, offered on Thursday evenings at present by one of the church members who is a PE teacher. But the rain cam back even heavier. Going was pointless, as nobody would be able to get there. It rained for several hours.

This morning it's overcast and damp but not actively raining. The temperature has dropped by about 15 degrees C I would think. After last night's scouring the lane from D's house up to the metalled road is patterned with deep gulleys. I comment that I wouldn't like to be driving here. 'Oh', says David.'Is it the roads?'

I take the opportunity to fill in my background understanding of how things work here. Who is responsible for the lane, I ask. We are, says D. 'We' is a group of around 30 neighbouring households, the smallest unit of lcal government. The leader is elected but not paid (and that can lead to petty corruption). No, there are not a lot of candidates – as at home, I say. There are monthly meetings to which D usually sends his house worker, Jean de Dieu; he thinks that the last time he went himself was 4 or 5 months ago.

I know that the last Saturday of every month has a few morning hours designated for community work. (In Bujumbura, with a similar system, I could get a cup of coffee at breakfast time only because the cafe staff knew me and took pity on my ignorance.) Would the neighbours get together to patch the lane? Yes, eventually: it's already nearly too bad to ignore. How often does it get patched? About twice a year.

Back in Kigali

Weds evening, 3 Feb

Leaving Bujumbura on a hideously expensive 30 minute flight yesterday, I was looking forward to a more comfortable temperature in Kigali. Not for long: the pilot cheerfully told us it was 32C at 5.30 in the evening. It's not just that I have left Britain in winter: everybody is remarking on the heat and here they are saying it must be climate change. I tried the term 'climate chaos', which I now prefer, on Rachel, my hostess (David Bucura's wife) and she didn't demur.

I slept for more than 10 hours in a quiet house where even the dog barked quietly when something moved in the night. Then after breakfast David presented an outline programme, to be firmed up tomorrow. He is responsible for the work with the women's and church groups, Antoine for the school contacts. (Antoine is no longer the head of the Friends School here in Kigali at Kagarama but has been promoted to superintendent of all 4 Friends schools in the country. I expect to be visiting 3 of them.)

Rachel leaves tomorrow for Nairobi, where she has 4 more months to complete her masters in counselling. We went into town together. The bus journey requires one big bus or two little ones. Fortunately for me we got on a little one, so I could learn how to change over in Remera bus station. I wrote down the name of our stop: Chapere, and the name of the district to check with the driver: Samuduha. I have no memory for meaningless words. On our return we get off the bus beside a little church, whose board says 'chapelle'.

We both changed money; I went seed shopping, while Rachel bought her bus ticket for tomorrow. (The journey takes 24 hours but flights are just too expensive.) The local seed company, Agrotech, had a much better selection than previously, including several herbs, which had seemed almost unknown. (It's om my schedule to se about making a demonstration herb garden.) Another innovation was a computerised system which gave me a printed list of all 18 kinds of seed instead of a hand-written scrap with a bare total. The Kenya Seed Company, a few shops further down, had some of the same staples and a few additions: a second variety of tomato, chard, kale (known here as sukumawiki – the Swahili name usually translated as collards), and spinach – especially useful for the sides of the planted sack which is my first project with every group. I have packed up samples for Burundi, where the choice was very limited, and will ask the church office to find somebody to take them to Alex – contact between the two yearly meetings is frequent.

I see more multi-storey buildings going up each time I come here, though many remain unfinished. Very pleasing to me is the increase in size and number of street trees, though most don't yet cast deep shade. Town was very crowded, and Rachel said the extra people were students preparing to return to school. All the schools have been closed for an extra month at the end of the long holiday while the teachers have training for teaching in English. A month is certainly better than nothing.

I didn't take my camera into town, and I didn't see anything I would have liked to capture. I was sorry, however, not to have had it when I went for supper with Alex on my last evening in Bujumbura. Hearing that I had not seen the lake other than from the aeroplane, she took me a few hundred yards from the house she shares with the two QPSW workers to a place called the Sunset Bar but nicknamed the hippo hole. There we sat sharing a drink, counting three solid dark shapes in the water as the light faded and glad of the protective netting even if it did mar the view.