Busy (Now with photos and video)

Let me tell you why I'm too tired to write anything more inspired than a bare account of my week.

Last weekend was quiet. Since then it's been all go. On Monday and Tuesday I worked for the first time with a group of women at Kanombe, one of the Kigali Friends churches. Everything went smoothly, but it was very hot and dusty.

On Monday evening I went to supper with Brad and Chelsea, a young American Evangelical Friends Mission couple. They are working on a new programme, brought from Uganda by Debby Thomas, who was struck by the differences between neighbouring villages using the programme and not using it. Called Discipling for Development (D for D), it aims to build on participants' felt needs rather than delivering ideas and training devised elsewhere. Perhaps there is scope for cooperation between Growing Together and D for D. We exchanged blog and email addresses. I was delighted to receive a copy of a short book self-published by Meg Guillebaud, an episcopalian pastor in Byumba whom I met last year. Entitled The Bible and the environment, it's also available in Kinyarwanda, has a wide range of up-to-date references and draws largely on Rwandan examples. I'm thinking of getting multiple copies for use among Friends here – I'll email Meg when I get home and find her address.

On Tuesday evening I took my host family of David, Rachel and Dina for a meal at a restaurant where tables are out of doors, each in a bower of trees and flowering plants, under a new moon and brilliant stars. David remarked that his vision for the church and conference centre at Gasharu was for a setting like this. The macadamia tree will be a small contribution.

The workshop on Wednesday and Thursday was with the women at Gahanga, first visited last October, and Rachel was my translator and co-trainer. Wednesday is local market day and we shopped together, prepared food and eventually ate it, delayed by the first real rain of the season. (I filmed the rain and will make a first attempt to attach a video clip. No, I've waited for 30 minutes and it won't finish uploading. I'll add some photos instead.)
Gaudance finishing the potatoes



My plate holds, among other things, macaroni cheese, stir fry veg, two salads, macadamia nuts, avocado, an extra slice of cheese - and no means of eating any of it except with fingers.<


On Thursday it rained solidly – and deafeningly on the tin roof of the church – for four hours from ten o'clock, so not much teaching was possible. Washing up on Thursday before the rain

On Wednesday evening I didn't go out. On Thursday I took Ruth and Krystan, plus baby Misha, to a Chinese restaurant they recommended, and which turned out to be one of the best I've ever experienced, catering for the many Chinese working here mostly as managers for engineering projects.

Today, Friday, I finished my accounts, matching up receipts, bus tickets etc and totalling expenses for all nine trainings. Then there was the evaluation of this visit and planning for my next. Then I took Antoine out to lunch after concluding various bits of business relating to the English and Rwandan Friends schools. Then I talked Josephine through my accounts and handed them over before being interviewed by Elin Henrysson, the QPSW worker in Burundi employed by AGLI to evaluate last year's Batwa project. Then home to TV news of the earthquake and tsunami, supper, and an hour going through a project proposal with Rachel, possibly to be called 'Firm foundations for future families' or 5F.

Seeds and nuts

One of the four kinds of food which in combination can provide protein as good as meat, together with grains, dairy and legumes, is a puzzle to all my groups. 'What are nuts?' 'What do you mean by seeds?'

Sunflower seeds are said to be used as a paste in sauce/gravy; I have not yet found any to buy. Sesame and pumpkin seeds I brought with me from England. They are viewed with suspicion and tasted reluctantly, even when toasted. It's sometimes conceded that pumpkin and similar seeds are eaten in Congo, but peeling them is very troublesome. I was once offered sesame seeds roasted with peanuts as a snack and have located them in the two big supermarkets and two Indian shops, both raw and browned. They are called 'simsim' and seem all to come from Kenya.

The same shops also stock almonds and cashews, but they are very expensive and probably bought only by ex-pats. I had searched in vain for macadamia nuts till Matt told me to look with the potato crisps and not with the raw nuts. Nakumat has five or six different brands, some organic. I was on the trail because somebody had mentioned that macadamia nuts are being introduced here. When I started asking around, a couple of gardeners asked if I could find seeds or saplings for them.

Driving with Antoine on Thursday I noticed a new hotel on the outskirts of town was named Macadamia. He told me he has five young trees in the garden of his little country house. There was a government project in Eastern Province to introduce them a couple of years ago. He doesn't know when they will start to yield.

We had been making various plans for my visit to his family on Friday. The tea plantation owner with an interest in fuel-efficient cooking would not be at home. Much of the day was taken up with a visit from the head of a school near Ruhengeri who brought letters and photos from some of her students for an exchange with a London primary school. At half past three, with three hours till dark, we set out to find a nursery selling macadamia trees.

The first site was one I'd been past several times. They had various kinds of citrus as well as papaya and mango but no macadamia. I bought two small orange trees – a valencia and a mandarin – for Antoine’s town garden. He got instructions for driving to the place where we'd find the macadamia.

We soon turned off the main road, heading towards the organic training institute at Gako that I'd visited two years ago. Before we reached it A asked for more directions. We retraced our route, turned down a narrow track and ended in a school yard. Various children and adults shrugged their shoulders. On the way back to our road we noticed the nursery and primary school was named 'La Pepiniere' (sorry, no accents), which is the name for a plant nursery in Kinyarwanda as well as in French.

The next side turning took us past the organic institute, where the gatekeeper confirmed we were headed in the right direction. I don't know whether A was warned about the state of the road or not. I do know we lurched several times at angles that I thought must result in overturning. Deep puddles sucked at the wheels. Somehow we kept going, down to the valley bottom, across bridges made of tree trunks, and part way up the other side.

Would we have to return by this route, I asked. 'Oh no, there's probably a better road.' I hoped so.

The track broadened out in a village. Further directions took us parallel with the hillside, through more troughs, along the edge of more drops, past more excited children. Then we saw a large area covered with black netting. We've found it, said A.


By now it was after five. Rain threatened. Antoine stopped the car and a solitary worker appeared. Following him we walked past thousands of macadamia saplings, perhaps as many as fifty thousand. Another worker joined us, then another, but the office was unstaffed when we reached it. 'This is a government project', they said. 'We don't sell to anybody.' Antoine quietly asked how many I wanted. 'Well, three would be good. I'd settle for one or pay for ten if necessary.'

I wanted to plead my case but A's body language said I'd better keep quiet and let him do the negotiating. He took his time. One of the workers phoned the manager. I went to photograph the notice board. When I returned the deal was done. We could take three. I paid generously 'for the phone calls'.

We didn't need to turn the car. The rain, as all too often this year, didn't fall. After perhaps three or four miles of adequate dirt road, passing macadamia trees, we rejoined the main road a mile or two from where we'd first turned off.
Antoine said he could do with a drink – non-alcoholic, of course. I said I'd be happy to treat him. We went to the very restaurant where I'd bought drinks and brochettes two years ago. Sitting outside in the fading light, we ate a fish kebab each and drank non-alcoholic beer before returning to letter writing and supper.

Next morning on the way up to the teachers' house, where I was to borrow a couple of novels and Sandrine a couple of DVDs, Antoine pointed out a macadamia tree, about four metres high, behind a garden wall. I wondered how they'd managed to buy it. Could there be a nursery selling the trees somewhere? 'They must be part of the government project', said Antoine.

This morning, Sunday, I bought roasted peanuts and sesame (in packages with Rwandan phone numbers) to add protein to the meal to be prepared by the women at Gahanga on Wednesday. I also got roasted and salted macadamia nuts, and sesame bars with jaggery (what's that?), sugar and edible oil – Kenyan again. Perhaps in October I'll find somebody growing simsim.

Changing minds

Thursday 3 March
Only on the last of three sessions with a group of women from the Friends Church at Katarara, in the famine-prone Bugesera district south east of Kigali, do I remember to do the formal introductions every group expects. On Tuesday communication had broken down and the women had not been invited to the expected morning session but were recruited for a rather rushed afternoon; on Wednesday we started with an hour's walk in full sun to visit three participants' kitchen gardens; on Thursday morning, looking round the group as they sing and pray, noting which babies and toddlers are here and which not, I realise I don't know any names.

One young woman has taken my attention at several points. She was the most assiduous wielder of the hoe to break up compost and mix it with topsoil on Tuesday when we filled the demonstration sack. On Wednesday she stepped into her family field and pulled me a bunch of onions, crisp and fragrant, before I could protest. In the discussion about restoring soil fertility she volunteers that her family store and use their toilet waste and have found their yields better than with chemical fertiliser – the first person I've met who does this. (on the final drive back into Kigali I notice a signboard for ecosan training - that's composting toilets.)

Now I have invited the women to introduce themselves by giving their name and something that they enjoy in their lives. 'My name is Vestine', she says. 'I am HIV positive and I enjoy helping others by speaking openly about my condition.'
Vestine with her gift - sadly I didn't capture her smile


Vestine shows her kitchen garden


In the evenings this week I have been proof reading the final version of Augustin's MA dissertation, which I first saw when I was staying in his family last October. His research project was interviewing members of a particular Friends Church to gain insight into successful and unsuccessful strategies for dealing with the mutually reinforcing problems of poverty and HIV/AIDS. One of his most heartening responses came from a former prostitute who 'came out' about her HIV status, became regular in taking her medication and began to make something of her life – and make an income as a small scale trader - instead of waiting to die. When church members and pastors themselves begin to be open about HIV in themselves and their families, change can happen, Augustin concludes.

I mention to Antoine during the drive back to Kigali that I was surprised by Vestine. She looks so well; she is open to new ideas and asks perceptive questions; she certainly challenges the stereotype of 'AIDS victim'. 'Well yes', he says, 'but that's how it works. When you are sick it's a great relief to have a diagnosis, and talking about your illness is a kind of therapy.' I sometimes forget Antoine is a psychology graduate of the 1980s.

I am more aware this year than previously of people in positions of leadership talking about how the only significant changes to Africa will be changes of mentality. On this morning's drive to Katarara we pass an unusual number of goats – one or two roped, or small flocks herded with sticks, then a large clump of goats and people by the side of the road, then a thinning stream heading away. I often see goats being traded at roadsides and in market pens.

Looking for a local cheese to take to a workshop last visit, I found a firm goats' cheese manufactured in Rwanda. Both the women and the teachers in Katarara have been telling me about the shortage of food round here, and the school has a feeding programme, using donated maize meal, because of the district's famine status. I have already heard that goat's milk is not drunk except occasionally by babies and young children. I invite Antone to comment. 'They won't use it', he says. 'They think the only milk for humans to use comes from cows.'

'But I have bought cheese in Kigali.'

'Oh, that’s only in Kigali, not round here.'

At the end of the workshop with the women I say my usual piece about how they are the experts in their lives while all I can do is bring some ideas they can adopt or reject, preferably after trying them. Telling them this may be the first time they hear this idea which may shock them, I say that in my country goat's milk is expensive and highly prized by some people. They dissolve into giggles. 'How on earth would you milk a goat?'

Antoine and I, later in the journey home, reflect on their response. We have both heard the formulation that a new idea is often ridiculed, then ignored, then opposed and eventually accepted. 'Rwandans do now eat eggs', he observes. (If this remark doesn't make sense, look at the blog entry for October 2010 entitled 'Le Congolais')


Jacqueline models a product of the women's (machine) knitting cooperative


Teachers and primary students in their lunch break


This crop benefits from the hot dry climate

Eating locally

For several years, reading about living off grid, or spending money on nothing but food and transport for a year, or aiming for a zero carbon lifestyle, and watching films along similar lines, I've been wondering if I should try something. I can't give up flying while I'm working in Rwanda twice a year; I'm not even ready to sell my car, though I do use it only two or three times a week now. I do, however, have a reasonably productive allotment and an interest in food miles, food security and good nutrition.

For the last week – mostly in bed by the light of a remarkable solar torch that recharges itself even inside the house - I've been reading Animal, vegetable, miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's account of her family's year in Appalachian Virginia, eating only local produce and raising much of it themselves, both animal and vegetable. At home in suburban London I've been cutting down my supermarket visits, though some items – some cleaning cloths, luxury biscuits for my singing group hosts, interesting spices – are impossible to find in the reducing number of smaller local shops. Ealing has a farmers' market on Saturdays. Is it time to get beyond fantasising and try an experiment?

A year is too much for me. I'm too peripatetic, quite apart from probable failures of will. Could I manage a month, to start with, buying no fruit or veg and only locally raised free-range meat? (No, I'm not a vegetarian. I have spent many years wondering whether the call would come but it doesn't. I try to eat only ethically produced meat, fish and poultry; many of my friends would consider that an oxymoron but I am as I am)

Thinking through my calendar, I can identify four weeks from late June, and/or probably another four from early August, where my chance of success would be greatest. Would anybody like to join me? It would be for each individual to identify your own parameters. Mine would be buying no fruit or veg or prepared meals, but allowing bread from the farmers' market and the cooking ingredients already in my store cupboard – and fairtrade coffee! Yours might be no plastic packaging, or no supermarkets, or only foods identifiable as coming from your own country or region or locality, to give some examples.

Barbara Kingsolver writes at the end of her book, which I hadn't yet reached when I started writing this proposal, about the growing popularity in the USA of a hundred-mile challenge – to consume only food produced within that radius. She also deals robustly with the objection that whatever one does won't be enough. If your sedentary friend had been diagnosed with a heart condition, would you criticise them, she asks, for starting to exercise only three days a week instead of all seven?



Here in the Friends compound in Kagarama, four of us have enjoyed a delicious meal comprising two cooked dishes prepared using a combination of passive and conventional heating methods, three salads and one of the best pineapples I have ever eaten. On the other side of the room where I am sitting at my netbook, Rachel and Gaudance, leaders in women's and children's work in the Rwandan Friends Church, are starting to write a project proposal for spreading the information and experience they are getting from the Growing Together in Rwanda project. Country people live surrounded by plenty of vegetables, they say, but they don't know how to use them. In town there is little cultivable land but much could be done with sacks and other containers, once the benefits of eating the produce are understood.

I am fortunate enough to have both the land and the information. Integrity requires that I keep finding things to do, however modest, to help the world move in the right direction.

A missing skill

I often have cause to be grateful for the breadth and depth of my education. But I didn't get any training in project management. I could have done with it today.

After supper last night I packed my bag quite carefully. At breakfast I reminded Rachel of the need for rags. On the way out of the house we collected the basket for the slow cooker and a few more old garments were found to supplement the one old sheet. Too late I thought of explaining that we needed enough rags to fill the basket. On arrival at Kagarama I would give Antoine the flash drive with four files to print, collect the sewing machine from Cassie and set myself up in good time.

Antoine was in his office and I wrote down the name of the file where I had put the documents I wanted printed. The sewing machine from the teachers' house needed a voltage converter too heavy for me to carry. I promised to send somebody.

I found Danzile, the yearly meeting bursar who is one of my students for today, and she sent the cleaner to ask a young man to run the errand. I took the opportunity to post last night's blog and check my email. (Four messages from yesterday have disappeared after I failed to open them. If you wrote to me and haven't had a reply by tomorrow, please re-send.) Fifteen minutes later nothing had appeared so I set off back to the house, scooping up Eduard, who appeared opportunely, and completed that task.

Antoine came with his own flash drive, unable to open mine. The virus it had acquired since last night – presumably from Antoine's computer – vanquished by McAffee, we opened everything, copied across and double checked.

Last year I had several times used the pad of flip chart paper from Jean Baptiste's office. Could I use some today, please? Searching for the one remaining sheet, he found the used remains of many sessions of brainstorming stuffedd into a cupboard. In a moment of inspiration I snaffled them up to supplement the rags.

A board for the tyre cooker was produced and set in a sunny spot. Levelled with broken bricks, it supported the tyre and the sheet of glass. This was the moment I realised that both Rachel and I had forgotten the black cooking pot borrowed from her father and needed to complete the ensemble. She found somebody to fetch it for a payment of 2,000 francs – three times the bus fares and well worth it.

By now it was nearing 10 o'clock, the usual 9am start for this group. Rachel, Gaudance and Danzile were waiting in the shade. For once I wasn't impatient to begin but I was now ready. They came in. The other two were prevented, Marie Rose by a sick child and Josiane by a head teacher who couldn't release her until later. As we started, Antoine brought three of the hoped for print outs. I introduced the idea of the tyre cooker and left them studying the information sheet while I took the pages for photocopying to Jean Baptiste. He was in a meeting but would try to do them before lunch. We set some water in the pot inside the tyre under the sheet of glass.

Settling down to conversation about cooking methods, fuel saving and good nutrition was a relief. By the end of the morning we had also made two insulating cushions for the basket – filled with a mixture of small squares of fabric and screwed up balls of paper.
Gaudance and Danzile struggle to thread the sewing machine needle

Gaudance and Josiane stuffing a cushion

Lunch had been the subject of many inconclusive conversations with Rachel. The group decided they'd be happy with snacks, so a budget was made to send somebody out for a samosa and a chapatti each, a bunch of bananas, two boxes of fruit juice, and a moto ride up the hill with the provisions: about £5 for 5 people. We ate under the trees and reviewed the arrangements for tomorrow morning.

Josine and Gaudance will start the two cooking processes; Rachel and I will be available by phone for any queries before we arrive around 11.30 to start making salads; Danzile is matron of honour at wedding and can't come. Perhaps Marie Rose will be able to leave her child.

At 1.30 we took the basket outside to fill the gaps around the cushions with hay or similar. The grass was thronged with secondary school pupils having a mock election but we managed to scavenge what we needed and ignore the curious stares. We stitched a final cushion and stuffed it with hay to fit closely over the space for the cooking pot. A shopping list was reviewed and finalised. Gaudance will bring basil: she still has some left after trying out the recipes from Wednesday and inviting her neighbours to come and taste. Josiane, who is to shop with me, revealed that she won't be free till 5. (Shopping has to be completed today because the market will be closed by umuganda in the morning.)

'What are you going to do with the hot water?' Gaudance asked, referring to the product of the trial of the tyre cooker. 'Why don't we put it in the hay box to see how warm it is in the morning?' Ah, a true scientist.

It is now 4pm. The photocopies didn't materialise and Jean Baptiste has locked up and gone to take choir practice for Sunday. I don't know if he will be here tomorrow but probably not. I am grateful for the easy hospitality of the teachers, where, having commandeered a young man to carry the converter and sewing machine, I can sit on a sofa with a glass of drinking water and type this piece. I've more or less caught up on the emails after Wednesday's busyness and yesterday's poor internet service. Perhaps I should be looking for project management by distance learning.


PS
At 5pm Therese was back in the office and did the photocopying. At 6.15 - presumably after choir practice - Baptiste rang full of apopogies for forgetting the photocopying. By then the shopping was completed and I was on my way home, squashed in a taxi-bus that seemed smaller than ever but really perfectly OK.

Shopping

Written Thurs 24th, posted Friday 25th

Yesterday was a very busy day. After teaching I shopped for supper for 9, then worked in the American teachers' kitchen with Cassie and Ruth and Gaudance, using Gaudance's bountiful harvest of the basil planted during my last visit. When I admired it in her garden last week she admitted not knowing how to use it. So last night's event took shape – drawing on Ruth and Krystan from Canada and Cassie from Texas, for recipes from countries where the basil grows much bigger and better than it does for me. We had spaghetti with tomato and basil sauce, pasta with two kinds of basil pesto (one including rocket), salad with basil vinaigrette and poached white fish with a different basil vinaigrette – the last from the internet. It made a surprisingly varied plateful.

Today has been set aside for preparation for tomorrow and Saturday, when a group of six of the women I know best and have worked with three times already will do some experimental cooking. I've been keeping my eyes open for the equipment I need. Today will be make or break.

Rachel and I set off after a leisurely breakfast. She has a new computer from one of her employers and needs to get internet access and virus protection. Nearby I want to buy some coffee for breakfasts and scrutinise the nut and seed section of the biggest supermarket, hoping to find evidence that sesame seeds and macadamia nuts are not unknown, working up to researching whether the trees are being introduced here, as rumour suggests. But Nakumatt has a power cut and from the Indian shop round the corner I buy only turmeric.

It is becoming clear that we won't have time to do all the jobs on our lists in town before going to Kicukiro, the market area near the Friends Church compound at Kagarama. So after Rachel's modem has been activated we do no more than buy an inner tube for tomorrow's solar cooking. For that I need Rachel's Kinyarwanda, as I do for finding a glass supplier in Kicukiro and getting a sheet cut to fit over the inner tube. Asking at a petrol station and being directed to the maintenance workshop for the moto riders, we get the inner tube inflated. Just in time, we phone Antoine to give us a lift up the hill with glass and rubber ring before his appointment elsewhere.

Next is further discussion of the arrangements for the next two days with Monique, who runs the part of the church buildings at Kagarama known as 'the centre', separately from the church and its offices, and the domain of David Bucura, Jean Baptiste and Therese which includes the newly extended children's peace library and its programme of peer mediation. Yes, it's very complex and I keep learning more of how much I don't know. As I take more responsibility for arrangements, accounting and scheduling for my work with each visit I'm continually trying to anticipate problems. Today it emerges that if Monique is not providing food for our group we'll be expected to pay to use her crockery, cutlery and cooking pots, in addition to the room rental I was expecting.

A quick phone call to Ruth and Krystan, whose house is next to the church, results in the promised loan of cups, plates and a cooking pot. If David is driving in on Saturday it won't be difficult to take extra items from Rachel's kitchen. I have knives, peelers and graters for making salads. The teachers' house and its well stocked kitchen will also be within easy reach.

I pay the room rental and collect the receipt with obligatory rubber stamp. Monique says she knows where to look for a board to go under the tyre cooker. Rachel has further business here and we separate.

Now for the kind of detail I am always afraid will trip me up. I know Jean Baptiste has printing and photocopying in his office. I check that he will be there in the morning. He will, and photocopying will be fine but the printer is out of ink. I return to Nicodeme, whose new office adjoins tomorrow's work room, to ask if he could print a couple of pages for me on the new printer we have just been admiring. He won't be in tomorrow but would be happy to do it now. I didn't think far enough ahead to put the necessary flash drive in my bag this morning. He suggests the yearly meeting office so I go round the back of the church but it's all locked up. Happily Antoine is returning from his appointment; there is a printer in his office; it is working; he will be there between 8 30 and 9.30 tomorrow. Phew!

I think everything is now in place for the tyre cooker, including a black cooking pot borrowed from Rachel's father's solar cooker. The second project is to make an insulated nest for the slow cooking of ingredients heated by wood or charcoal. Practical Action (the charity that used to be called Intermediate Technology) has a design, with rather sketchy instructions. One of Anne's compilations of useful suggestions has a photo of another. It's apparently recommended by the government here though nobody I know has one; it's known as a peacemaker. It's what I called a haybox when I was a Girl Guide.

Rachel and I have been looking for a suitable container. Soon after the beginning of my enquiries she bought a couple of beautiful baskets but they were too small and she took them back. I have considered a banana leaf hamper in a tourist shop, a large plastic plant pot and a utilitarian plastic bin. None is quite right and only the last is a reasonable price. As we left the house this morning I spotted a laundry basket that would serve though it's unnecessarily tall. We could use it, Rachel says, but they're expensive and she wouldn't be able to recommend a place to buy them as it came from a travelling salesman or similar. Then she thinks of a large waste paper basket in the house worker's room. It's the best yet, and light enough to carry on the bus if necessary tomorrow, though we won't be popular if the bus is full.

What else does the project require? I've been doing my best to make sure both Rachel and Gaudance understand the need for plenty of rags to stuff the cushions. I'm borrowing a sewing machine from Cassie. I have a couple of pairs of scissors.

Now to buy the tough fabric to enclose the rags.

Ruth has recommended a fabric shop called Maman Fatuma. I think I can find it. I take the bus back into town. It's after one and I'm getting hungry. I've arranged with Rachel that I'll find lunch in town. I remember that Dorothy (now back in England) once suggested meeting at a place called La Galette. I spotted it once but haven't visited. It's near the seed shops and I might as well top up on seed supplies now I'm here. I buy another 60 or 70 packets of seeds – for the women tomorrow and three more full workshops of 15.

As I leave the second seed shop I ask for directions to La Galette. It is where I expected. What I didn't expect is that it's sub-titled German Butchery. The language of the labels and the menu is French, nevertheless. The shop part has many interesting supplies and I buy coffee and brown bread. Then lunch takes the usual 45 minutes to arrive, despite being only an egg salad. It's good and I'm refreshed and well rested.

It's steeply uphill to Maman Fatuma and the sun is hot but it's not too far. The shop is much smaller than I expected. I'm beckoned in past three people battling waves of clear plastic tablecloth printed with pink roses and emitting a strong plastic smell. I show an illustration of what I need. I'm sent through a narrow opening into a second room. Bales and rolls of fabric are stacked on all four sides up to the ceiling. The assistant allocated to me has little French (and no English). How on earth shall I choose? I do, however, on weight and price. I'm passed to a different assistant who measures and cuts, in between contributing to the taming of the plastic. Anything else? I need needles. A box containing at least a hundred packets of steel needles, made in China, is passed to me. But they're all the same size and too big. Another box is produced. That will do. Thread? A box with a dozen to choose from. Done. As I leave I spot a stack of at least fifteen folded rosy tablecloths, each two metres by three. The cutting, billowing and constraining continues. Who could need so many?

It's a ten minute hot walk back to the bus stop. Some people here say the sun feels hottest before it rains. Thunder rumbles. I'm glad to get a place on the first bus, though it's one of the uncomfortable fold down seats. Two minutes after I'm home the rain comes. Rain is good; getting drenched is not.

At supper with David and Rachel I ask for clarification about 'umuganda' on Saturday. The last Saturday of every month is designated for communal work – nobody thought of that when the workshop dates were agreed - and the roads are closed till 11am. However, when I realised last week that there would be a problem they said we'd be OK getting to Kagarama early – around 8 – to prepare the food for cooking in the new devices. Now they say we'd have to be there before 7 to avoid the roadblocks and whoever drove us would not be able to get away. And I hoped I'd thought of everything!

Rachel says we can discuss it with the group tomorrow and make a plan. I'll report on what transpires.

Another brief encounter

Giheke,17-18 February

This was a two-day workshop with a new group, at a small Friends church seven kilometres up the road out of Kamembe towards Nyungwe forest. I've lost count of the number of groups I've worked with but it must be more than 10. This is the first time I've had a student who's been to the organic training at Gako, outside Kigali, where I visited at the beginning of this project, two years ago.

Having an ally in the group is a new pleasure. Of course Marie Claire may disagree with some of the things I say, and I invite her to do so if there's something I've forgotten or misunderstood. (The group has already had the line about how they and not I are the experts on their soil, climate etc.). Mostly she is able to add detail – it only takes 30 days to make usable compost if you construct the heap in one day; biogas can be made equally well from cow dung or human waste....

The second day is to end after a late lunch. We finish by planting seeds in the sack outside the church leader's house where we are to eat. I suggest that we just relax and wait for the food to be ready in 10 or 15 minutes. Oh no, we must go back to the church/classroom for the recommendations.

Mukarugwiza Mary, the woman who has led most of the singing and dancing and asked the most questions, wants to speak on behalf of the group.

'Thank you for two days' teaching. We have learnt how to prepare and plant a sack. Thank you for what you have taught.

'Also you have helped us to produce many vegetables in a small space when we don't have much land. And we have learnt about plant tea and ways to protect our plants from pests. Also we have learnt about compost. Altogether many new things. Thank you for choosing to come here to us.

'Now we have some recommendations. First, we would like to learn how to grow mushrooms so we can sell them for income and eat them when we can't afford meat. [This was not a good time to make sure they know mushrooms – a very fashionable commodity at the moment - are not nourishing!] Second, you can see how our church has foundations but hardly any building; we are a small congregation of 60 including children and we hope you will ask your church to pray for us and consider sending us money.

'We ask you to greet your family and your church.'

Dancing in the part-built church
I thank everybody for attending and wish them well. I leave a selection of seeds with Marie Claire, whom they appoint to distribute them. After lunch I am picked up and taken to Kumbya for a weekend's relaxation. They get on with their lives.


Marie Claire (left) and Mary