What has happened?

I have come to the end of two days of revisiting people and places. Old friends, new understanding.

Yesterday morning the first visit was to Mwana Nshuti, the training school which is one of he programmes of Rwanda Yearly Meeting. I see most of the sacks - one quite collapsed, others the worse for wear but still with remains of cabbages and spinach. Jonas, the school director, is enthusiastic about quantity and quality. (In the next two days several people tell me of sharing the abundant cabbages.) He shows me a dry mound where a second compost heap dried out after the rain stopped in May. The pit dug with my supervision for the first heap has a little burnt refuse in the bottom but J assures me they will reconstitute it once the rain comes.

Once the rain comes... The 'long rains' used to arrive pretty reliably at the beginning of September. The Kigali region had a first light shower on the 28th and no more yet. Today it clouded up and the wind blew in the middle of the day, but the moisture stayed stubbornly in the clouds. Now as I write in the early evening thunder is rolling but no rain falling.

Yesterday afternoon I went by bus with Musafiri, my teaching partner in February, to Shyorongi to talk with as many of that group as could come at a day's notice to a meeting at 3 in the afternoon. More than a dozen turn up. These are serious young adults with livelihoods to establish and several of them are students of agriculture or trainee teachers. Two of them speak good English and we have a wide-ranging discussion of world politics (especially 'Yes we can' Obama and how much difference he might make) while waiting for latecomers. Then Musafiri asks for individuals to report their experiences with the sacks. Four describe successes and failures – the beetroots weren't red hough the leaes wre delicious, the tomatoes were very small (I had chosen a dwarf variety to avoid overbalancing), green peppers and spinach were the most successful. On balance, I ask, would they recommend this technique. Definitely yes. I don't think they were just being polite. In two weeks' time I'm to go back and make a demonstration keyhole garden for the community centre. We talk through what will be needed – string and pegs, stakes, compost, enriched topsoil, dry grass or banana leaves. They will invite the president of the district.

Introducing my programme of visits today to 4 individual women, Cecile told me they all wanted advice on what to do in the dry season. After a moment of panic that I am out of my depth in all this drought, I thought of several topics for useful conversation.

At the first house, ten minutes' drive and ten minutes' walk from Friends Peace House, most of the time is taken up with how pleased we are to see each other again and how resistant the young are to eating a healthy range of vegetables. The second host is an enterprising woman who sold a parcel of land near town, saved and invested and now has the only electricity in the extensive village, from a solar panel on her roof. She observes that crops in the ground last longer than in the sacks when everything dries out. It is a common theme that the soil in the sacks gets as hard as concrete. More compost in the mix, I suggest, and remind everybody to use the water from the washing up, for example. Does she put her vegetable peelings in the compost? Only after they've been through the goats or the cow!

At the third house there is a good heap of mature compost and a piece of ground prepared for planting - once the rain comes. I show some photos of precision watering from a bag or bottle with a tiny hole. (Expecting an English speaking guide and not a French one, I'm not carrying my dictionary and can't remember the vocabulary to ask if there's enough dew to channel onto seedlings, as I saw in Israel many years ago.) Water is thirty minutes' walk away, and longer uphill to bring it home. Nobody would pour it on the ground after that. Cisterns to collect surplus water in the rainy season are too expensive to contemplate; there is no ground water to pump up. This is how it is and we're used to it, the women say. My first feeling is of disappointment. Then I realise that an advisor from a warmer climate could find English allotments in winter quite disappointing.

One more visit in the afternoon. It's to Solange, the young FPH worker whose wedding I attended in February. She's laid off, like all the HROC team, for lack of funding, but we don't discuss that. She is eager to show me her sack garden, made after looking at what the group had done in February. At last, evidence that with watering it is possible to keep going through the dry season. A local variety of spinach spills down the sides. A second sack is filled, ready for planting when the rain comes. S has no compost. She would like to star making some and looks at my diagramme and the photos from my visit to the Gako organic farming training institute. We discuss placing the sacks close to the house to avoid some of the strong sun. I advise using soil to cover the compost heap if it is smelly and attracting flies.

It all comes back to compost.


PS I'm posting at 9.30 on Friday evening and it's been raining for an hour and a half.