What to drink?

Well, as a first decision, no alcohol while I'm a volunteer with AGLI. The prohibition is in the standard volunteer contract and it's not a problem. I do drink wine and beer normally (ie both in my normal life and at what from my perspective are normal levels). On Saturday afternoon, after market shopping and a drive round some outlying parts of Kigali, Antoine took me for a drink. On the deck of the golf club, with a view of some of the best grown eucalyptus I've seen here, we shared a pot of good coffee, surrounded by men from various countries and continents, drinking beer and speaking various languages very loudly. I commented to Antoine that I could see why Rwanda Yearly Meeting forbids alcohol. So do the American YM's, he replies. Yes, that's still true of the evangelical yearly meetings though not the liberal ones, including Britain. I say that I like to drink wine at home. He immediately offers to buy me a glass – he wouldn't mind. I decline.

I hope our coffee is Rwandan but it may well not be. It is possible to buy Rwandan ground coffee or beans in Kigali in airtight bags like the packets at home. However, any coffee I have been offered in a house is Nescafe, in a small tin, labelled in English and Swahili, produced in Kenya and promising 31 cups. I watched an item on Rwandan TV earlier in the year where a representative from the East African coffee federation, which Rwanda hopes to join, was lamenting the complete lack of a coffee culture in Rwanda. If young well-educated people would start asking for proper coffee it would become fashionable and that would raise awareness among producers, he said. I report the item to Antoine, who says it is only educated people who drink any kind of coffee, or indeed tea. In the countryside people drink water or beer. That's home-brewed banana beer unless they're very rich or extravagant.

A couple of months ago two people who know of my interest in Rwanda drew my attention to an article in the Waitrose Supermarkets' magazine about how a tea co-operative here is the sole source of Yorkshire Gold Tea. The article commended the enterprise for helping heal the wounds of genocide by enabling mutual development. The TV programme about coffee said producers, many of whom are small-scale farmers with a few bushes, could increase their profit considerably by processing the beans instead of selling the 'cherries'. That too would require the establishing of co-operatives or something similar.

By chance, in the interval between my composing the previous paragraphs and his one, I have been out to lunch today. The occasion is a public holiday to celebrate school teaching and this is its first year. A large group of teachers from several local schools, who convened this morning at CGFK for a dance display (which I missed) and speeches, went on to lunch at a restaurant down the hill. I sat with Theogene (imagine the accents please), the director of the adult school with whom I had spent he morning, and two pleasant young teachers, who wanted to practise their English.

Crates of drinks were carried round the tables: 24 soft fizzy drinks, 12 Primus beer and 12 Mutzig (imagine the umlaut). Few people chose beer. I asked why. Well, many fewer people drink alcohol now, I was told. It's become usual in the last 15 years for toasts at weddings, for example, to be drunk in soft drinks. My companions though it was because of the spread of protestant strains of Christianity. I said that many Christians in Europe are not against alcohol in moderation. Ah, that's it, they said. Rwandans are not good at moderation. Somebody who drinks one beer (and they're 600 ml bottles) will certainly want another, even at lunch.

The next stage is that now many people choose water instead of a sweetened drink. Water requested instead of a coke is always in a plastic bottle, while coke and its cousins are in re-usable glass bottles.

In the household where I am staying , as in the last one, tap water is boiled for drinking. Do people drink tap water? All educated people boil it. Why? There's a slight risk of worms, but more of typhoid. No, typhoid isn't common, but you should avoid it if you can.

It's sad that the price of avoiding typhoid and tooth decay is a growing mountain of one-trip plastic bottles in a country where non-biodegradable plastic bags are banned. I ask who profits from the growing sales of drinking water. There are two bottling plants in Rwanda but you can be pretty sure they're not owned by Rwandans.