Two walks with Antoine: 2

Part Two, Friday

Three times on this visit I have been driven past a run of fish ponds and failed to photograph them. On the third occasion, at the beginning of this week, Danzile offered some intriguing information and Antoine said we would visit them on our way back.

He pulls in to the side of the road and Danzile says she will wait in the car. This avoids the need to park rather better and lock up, but as our walk proceeds I worry that she will be getting very hot. I would have been happy to ask the first workers we meet if they are happy to be photographed and leave it at that. But no, we are going for the full works.

Those first workers are up to their elbows in suds, and producing bowls full of something white and fluffy. Cotton crosses my mind, but only momentarily. As we get closer I can see they are washing small polythene bags. Antoine asks a question and we are directed up a slope into a smart new office building. We greet a receptionist/secretary and she takes us in to her boss, whose business card describes him as Ruremesha Joseph, specialist in continental fishes and pisciculture, inspection and quality control, and 'Economie halieutique'. (L'halieutique peut être définie comme " la science de l'exploitation des ressources vivantes aquatiques" according to Wikipedia.)

He gives us a long narrative in French. I find the strings of figures confusing: are they numbers of fish or francs worth of development funding? (Recapping with Antoine today, I am pleasantly surprised to find he too got lost in 'les chiffres'.)

The enterprise is a joint venture between the district of Muzanze and a business which also operates in Uganda and DRC. In 2003 there was a serious drought and the two lakes of Burera and Ruhondo, whose scenery we have been enjoying all week, lost their fish stocks. Livelihoods and food supplies were at stake. A university offered to produce enough small fry to restock the lakes, but fell short.

I didn't take in all the details, but the site was identified, two small dams constructed and the ponds dug. There must be at least a dozen. Would we like to walk round?

The project manager was a complete enthusiast. He'd trained in France for six months. He had plans for further developments but lack of funding was holding him back. He said much more about breeding than I could follow. I did get the point, however, that this was a natural process – GM is banned in Rwanda.

Fish were imported from Uganda, which is still the source of some of the fish food, though that should change soon. We walked past a series of ponds with fish from the tiniest to the size of a sprat. I started muttering after the second pond and we cut short the tour after four. I'm sorry to have to report that once again my footwear was inadequare, since my walking shoes were drying out on the parcel shelf after Thursday's drenching. The pond margins were quite slippery and occasionally I needed a hand.

A central covered area housed two washing operations – for environmental conservation through re-using the bags in which small fish are transported to various lakes and ponds, and good husbandry through cleaning the fish when mud fouled their gills.

On the other side each pond had a wooden structure on one side, protruding over the water. Danzile had provided the information that these structures were rabbit hutches. Our guide explained that feeding greenstuff to the rabbits and letting their droppings fall into the ponds for the fish to eat avoided the need for shredding the food artificially. The rabbits were allowed to breed and were sold locally for meat.

I was invited up a ramp to look more closely at the rabbits – varieties from Holland and USA as well as a local breed. Fine – I like ladders and there was no mud.

As we made our way back to towards the car our guide spoke of his future plans. He'd like a fishing lake for people to catch their supper, weigh it, and buy it to take home. He didn't want to sell caught fish to eat – I think there may be a contractual prohibition. Antoine asked if he'd thought of opening a restaurant. Oh yes, but at the beginning he couldn't interest anybody.

He stopped in the middle of the footbridge. The stream marked the boundary of Muzanze District so it was a good place for him to part from us. Would I be coming back to Rwanda, he asked. Yes, several more times. Would he try to get his restaurant open by 2012 so I could eat at it? Yes, he'd try.