A new start

[Composed on Friday 1 October. Posted on Saturday 2nd]

The fact that I'm writing this only on Friday indicates how busy I've been from the very day of arrival. I landed at noon on Monday and the initial planning meeting was that afternoon. My schedule is mapped out. The biggest problem will be doing all I am committed to, doing all I want to do, and having any social time at all.

On Tuesday there was a meeting of pastors and heads of schools at the Friends Church headquarter at Kagarama. Antoine invited me to take half an hour describing my Growing Together project and having some discussion. This was a longed-for opportunity: I usually find it impossible to convey my sense of the connection between my vegetable growing work, wellbeing - physical, social and spiritual - and peace. For this audience I emphasised the origin of my project in inspiration from two women Friends - Debby Thomas, one of the Evangelical Friends Church International missionaries with a concern for nutrition, and Laura Shipler Chico, previously an AGLI volunteer for three years in Rwanda, working on AVP and HROC. (Readers unfamiliar wit the initials could go to aglifpt.org. I'm sorry my skills don't extend to inserting links.) Next I considered various layers of meaning in the phrase 'growing together'. Then I described my reason for working with the teachers in the Friends schools as being to give them a taste of British English, while studying a health related topic taht could be useful when they are consulted in their communities because of their status as teachers.

There were pertinent questions about how I could spread my information throughout Rwanda, to which I replied that I can only plant a few seeds and it's for them to provide fertile soil by encouraging good students to go into agriculture and health sciences, and not always economics, business and computing. The discussion was mostly about which schools I should visit, and why not for longer. It's good to know I must be doing something right.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent in Byumba, and the next post will be about that. This morning I arranged to spend half a day with the Women in Dialogue group in Kagarama, with whom I want to use my new material on diet and nutrition, and try out an idea from Practical Action for an insulated container for slow cooking.