Rainbows

Yesterday evening, as the dishes at dinner were uncovered and we began filling our plates, Gaudance commented that we were eating a rainbow. (I'm sorry I didn't think to photograph my plate.) I've found this a difficult concept to communicate when teaching about the importance of eating a variety of foods. So I was delighted that she'd got it, and delighted, too, with my colourful plate: whitish pasta, yellow fried plantain, dark red beans, carrots with onions, tomato-coloured gravy, and a deep green vegetable from the garden, for which they don't know the name and which has a strange fishy flavour. Augustin asked what 'rainbow' was, and wrote the word in his notebook.

Working with another women's group in the afternoon, I'd been challenged by Solange, my translator, to say what on earth was meant by 'dark green leafy vegetables'. I pointed to somebody's dark green shawl. Moringa was also mentioned on the handout (prepared by Anne) focussing on vitamin A and eyesight. Was moringa a dark green leafy vegetable? I thought so, or as good as.

This morning there was an item in a Voice of America broadcast for Africa about the critical importance of nutrition for the foetus and the first two years after birth. Apparently Thailand changed its development priorities to focus on that and has had very good results. Yesterday's news in English on a Rwandan station was reporting the prime minister's speech at the beginning of the new seven-year presidential term. The goal is to move Rwanda out of the category of least developed nations into the middle income category.

I had brief conversations with both Augustin and Antoine about that conjunction. Is anybody in government working on child nutrition? How could people with power to change things be helped to see that without good nutrition there won't be the mental capacity for the hoped-for surge in economic growth, even with the new emphasis in the school syllabus on entrepreneurship?

Antoine's response is that you have to start in the schools. OK, I said; you are the Inspector of all the Friends Schools... And he interrupted me to phone for some packets of moringa to take with us to the school at Katarara in the next ten minutes. A couple of hours later the head teacher was taking some to stir into the day's beans. This school is in an area prone to famine and feeds all the children with food donated by the World Food Program: maize meal, rice fortified with soy, iodised salt; perhaps the beans were local.

Caption: Is this enough beans for 500?



Cption: Four of these beds provide greens twice a week to cook with the beans.

I've had a couple of conversations lately about how difficult it is to start a small business here, compared with Uganda, for instance. The regulations have been eased somewhat for foreign companies, but Rwandans have to meet so many criteria that most are discouraged. On our car journey I learn that although the Friends' church's moringa business is all set to expand its processing, buy more leaves from local farmers who are keen to sell them, and then get the product at a price most people can afford into ordinary small shops, there is a hitch.

In most African countries a bribe would be a way through the red tape. Here that isn't done. The problem is that the Rwandan Bureau of Standards admirably insists that new food products conform to US or EU standards. But there is no such standard for moringa. Test results for several measures of purity have been submitted but always rejected. What would be acceptable readings? Zero on all counts. Impossible, of course.

However, movement may be possible. Uganda has just licensed moringa with much less strict standards. So there are some figures to work from. And does Rwanda really want poeple to import moringa and give the profits to a Ugandan business when there is a Rwandan one eager to proceed?

I'll tell you when I hear. Mean time I'm doing my bit towards a level of development that seems for now to be somewhere over the rainbow.