The week ahead (post completed)

On Sunday afternoon Rachel, Solange N and I will be on the 3pm bus to Ruhengeri. That's a different Solange - not the HROC coordinator but the facilitator who has worked with most of the groups of Batwa where I am taking the Growing Together work. (The first, Solange M, will replace Rachel on Weds and Thurs, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

There two workshops will be the first of the six I'm to do as my portion of the HROC-Batwa project largely funded by a Quaker Peace and Social Witness Relief Grant. Usually I can assume a group will be able to produce some usable second-hand sacks as well as an empty water bottle or food tin. For these groups, hwever, we have to provide everything. I don't know how much of my usual material - on compost, for example - will be irrelevant to their cramped and impoverished circumstances. Fortunately I shall have a HROC facilitator as well as Rachel, my translator with a post-graduate counselling qualification. My hope is that we shall be able to make explicit those connections between food security and other kinds, so clear in my mind but somehow so difficult for me to communicate here. We are also tasked with identifying a few participants who might go on to train as HROC facilitators.

The plan is to do day one in a church building in town, revising basic HROC work and constructing a demonstration sack. On day two, the three of us will hire motos to go up to where the Batwa live, close to the mountain forests where they are no longer allowed. Solange says the climb takes two hours on foot, so I'm preparing myself for a long bumpy ride. Participants will prepare and plant their own sacks in groups of four or five. With these arrangements I hope people will end up with a sack garden where they need it and can tend it daily. If the scheme is reasonably successful we repeat it on Weds and Thursday for a second group. If not, I suppose we make a new plan in the evenings. We shall be staying together in a guest house for the four nights. (In two weeks' time we do another week with the same pattern.)

Then on Thursday evening the others return to Kigali and I move to a Friend household - probably the head teacher from Kidaho where I stayed with Antoine last time - for three more nights. On Friday I am to work with a school, Saturday is a day off, going to lunch at a lakeside restaurant with the American teachers of English, and on Sunday there's to be a pastors' celebration. I don't know anything about that but I think only my presence is required.

Next Monday is the start of another two day introductory workshop with a church women's group near Kigali...