A little something

I'm not inspired today but it's time for a little something.

Tuesday
I am sitting after lunch in a sliver of shade at the side of the training room in the resettlement village of Kageyo, near Kayonza, where I'm spending two days with groups of Batwa I trained in sack gardening last year. A boy of about 10 comes over, and Rachel, resting beside me, is able to translate. He is full of questions.

'How many children do you have?' 'Only two! Most people here have ten.' ('What's wrong with you?' was politely unspoken. He later said he would have three.)

'Do you have elephants in your country?' (They sometimes eat the crops here.) 'Or giraffe? Zebra?' I say our largest animal is a kind of antelope.

'Do you have cows?'
'Yes, and a lot of sheep.' (He won't have seen sheep but he may know they are kept in the cooler north of Rwanda.)

'Do you have goats? Do you have goats you can milk?'

We are less than 50 miles from the village where women laughed a few months ago at the suggestion that goats could be milked. Even last week the sophisticated group of church women in Kigali admitted that they too were close to laughing. This boy has a little something. I'm sorry I can't show you his picture, but my camera battery was dead.