More about goats

First, here's the sign board for Kageyo, the village where 3 communities of Batwa, Rwandan exiles from Tanzania (which threw out all with Rwandan background, even Tanzanian citizens, a few year ago, causing great and continuing distress as groups afraid of each other were lumped together)and released prisoners all try to make a decent life in an isolated arid place. My chatty boy lives here.



I was in Kageyo on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday I went to see the developments in the church field at Gahanga and receive the statement of how the donation from Growing Together is being used. More on that anon. Yesterday, Friday, was for a day workshop with the Gahanga church women - my third visit to this group.

We began by walking round the village to look at the garden projects of three members of the group. Others would also have enjoyed a visit, but were too far afield - the three visits took an hour. This woman has two sacks, which she has planted three times. She evidently still cooks on an old-fashioned fuel-hungry three-stone fire.
I saw sacks, new style kitchen gardens, fields and livestock. Two had a cow, one had a pig, all had chickens and all had goats. As we admired a goat with two day old twin kids, I asked my usual question: 'Do you milk the goats?' There were several reasons for not doing so. This kind are too small - we'd need the bigger ones from Kenya. Nobody wants to buy the milk and we don't want to drink it. It's not proper food for adults, only for children with kwashiorkor. However, they had heard it was helpful for people on antiretroviral medication for HIV. And yes, maybe in a crisis they'd try...