A day with Alphonse

Written Weds-Thurs, 22-23 Feb.
Edited and pictures added, Sat 25 Feb.

Monday 20 February
I am returning to Mutura, high above Gisenyi on Lake Kivu. In October I was here with Jean Baptiste as translator. This time the Friends School at Cyangugu, where Alphonse has many responsibilities including teaching, has released him to work with me in his home community.

Leaving Kigali at 8am, I get off the bus just before 11 at Kabali, the junction for the road up to Mutura. Alphonse is there to meet me. First, we will take something to eat. In a small back room of a building labelled 'Restaurant' he orders tea and bread. Would I like some meat, cooked without oil? He is anxious to be hospitable, I to be no trouble. Is he having meat, I ask. Yes, he will try some. OK then, I'll have some too. Is this lunch, I wonder.

As we wait I observe the walls, originally bright yellow but now very grimy, particularly so round the door and the light switch. The door swings continually on a noisy hinge. The radio blares in the adjacent room till Alphonse decides it is too loud and goes to get it turned down.

The tea and the bread are fine. When the plate of meat comes, there are 5 bundles of intestines, each wrapping what might be a tongue or a piece of tripe. To my great relief, Alphonse rejects them. Next, two small bony portions of boiled beef or goat are produced. No oil, indeed. Alphonse is still not happy. Don't they have brochettes? They could send out but it would take a long time. We agree to leave for the village.

After an awkward stand off when a line of men, some with staves and one with a clipboard, symbolically bar the entrance to our road (they want 'tax', a worried Alphonse explains, before our moto drivers push through without paying) we make our way up the bumpy road with the stunning views, past the turn off to the church at Mutura and into the village of Mudende. A stop and a brief discussion. Then remount and cut down a side road. Alphonse, anxious again, explains that I have to be registered because I'm staying overnight. (First he says that foreign visitors earn kudos for the district. Later he adds that this is very close to the border with DRC.) The appropriate official is in a meeting. Waiting outside the office
We dismount again, he fetches her out, and I hand over my passport to be recorded – lucky I remembered to bring it. Another 5 minutes and we are at his house.

How would I like to spend the rest of the day, he asks. I'd like to walk through the village, and I'd like to meet and greet his parents. We also need to go to the church to make plans with the pastor for the workshop tomorrow.

The road to the parents' house
We set off for his parents' house, further out of the village, past neighbours he greets and one or two who say a few words to me. John, for example, is preparing to plant his next crop of potatoes, sprinkling commercial fertiliser into every hole in the deep soil. He'd like me to take his picture, and here it is. Frequently, as on previous visits to this region, I see an adult or a child, spray nozzle in hand, carrying a tank of foul-smelling pesticide on their back.

Alphonse's father, a retired teacher, and his mother are welcoming and gracious. I am given a fizzy drink while Alphonse and his parents have something warm made from sorghum. His mother, laughing, wants to see my face when I try it. It tastes fermented but they assure me it couldn't be alcoholic or they wouldn't drink it. (The parents are Catholic; many Christians are teetotal.) Alphonse and his parents. He is dresed for my visit. I don't know whether his father always wears a suit.

There is wiring taped to the ceiling for a light to be run from a battery, which is charged in the village from a shop with solar panels and a bigger battery, which in turn is charged further down the hill where the grid reaches. I ask if they would like a solar lamp. They are delighted with the prospect and I am delighted to find somebody who really needs one, rather than keeping it for use in power cuts and for spot lighting to supplement the low wattage common in ceiling lights. I just hope there's enough sunshine to keep it topped up. I tell them it's a gift from my friend Anne, who would love to be able to travel with me but who supports my work in many ways while confined to her bed.

'Tell us what her illness is and we'll pray for her recovery.' I explain it's a result of DDT poisoning. 'Oh yes,' they say, 'We know about that.'


We walk into the village – quite substantial, with a modern covered market I had not seen on the route taken by the motos. Alphonse knows almost everybody, and most are greeted with a handshake, a handshake from me, an exclamation of pleased surprise that I know how to say hello or good afternoon, a brief or very brief conversation and two parting handshakes. This in addition to the swarm of children, some old enough to be in school, who pursue me with 'Good morning, good morning, good morning. How are you? How are you? How are you?' Replying doesn't diminish the chorus. Alphonse comments that they are like birds, with only one song.

It's a long time since I read Larkrise to Candleford but I remember a passage where somebody gets a bicycle and declares that its chief benefit is the ability to pass through the village without having to stop and talk to everybody. Alphonse, used to a different pace in the town where he now works, apologises for the time it takes to speak with everybody. I think he has to explain who I am and why he's home mid week. But this is where he grew up, where his parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in June, where his wife and three of his four children are. And his field, of which more later perhaps.

Moreover he feels very committed to the place. The living room, in his house with a bare earth floor and no electricity, contains, in addition to enough chairs and stools for the family to eat round the table, a treadle sewing machine and a stack of boards. There's nowhere else to keep them safe, he explains. He will need the boards in a few months' time when he will use a school holiday to make doors and window frames for the building he's constructing in the heart of the village. (Usually such a statement seems to mean employing and supervising labourers rather than doing the work oneself.) The plan is to use the sewing machine, donated by Matt and Gayle when they visited at the time of the wedding jubilee, to train a team of young village women in a marketable skill and to have a sewing shop on the main street. (When we do the opening go-round in the workshop on Tuesday, Alphonse says that what gives him pleasure is helping people develop themselves and improve their lives.) There will also be a section offering secretarial services, photocopying and perhaps internet access. Then his wife will work there instead of being an overworked primary school teacher, doing two shifts every day from 8-5 with classes of up to 50.

We eat goat brochettes and potatoes – the least expensive and the most delicious I've yet had – at around 3. Alphonse would like to pay because I'm his guest, but demurs when I say that eating with him is allowed for in my workshop budget. That was lunch.

We walk on down to the church, where I observe that the sack planted in October is no longer there. Children destroy them, I'm told. There's a lot of bad behaviour. Look at our fine cauliflowers from your seeds, though.

As we return to his house, passing the primary school where his wife comes out to take the money she's forgotten, for shopping on the way home, Alphonse comments that even though she works such long hours she does her own cooking. It would be nice to give somebody a job, but there's so much jealousy around still (envy, perhaps?) that you have to beware of being poisoned by the person who's meant to be working for you and whom you are paying.

It's government policy to declare that all hostility is in the past. It's not done to mention Tutsi and Hutu, though of course people know what they are. (On the other hand, radio and television news often contain reports of groups visiting memorial sites commemorating the genocide of the Tutsi, I've noticed. Augustin, when I asked him, couldn't explain the inconsistency.) Here is evidence of how much the trauma healing work of AGLI (whose volunteer I am) and other agencies, is still much needed. Later I ask the pastor whether there has been a HROC training here. Not yet, he says.

We get back at dusk, and I rest in the dark till supper time. I give the family a solar lamp and they suspend it from a bent nail in the ceiling over the dining table. Aren't we fine, they declare.



AGLI is the African Great Lakes Initiative of Friends Peace Teams. Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC) is an AGLI programme developed in Rwanda and Burundi, based on AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project).