What does it take?

Tuesday 23 October, in Kamembe

Using a coin, I scratch the black covering to reveal the number on my airtime card.Shall I blow it away like everybody else, or brush it into the plastic bin with mesh sides in the corner of my guesthouse room? Will it make any difference?

There is very little litter in Rwanda. Offenders can be fined. Rubbish bins are now appearing on the streets in towns. But the habit of letting drop whatever is not needed - like the top and bottom of the plastic bottle used for the column of stones in the planting sack - is hard to break. Indeed, what to do with a non-returnable water bottle - always plastic, and replacing the recycled glass of Fanta etc - is a problem.

Sweet fizzy drinks are popular for the morning break

Don't put it in the rubbish/compost pit, where in simpler times everything would decay; don't drop it down the toilet, whose contents may now be used on the fields after a year or so; don't burn it and release poisonous fumes. In towns there is now rubbish collection - out of sight, out of mind, as my students in Gisenyi agreed. But yes, they could keep vegetable waste and make a little compost, now they have seen the sack planting. They had never thought about the landfill.

A few years ago at the John Woolman School, near Nevada City in California, above the central valley where a single field can stretch for several miles and the ploughed topsoil blows away on the wind, 14 year old Norah had been set an assignment: to take an everyday object and find out as much as she could about its components. She had chosen a cup of coffee to go (ie takeaway). She could trace the coffee and the milk; she was hopeful that the source of the inks and the cardboard would not be beyond investigation; but the manufacturer of plastic lids refused to reveal anything. She began wondering why.

Particularly since that conversation with Norah, I ask myself more often what irreplaceable resources have gone into what I buy and what I use. How much should I refuse or give up? The plastic bag for carrying my shopping home is easy: take my own bag. Cheap cotton grown with pesticides that poison soil and people is tempting but avoidable: buy only fair trade organic. And what of flying? Never visit Africa or N America again? Holiday only by bus, train and ferry? I'm seriously thinking about it.

Wednesday 24th

For about 30 minutes during the long bus ride on Monday I tried consistently to decipher the project announcement boards along the road. While new road signage is appearing in lower case, these boards are uniformly in block capitals and usually in French.

REPUBLIQUE DU RWANDA

PROVINCE DU SUD (for example)

DISTRICT DE XXXXXXXXXXX (sometimes)

SECTEUR DE YYYYYYYYYYYYY (sometimes)

And only then a description of the work, followed by the agency or agencies responsible.

Here are the ones I noted: wetland management including 7 fish ponds; a rural burial site; 31 hectares of forest regeneration; a block of public latrines, composting style; improvement of a (feeder)road surface; a post office; a modern market; an integrated centre for artisans; extension of a drinking water system; a court house for enforcement of law and justice; a small hydro-electric scheme - and there it is, deep down beside the road.

This board, adjacent to the market in Cyete, is unusual in being in English

Would one wish any of those cancelled, in the interests of resource protection, climate stabilisation, reduction of carbon consumption or anything else? 'Our development here in Rwanda is at an embryonic stage', I was told yesterday by Mobile (pronounced with 3 syllables), the discipline master at Kamembe Friends School and assistant pastor at the Friends Church. For his introductory words to the group of women yesterday we were back with Genesis 2 and I was delighted to hear his interpretation - that where we live is our garden of Eden and we have a responsibility to tend it and use its fruits to give our children good health. He was delighted by Rachel's translation of my notes on vitamins and minerals, with lists of locally available foods. 'How did you learn all this? This is exactly what we need.'*

Mobile, with his son Triomphe, waits with other parents as lunch is prepared on Wednesday

Mobile phones make a huge contribution to everyday life here. At least until the fibre optic cabling throughout the country, laid at President Kagame's personal insistence, is enabled with a reliable power supply, the phone masts also carry internet traffic, so I can read email and post this blog. I'm not seriously worried about the tiny amounts of black dust from the scratch cards, whatever the ingredients. But there is accumulating evidence of the harm done by unseen microwave radiations, not only to human beings but also, for example, to aspens and tadpoles.

Something else I've noticed increasingly over the 5 years I've been visitng Rwanda is mechanisation replacing human labour. The surfaces of many roads outside the arterial network are much improved by stone-lined drains - still dug with picks and cemented stone by stone - and surfaces compacted by steamrollers, often then tarmacked or cobbled. (Are they still called steamrollers when not steam powered?) But where is the work for the displaced labourers, not to mention the cohorts of new secondary school and college graduates? Of course development brings benefits. And of course I think that by my work here I am contributing to the right kind of development through individual empowerment, or I wouldn't be here. But only the most naive would believe that benefit is only or always to the intended beneficiaries rather than to powerful interests and individuals. Ideally I would like to remember, every time I travel or shop, not only what does this give me but also what does it take from our finite planet.

*A significant part of the answer to that question lies in two sources. The first is a comprehensive textbook and practical guide for nutrition workers, now 20 years old but available on Amazon: Nutrition for Developing Countries by Felicity Savage King and Ann Burgess. I'm leaving two copies with Rwandan colleagues and hope they will be well used. The second is the work of Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, a professor at Jomo Kenyatta University of Technology and Agriculture in Nairobi, whose analysis of the nutrient content of African and exotic (eg cabbage) vegetables has enabled me to add many local Rwandan vegetables, often despised, to my lists of beneficial foods.