Where the water bottles go

Today, Tuesday, I've been working with some of the non-teaching staff at CGFK (yes, that's the Friends school). The work went well and I'll write about it soon. First, though, a postscript to yesterday's question about the plastic bottles. This is a far corner of the school grounds, where we're about to prepare a sack for planting tomorrow. I thought I'd capture the compost heap, with its mixture of good compost and all kinds of other rubbish. Then I looked up and here's the answer to the bottle question. Humans instinctively sort things – behind the bottle collection is a cluster of rags, and the rubbish cum compost pit has a corner for paper.

I ask Nicodeme, my translator for the morning, what will happen to the bottles. They'll be burnt, he says, so as not to have to be buried. There's my topic for tomorrow morning then – rubbish.

PS I asked what the bottles were separated for. 'For people to use.' We discussed the hygiene implications of unboiled water in unsterilised bottles. We talked about not burning plastics. What, though, is the best solution?

The gospel of compost

At the English language service at Gasharu Evangelical Friends Church yesterday, those of us who had not brought our own were issued with bibles, to look up relevant verses. The leader of the exercise – a discussion, not a sermon, he insisted – introduced the topic of calling and asked for testimonies. From immediately in front of me the young American, Brad, who has just returned to Rwanda with his new wife to study the language and work as a missionary, told us of a recent encounter with an old friend where he had felt compelled to speak about the place of Jesus at the centre of his life. The insistence on inviting Jesus into one’s heart to cleanse oneself of sin sits ill with me. I’m not an evangelical.

Or am I? Today wasn’t even a working day and already I’ve shown my pictorial guide to compost making to four neophytes. Theogene, director of the adult English and computer school, asked to see photos of my work on one of the teaching computers, prior to introducing the planned subject of conversation. The picture of my first solar panel in Rwanda led to discussion of renewable resources, which led to soil fertility, which led to compost. Out came the diagramme, followed by a photo of the giant heap at the local organic training institute.

T and I had the planned conversation about language teaching methods and resources – not an area of familiarity for me, though I have promised to consult on recommendations. We listened to speeches on School Teaching (or School Teachers’) Day. After a lunchtime ‘snack’ of kebabs and roast potatoes, we shifted from our tables while the restaurant floor was swept more or less clear of rainwater from a torrential downpour. As we regrouped I was handed to Antoine, head of the Friends school and my host, and his table of local education officials. My neighbour asked me what I was doing in Rwanda. I answered briefly. Could I advise him on how to make his small garden productive? I fished out of my rucksack the laminated sheet on compost. He passed it round the table to his two colleagues. Each studied it attentively. Each committed to adopting a new approach to vegetable waste. Dare I claim four converts?

What to drink?

Well, as a first decision, no alcohol while I'm a volunteer with AGLI. The prohibition is in the standard volunteer contract and it's not a problem. I do drink wine and beer normally (ie both in my normal life and at what from my perspective are normal levels). On Saturday afternoon, after market shopping and a drive round some outlying parts of Kigali, Antoine took me for a drink. On the deck of the golf club, with a view of some of the best grown eucalyptus I've seen here, we shared a pot of good coffee, surrounded by men from various countries and continents, drinking beer and speaking various languages very loudly. I commented to Antoine that I could see why Rwanda Yearly Meeting forbids alcohol. So do the American YM's, he replies. Yes, that's still true of the evangelical yearly meetings though not the liberal ones, including Britain. I say that I like to drink wine at home. He immediately offers to buy me a glass – he wouldn't mind. I decline.

I hope our coffee is Rwandan but it may well not be. It is possible to buy Rwandan ground coffee or beans in Kigali in airtight bags like the packets at home. However, any coffee I have been offered in a house is Nescafe, in a small tin, labelled in English and Swahili, produced in Kenya and promising 31 cups. I watched an item on Rwandan TV earlier in the year where a representative from the East African coffee federation, which Rwanda hopes to join, was lamenting the complete lack of a coffee culture in Rwanda. If young well-educated people would start asking for proper coffee it would become fashionable and that would raise awareness among producers, he said. I report the item to Antoine, who says it is only educated people who drink any kind of coffee, or indeed tea. In the countryside people drink water or beer. That's home-brewed banana beer unless they're very rich or extravagant.

A couple of months ago two people who know of my interest in Rwanda drew my attention to an article in the Waitrose Supermarkets' magazine about how a tea co-operative here is the sole source of Yorkshire Gold Tea. The article commended the enterprise for helping heal the wounds of genocide by enabling mutual development. The TV programme about coffee said producers, many of whom are small-scale farmers with a few bushes, could increase their profit considerably by processing the beans instead of selling the 'cherries'. That too would require the establishing of co-operatives or something similar.

By chance, in the interval between my composing the previous paragraphs and his one, I have been out to lunch today. The occasion is a public holiday to celebrate school teaching and this is its first year. A large group of teachers from several local schools, who convened this morning at CGFK for a dance display (which I missed) and speeches, went on to lunch at a restaurant down the hill. I sat with Theogene (imagine the accents please), the director of the adult school with whom I had spent he morning, and two pleasant young teachers, who wanted to practise their English.

Crates of drinks were carried round the tables: 24 soft fizzy drinks, 12 Primus beer and 12 Mutzig (imagine the umlaut). Few people chose beer. I asked why. Well, many fewer people drink alcohol now, I was told. It's become usual in the last 15 years for toasts at weddings, for example, to be drunk in soft drinks. My companions though it was because of the spread of protestant strains of Christianity. I said that many Christians in Europe are not against alcohol in moderation. Ah, that's it, they said. Rwandans are not good at moderation. Somebody who drinks one beer (and they're 600 ml bottles) will certainly want another, even at lunch.

The next stage is that now many people choose water instead of a sweetened drink. Water requested instead of a coke is always in a plastic bottle, while coke and its cousins are in re-usable glass bottles.

In the household where I am staying , as in the last one, tap water is boiled for drinking. Do people drink tap water? All educated people boil it. Why? There's a slight risk of worms, but more of typhoid. No, typhoid isn't common, but you should avoid it if you can.

It's sad that the price of avoiding typhoid and tooth decay is a growing mountain of one-trip plastic bottles in a country where non-biodegradable plastic bags are banned. I ask who profits from the growing sales of drinking water. There are two bottling plants in Rwanda but you can be pretty sure they're not owned by Rwandans.

Pictorial evidence

Last night my attempt to add a couple of photos to my text was timed out. I'm trying again. The sack looks very sad to me, but I'm told there were tomatoes on the top as well as the ring of cabbages at ground level. I shall be interested to see whether last night's long and heavy rain proves stimulus enough for the side shoots of the cabbage plants to grow.

You'll just have to take my word for the solar panel. It was out of sight as we walked along the lane from the house, and this was the only glimpse from the car taking us back to town. The pole to the left of the panel holds a TV aerial.

It's possible that by next time I shall have found out how to edit pictures on my netbook but for now I can send only the crude images. I hope they're better than nothing.

What has happened?

I have come to the end of two days of revisiting people and places. Old friends, new understanding.

Yesterday morning the first visit was to Mwana Nshuti, the training school which is one of he programmes of Rwanda Yearly Meeting. I see most of the sacks - one quite collapsed, others the worse for wear but still with remains of cabbages and spinach. Jonas, the school director, is enthusiastic about quantity and quality. (In the next two days several people tell me of sharing the abundant cabbages.) He shows me a dry mound where a second compost heap dried out after the rain stopped in May. The pit dug with my supervision for the first heap has a little burnt refuse in the bottom but J assures me they will reconstitute it once the rain comes.

Once the rain comes... The 'long rains' used to arrive pretty reliably at the beginning of September. The Kigali region had a first light shower on the 28th and no more yet. Today it clouded up and the wind blew in the middle of the day, but the moisture stayed stubbornly in the clouds. Now as I write in the early evening thunder is rolling but no rain falling.

Yesterday afternoon I went by bus with Musafiri, my teaching partner in February, to Shyorongi to talk with as many of that group as could come at a day's notice to a meeting at 3 in the afternoon. More than a dozen turn up. These are serious young adults with livelihoods to establish and several of them are students of agriculture or trainee teachers. Two of them speak good English and we have a wide-ranging discussion of world politics (especially 'Yes we can' Obama and how much difference he might make) while waiting for latecomers. Then Musafiri asks for individuals to report their experiences with the sacks. Four describe successes and failures – the beetroots weren't red hough the leaes wre delicious, the tomatoes were very small (I had chosen a dwarf variety to avoid overbalancing), green peppers and spinach were the most successful. On balance, I ask, would they recommend this technique. Definitely yes. I don't think they were just being polite. In two weeks' time I'm to go back and make a demonstration keyhole garden for the community centre. We talk through what will be needed – string and pegs, stakes, compost, enriched topsoil, dry grass or banana leaves. They will invite the president of the district.

Introducing my programme of visits today to 4 individual women, Cecile told me they all wanted advice on what to do in the dry season. After a moment of panic that I am out of my depth in all this drought, I thought of several topics for useful conversation.

At the first house, ten minutes' drive and ten minutes' walk from Friends Peace House, most of the time is taken up with how pleased we are to see each other again and how resistant the young are to eating a healthy range of vegetables. The second host is an enterprising woman who sold a parcel of land near town, saved and invested and now has the only electricity in the extensive village, from a solar panel on her roof. She observes that crops in the ground last longer than in the sacks when everything dries out. It is a common theme that the soil in the sacks gets as hard as concrete. More compost in the mix, I suggest, and remind everybody to use the water from the washing up, for example. Does she put her vegetable peelings in the compost? Only after they've been through the goats or the cow!

At the third house there is a good heap of mature compost and a piece of ground prepared for planting - once the rain comes. I show some photos of precision watering from a bag or bottle with a tiny hole. (Expecting an English speaking guide and not a French one, I'm not carrying my dictionary and can't remember the vocabulary to ask if there's enough dew to channel onto seedlings, as I saw in Israel many years ago.) Water is thirty minutes' walk away, and longer uphill to bring it home. Nobody would pour it on the ground after that. Cisterns to collect surplus water in the rainy season are too expensive to contemplate; there is no ground water to pump up. This is how it is and we're used to it, the women say. My first feeling is of disappointment. Then I realise that an advisor from a warmer climate could find English allotments in winter quite disappointing.

One more visit in the afternoon. It's to Solange, the young FPH worker whose wedding I attended in February. She's laid off, like all the HROC team, for lack of funding, but we don't discuss that. She is eager to show me her sack garden, made after looking at what the group had done in February. At last, evidence that with watering it is possible to keep going through the dry season. A local variety of spinach spills down the sides. A second sack is filled, ready for planting when the rain comes. S has no compost. She would like to star making some and looks at my diagramme and the photos from my visit to the Gako organic farming training institute. We discuss placing the sacks close to the house to avoid some of the strong sun. I advise using soil to cover the compost heap if it is smelly and attracting flies.

It all comes back to compost.


PS I'm posting at 9.30 on Friday evening and it's been raining for an hour and a half.

Beginning again

Beginning again

Arriving at Friends Peace House to discuss the programme for this, my second visit, I look for the six bag gardens filled and planted by a women's group in February. No trace remains. Ah well! I had been warned that some projects had not survived the months without rain. This was far from an ideal location, under a tin roof beside the car park of a place where nobody lives and even waste water from the kitchen is available only intermittently.

Five of us convene to plan my month's activities. We work mostly in French, but swap to English for me or Kinyarwanda for the others as necessary, to make sure we have understood each other.

At the end of an hour we have agreed six two-day workshops, various other sessions and a couple of days plus a weekend for me to follow up leads from my researches into African indigenous vegetables (AIV's), to visit a British Quaker VSO worker and the VSO office, and to see if I can do anything useful towards getting Antoine – my host this time and the clerk of Rwanda Yearly Meeting as well as head of the Friends School here – a visa to come to Britain Yearly Meeting next year after this year's refusal. (They told him at the British Embassy in Kigali that papers are sent to Uganda for decision.)

For the remainder of this week I shall be visiting and/or discussing last time's work. I am assured that at Mwana Nshuti, the teen project down the hill from Friends Peace House, the bag gardens have survived and the compost is ready for use. They are eager to add home produced vegetables to their school lunches. Perhaps I can nudge the wish into fulfilment.

My first new activity will be going to choir practice on Friday evening at Gasharu Friends Church, where there is a weekly service in English, so the singers and I can size each other up before I teach them one or more pieces later in the month when a special commitment is over. I meet the young choir master, Jean-Baptiste, who is in charge of a new library – called 'Children's Peace Library' though I spot Harry Potters and other general materials, all in English. His readers are mostly children from 3 local primary schools, including the Friends school. I suppose he is employed by the church though I don't get a chance to ask. We exchange phone numbers: fortunately my sim card and calling credit have carried over from February.

It's good to be back. Yesterday I was driven straight from the airport to a lunch meeting of the committee developing adult classes in English and computing – a project of the Friends Church drawing on some resources from the school and Peace House. The coincidence of the meeting with my need for lunch was not planned, yet I knew 8 of the 10 people present. I was able to contribute thoughts on accreditation (local, to raise the profile of the church, or linked to an international structure to enhance employment prospects?) as well as my proposal for students (including school teachers) to improve their English while engaging with topics relevant to Growing Together. A day to work with the adult school director is now on my programme.

I have walked back to Antoine's house, round the corner from where I stayed last time with Jeanette, whose husband Bosco is now studying human rights in Tanzania on a German government scholarship. Slightly apprehensive about remembering the route, I am relieved to see the charcoal seller's familiar corner. When A comes home for lunch I show him the laminated sheets on AIV's, prepared for me by Anne and Rob. One in particular interests him. He could take me to a restaurant where they serve it. It tastes bitter. The old people like it still.

Home till next time

My friends in Rwanda asked what would be growing in my own vegetable garden when I got home. This is what I found.



Starting a keyhole garden on my allotment


It's three weeks since I arrived home. Already I'm planning further visits in October 2009 and February 2010. Between now and then I shall be giving talks - with plenty of photos; also following leads on urban food production, soil fertility, and links with agencies in Rwanda; looking into getting charitable status in the UK for AGLI's work; and giving critical thought to what I should be offering as a European amateur volunteer.

Meantime there's my own allotment, where I'm applying more of the techniques I was teaching in Rwanda. Yesterday I started building a keyhole garden. Now I'm waiting for rain to settle the soil.

Do ask me if you'd like an informal talk or a formal presentation to any interested group. Do write if you have any input to take my planning forward. Don't expect much in the way of posts till after the summer.