Food and water

It's a year since I stayed with Gaudence and her husband Augustin. Like Rachel, my host in February, she is a keen grower of vegetables. It was her bumper crop of basil cooked communally with the N American women last time. She and Rachel together are taking the initiative in continuing Growing Together when I finish.

So I wasn't altogether surprised this morning to see at the back of her house a new-style tiered kitchen garden, with new season's green pepper and aubergine plants peeping through the moist half-rotted mulch. The rain came late last month but it is here now. (Twenty minutes was added to the delay in getting into the air terminal in Kigali yesterday while a bus was sent for to protect disembarking passengers from a downpour. Those going on to Entebbe were not well pleased.)

Conversation is sparse between us without a translator, though her English is better than my Kinyarwanda. With a broad smile she led me round the side of the house, past the polythene sided rainwater store, to a neat row of four sacks, generously planted with isogi (an African leaf vegetable), leaf celery, spinach beet, piri-piri (hot pepper), basil and probably more. It really does seem to be true that even people with enough land like planting in sacks. We walk round to the front, where newly pruned bushes of moringa and another edible shrubs are interspersed with maize, fronted by a row of young papaya. I'd like to get a close look at the macadamia sapling, but the ground is too muddy.

My first appointment is with Bucura David, in charge of the AGLI work in Rwanda, to talk timetable and money.

As I cross the yard of the primary school opposite the Friends compound at Kagarama, I notice a mound about the size of Gaudence's new structure, surrounded with freshly dug earth. I greet the group standing round it, including a young white man. I ask if I may take a photo. 'Would you like to look inside?' he asks. I didn't know there would be an inside. However, the structure is not beaten earth but mud-stained concrete. The hole in the centre gives onto a deep chamber, hollowed to a width of about 3 metres. A rainwater cistern! When asked what would help Rwanda most, I often propose water retention. Here it is in action, directed by a young man from Bristol called Toby, a garden construction engineer, working with Water for Life. 'Are you working for Christ?' he asks. 'Well, sort of,' I mumble, Quaker fashion. 'There is the church I work with, over the road.' My credentials are enhanced when Josine, the deputy head here and participant in several of my workshops, comes to greet me in lively French.

Over the road, David proposes postponing a two-day workshop in a remote location till my next visit; I suggest a re-arrangement that would avoid my working two 6-day weeks consecutively; he tells me to bring the proposal to the planning meeting this afternoon. He fails to bring up the budget on his laptop and emails me later that there's a 25% discrepancy between my expected budget for the QPSW funded Batwa project and the money wired from AGLI in the USA. Fortunately I have cash for such contingencies.

By 5pm I've re-established my dongle for internet connection, failed to get a US phone to accept an African SIM card, arrived late for the 3pm planning meeting, which I hate, after one of those public transport stories you don't need to hear, and returned to Gaudence's garden on my way into the house. She is at the door. I ask if I may thin the forest of tiny lettuces. We could eat them for supper, I say.

I pull out several handfuls. Already some of the outer leaves have rotted from lack of air; the roots are coated with mud. Clearly, I need water to prepare them. Gaudence goes inside to get a key, brings a jug and a bowl, and makes her way round the side of the house, presumably to the stopcock. Water pours out of the tap above the sink on the outside wall. I fill bowl and jug, but can't turn off the tap. The flow can be slowed, but only by pushing down on the tap as well as turning it. Gaudence goes back round the side and eventually the flow subsides. I don't want to embarrass her by offering to pay for a repair, though it's tempting.

How long would it take me to get used to such as routine? And how much more inhibiting would it be if there were no stopcock in the garden but only a communal tap several hundred yards away? Or a muddy pond, as I have seen in some places being used to draw water and wash motor bikes. Would I want to eat salad and encourage others to do so then?

Ready for supper time is a small but perfectly formed salad of baby lettuce leaves, rocket, basil, leek green, parsley and celery top, all from the garden, with an onion and a tomato added and a little salt. Also enough water to drink and later to wash in. We are blessed.

Link to my programme for Oct-Nov

http://www.ealingquakers.org.uk

I hoped this would be a link to my programme for Oct-Nov 2011 on the Rwanda page of Ealing Quaker website. The link doesn't seem to be working, but here's the address.

Busy (Now with photos and video)

Let me tell you why I'm too tired to write anything more inspired than a bare account of my week.

Last weekend was quiet. Since then it's been all go. On Monday and Tuesday I worked for the first time with a group of women at Kanombe, one of the Kigali Friends churches. Everything went smoothly, but it was very hot and dusty.

On Monday evening I went to supper with Brad and Chelsea, a young American Evangelical Friends Mission couple. They are working on a new programme, brought from Uganda by Debby Thomas, who was struck by the differences between neighbouring villages using the programme and not using it. Called Discipling for Development (D for D), it aims to build on participants' felt needs rather than delivering ideas and training devised elsewhere. Perhaps there is scope for cooperation between Growing Together and D for D. We exchanged blog and email addresses. I was delighted to receive a copy of a short book self-published by Meg Guillebaud, an episcopalian pastor in Byumba whom I met last year. Entitled The Bible and the environment, it's also available in Kinyarwanda, has a wide range of up-to-date references and draws largely on Rwandan examples. I'm thinking of getting multiple copies for use among Friends here – I'll email Meg when I get home and find her address.

On Tuesday evening I took my host family of David, Rachel and Dina for a meal at a restaurant where tables are out of doors, each in a bower of trees and flowering plants, under a new moon and brilliant stars. David remarked that his vision for the church and conference centre at Gasharu was for a setting like this. The macadamia tree will be a small contribution.

The workshop on Wednesday and Thursday was with the women at Gahanga, first visited last October, and Rachel was my translator and co-trainer. Wednesday is local market day and we shopped together, prepared food and eventually ate it, delayed by the first real rain of the season. (I filmed the rain and will make a first attempt to attach a video clip. No, I've waited for 30 minutes and it won't finish uploading. I'll add some photos instead.)
Gaudance finishing the potatoes



My plate holds, among other things, macaroni cheese, stir fry veg, two salads, macadamia nuts, avocado, an extra slice of cheese - and no means of eating any of it except with fingers.<


On Thursday it rained solidly – and deafeningly on the tin roof of the church – for four hours from ten o'clock, so not much teaching was possible. Washing up on Thursday before the rain

On Wednesday evening I didn't go out. On Thursday I took Ruth and Krystan, plus baby Misha, to a Chinese restaurant they recommended, and which turned out to be one of the best I've ever experienced, catering for the many Chinese working here mostly as managers for engineering projects.

Today, Friday, I finished my accounts, matching up receipts, bus tickets etc and totalling expenses for all nine trainings. Then there was the evaluation of this visit and planning for my next. Then I took Antoine out to lunch after concluding various bits of business relating to the English and Rwandan Friends schools. Then I talked Josephine through my accounts and handed them over before being interviewed by Elin Henrysson, the QPSW worker in Burundi employed by AGLI to evaluate last year's Batwa project. Then home to TV news of the earthquake and tsunami, supper, and an hour going through a project proposal with Rachel, possibly to be called 'Firm foundations for future families' or 5F.

Seeds and nuts

One of the four kinds of food which in combination can provide protein as good as meat, together with grains, dairy and legumes, is a puzzle to all my groups. 'What are nuts?' 'What do you mean by seeds?'

Sunflower seeds are said to be used as a paste in sauce/gravy; I have not yet found any to buy. Sesame and pumpkin seeds I brought with me from England. They are viewed with suspicion and tasted reluctantly, even when toasted. It's sometimes conceded that pumpkin and similar seeds are eaten in Congo, but peeling them is very troublesome. I was once offered sesame seeds roasted with peanuts as a snack and have located them in the two big supermarkets and two Indian shops, both raw and browned. They are called 'simsim' and seem all to come from Kenya.

The same shops also stock almonds and cashews, but they are very expensive and probably bought only by ex-pats. I had searched in vain for macadamia nuts till Matt told me to look with the potato crisps and not with the raw nuts. Nakumat has five or six different brands, some organic. I was on the trail because somebody had mentioned that macadamia nuts are being introduced here. When I started asking around, a couple of gardeners asked if I could find seeds or saplings for them.

Driving with Antoine on Thursday I noticed a new hotel on the outskirts of town was named Macadamia. He told me he has five young trees in the garden of his little country house. There was a government project in Eastern Province to introduce them a couple of years ago. He doesn't know when they will start to yield.

We had been making various plans for my visit to his family on Friday. The tea plantation owner with an interest in fuel-efficient cooking would not be at home. Much of the day was taken up with a visit from the head of a school near Ruhengeri who brought letters and photos from some of her students for an exchange with a London primary school. At half past three, with three hours till dark, we set out to find a nursery selling macadamia trees.

The first site was one I'd been past several times. They had various kinds of citrus as well as papaya and mango but no macadamia. I bought two small orange trees – a valencia and a mandarin – for Antoine’s town garden. He got instructions for driving to the place where we'd find the macadamia.

We soon turned off the main road, heading towards the organic training institute at Gako that I'd visited two years ago. Before we reached it A asked for more directions. We retraced our route, turned down a narrow track and ended in a school yard. Various children and adults shrugged their shoulders. On the way back to our road we noticed the nursery and primary school was named 'La Pepiniere' (sorry, no accents), which is the name for a plant nursery in Kinyarwanda as well as in French.

The next side turning took us past the organic institute, where the gatekeeper confirmed we were headed in the right direction. I don't know whether A was warned about the state of the road or not. I do know we lurched several times at angles that I thought must result in overturning. Deep puddles sucked at the wheels. Somehow we kept going, down to the valley bottom, across bridges made of tree trunks, and part way up the other side.

Would we have to return by this route, I asked. 'Oh no, there's probably a better road.' I hoped so.

The track broadened out in a village. Further directions took us parallel with the hillside, through more troughs, along the edge of more drops, past more excited children. Then we saw a large area covered with black netting. We've found it, said A.


By now it was after five. Rain threatened. Antoine stopped the car and a solitary worker appeared. Following him we walked past thousands of macadamia saplings, perhaps as many as fifty thousand. Another worker joined us, then another, but the office was unstaffed when we reached it. 'This is a government project', they said. 'We don't sell to anybody.' Antoine quietly asked how many I wanted. 'Well, three would be good. I'd settle for one or pay for ten if necessary.'

I wanted to plead my case but A's body language said I'd better keep quiet and let him do the negotiating. He took his time. One of the workers phoned the manager. I went to photograph the notice board. When I returned the deal was done. We could take three. I paid generously 'for the phone calls'.

We didn't need to turn the car. The rain, as all too often this year, didn't fall. After perhaps three or four miles of adequate dirt road, passing macadamia trees, we rejoined the main road a mile or two from where we'd first turned off.
Antoine said he could do with a drink – non-alcoholic, of course. I said I'd be happy to treat him. We went to the very restaurant where I'd bought drinks and brochettes two years ago. Sitting outside in the fading light, we ate a fish kebab each and drank non-alcoholic beer before returning to letter writing and supper.

Next morning on the way up to the teachers' house, where I was to borrow a couple of novels and Sandrine a couple of DVDs, Antoine pointed out a macadamia tree, about four metres high, behind a garden wall. I wondered how they'd managed to buy it. Could there be a nursery selling the trees somewhere? 'They must be part of the government project', said Antoine.

This morning, Sunday, I bought roasted peanuts and sesame (in packages with Rwandan phone numbers) to add protein to the meal to be prepared by the women at Gahanga on Wednesday. I also got roasted and salted macadamia nuts, and sesame bars with jaggery (what's that?), sugar and edible oil – Kenyan again. Perhaps in October I'll find somebody growing simsim.

Changing minds

Thursday 3 March
Only on the last of three sessions with a group of women from the Friends Church at Katarara, in the famine-prone Bugesera district south east of Kigali, do I remember to do the formal introductions every group expects. On Tuesday communication had broken down and the women had not been invited to the expected morning session but were recruited for a rather rushed afternoon; on Wednesday we started with an hour's walk in full sun to visit three participants' kitchen gardens; on Thursday morning, looking round the group as they sing and pray, noting which babies and toddlers are here and which not, I realise I don't know any names.

One young woman has taken my attention at several points. She was the most assiduous wielder of the hoe to break up compost and mix it with topsoil on Tuesday when we filled the demonstration sack. On Wednesday she stepped into her family field and pulled me a bunch of onions, crisp and fragrant, before I could protest. In the discussion about restoring soil fertility she volunteers that her family store and use their toilet waste and have found their yields better than with chemical fertiliser – the first person I've met who does this. (on the final drive back into Kigali I notice a signboard for ecosan training - that's composting toilets.)

Now I have invited the women to introduce themselves by giving their name and something that they enjoy in their lives. 'My name is Vestine', she says. 'I am HIV positive and I enjoy helping others by speaking openly about my condition.'
Vestine with her gift - sadly I didn't capture her smile


Vestine shows her kitchen garden


In the evenings this week I have been proof reading the final version of Augustin's MA dissertation, which I first saw when I was staying in his family last October. His research project was interviewing members of a particular Friends Church to gain insight into successful and unsuccessful strategies for dealing with the mutually reinforcing problems of poverty and HIV/AIDS. One of his most heartening responses came from a former prostitute who 'came out' about her HIV status, became regular in taking her medication and began to make something of her life – and make an income as a small scale trader - instead of waiting to die. When church members and pastors themselves begin to be open about HIV in themselves and their families, change can happen, Augustin concludes.

I mention to Antoine during the drive back to Kigali that I was surprised by Vestine. She looks so well; she is open to new ideas and asks perceptive questions; she certainly challenges the stereotype of 'AIDS victim'. 'Well yes', he says, 'but that's how it works. When you are sick it's a great relief to have a diagnosis, and talking about your illness is a kind of therapy.' I sometimes forget Antoine is a psychology graduate of the 1980s.

I am more aware this year than previously of people in positions of leadership talking about how the only significant changes to Africa will be changes of mentality. On this morning's drive to Katarara we pass an unusual number of goats – one or two roped, or small flocks herded with sticks, then a large clump of goats and people by the side of the road, then a thinning stream heading away. I often see goats being traded at roadsides and in market pens.

Looking for a local cheese to take to a workshop last visit, I found a firm goats' cheese manufactured in Rwanda. Both the women and the teachers in Katarara have been telling me about the shortage of food round here, and the school has a feeding programme, using donated maize meal, because of the district's famine status. I have already heard that goat's milk is not drunk except occasionally by babies and young children. I invite Antone to comment. 'They won't use it', he says. 'They think the only milk for humans to use comes from cows.'

'But I have bought cheese in Kigali.'

'Oh, that’s only in Kigali, not round here.'

At the end of the workshop with the women I say my usual piece about how they are the experts in their lives while all I can do is bring some ideas they can adopt or reject, preferably after trying them. Telling them this may be the first time they hear this idea which may shock them, I say that in my country goat's milk is expensive and highly prized by some people. They dissolve into giggles. 'How on earth would you milk a goat?'

Antoine and I, later in the journey home, reflect on their response. We have both heard the formulation that a new idea is often ridiculed, then ignored, then opposed and eventually accepted. 'Rwandans do now eat eggs', he observes. (If this remark doesn't make sense, look at the blog entry for October 2010 entitled 'Le Congolais')


Jacqueline models a product of the women's (machine) knitting cooperative


Teachers and primary students in their lunch break


This crop benefits from the hot dry climate

Eating locally

For several years, reading about living off grid, or spending money on nothing but food and transport for a year, or aiming for a zero carbon lifestyle, and watching films along similar lines, I've been wondering if I should try something. I can't give up flying while I'm working in Rwanda twice a year; I'm not even ready to sell my car, though I do use it only two or three times a week now. I do, however, have a reasonably productive allotment and an interest in food miles, food security and good nutrition.

For the last week – mostly in bed by the light of a remarkable solar torch that recharges itself even inside the house - I've been reading Animal, vegetable, miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's account of her family's year in Appalachian Virginia, eating only local produce and raising much of it themselves, both animal and vegetable. At home in suburban London I've been cutting down my supermarket visits, though some items – some cleaning cloths, luxury biscuits for my singing group hosts, interesting spices – are impossible to find in the reducing number of smaller local shops. Ealing has a farmers' market on Saturdays. Is it time to get beyond fantasising and try an experiment?

A year is too much for me. I'm too peripatetic, quite apart from probable failures of will. Could I manage a month, to start with, buying no fruit or veg and only locally raised free-range meat? (No, I'm not a vegetarian. I have spent many years wondering whether the call would come but it doesn't. I try to eat only ethically produced meat, fish and poultry; many of my friends would consider that an oxymoron but I am as I am)

Thinking through my calendar, I can identify four weeks from late June, and/or probably another four from early August, where my chance of success would be greatest. Would anybody like to join me? It would be for each individual to identify your own parameters. Mine would be buying no fruit or veg or prepared meals, but allowing bread from the farmers' market and the cooking ingredients already in my store cupboard – and fairtrade coffee! Yours might be no plastic packaging, or no supermarkets, or only foods identifiable as coming from your own country or region or locality, to give some examples.

Barbara Kingsolver writes at the end of her book, which I hadn't yet reached when I started writing this proposal, about the growing popularity in the USA of a hundred-mile challenge – to consume only food produced within that radius. She also deals robustly with the objection that whatever one does won't be enough. If your sedentary friend had been diagnosed with a heart condition, would you criticise them, she asks, for starting to exercise only three days a week instead of all seven?



Here in the Friends compound in Kagarama, four of us have enjoyed a delicious meal comprising two cooked dishes prepared using a combination of passive and conventional heating methods, three salads and one of the best pineapples I have ever eaten. On the other side of the room where I am sitting at my netbook, Rachel and Gaudance, leaders in women's and children's work in the Rwandan Friends Church, are starting to write a project proposal for spreading the information and experience they are getting from the Growing Together in Rwanda project. Country people live surrounded by plenty of vegetables, they say, but they don't know how to use them. In town there is little cultivable land but much could be done with sacks and other containers, once the benefits of eating the produce are understood.

I am fortunate enough to have both the land and the information. Integrity requires that I keep finding things to do, however modest, to help the world move in the right direction.

A missing skill

I often have cause to be grateful for the breadth and depth of my education. But I didn't get any training in project management. I could have done with it today.

After supper last night I packed my bag quite carefully. At breakfast I reminded Rachel of the need for rags. On the way out of the house we collected the basket for the slow cooker and a few more old garments were found to supplement the one old sheet. Too late I thought of explaining that we needed enough rags to fill the basket. On arrival at Kagarama I would give Antoine the flash drive with four files to print, collect the sewing machine from Cassie and set myself up in good time.

Antoine was in his office and I wrote down the name of the file where I had put the documents I wanted printed. The sewing machine from the teachers' house needed a voltage converter too heavy for me to carry. I promised to send somebody.

I found Danzile, the yearly meeting bursar who is one of my students for today, and she sent the cleaner to ask a young man to run the errand. I took the opportunity to post last night's blog and check my email. (Four messages from yesterday have disappeared after I failed to open them. If you wrote to me and haven't had a reply by tomorrow, please re-send.) Fifteen minutes later nothing had appeared so I set off back to the house, scooping up Eduard, who appeared opportunely, and completed that task.

Antoine came with his own flash drive, unable to open mine. The virus it had acquired since last night – presumably from Antoine's computer – vanquished by McAffee, we opened everything, copied across and double checked.

Last year I had several times used the pad of flip chart paper from Jean Baptiste's office. Could I use some today, please? Searching for the one remaining sheet, he found the used remains of many sessions of brainstorming stuffedd into a cupboard. In a moment of inspiration I snaffled them up to supplement the rags.

A board for the tyre cooker was produced and set in a sunny spot. Levelled with broken bricks, it supported the tyre and the sheet of glass. This was the moment I realised that both Rachel and I had forgotten the black cooking pot borrowed from her father and needed to complete the ensemble. She found somebody to fetch it for a payment of 2,000 francs – three times the bus fares and well worth it.

By now it was nearing 10 o'clock, the usual 9am start for this group. Rachel, Gaudance and Danzile were waiting in the shade. For once I wasn't impatient to begin but I was now ready. They came in. The other two were prevented, Marie Rose by a sick child and Josiane by a head teacher who couldn't release her until later. As we started, Antoine brought three of the hoped for print outs. I introduced the idea of the tyre cooker and left them studying the information sheet while I took the pages for photocopying to Jean Baptiste. He was in a meeting but would try to do them before lunch. We set some water in the pot inside the tyre under the sheet of glass.

Settling down to conversation about cooking methods, fuel saving and good nutrition was a relief. By the end of the morning we had also made two insulating cushions for the basket – filled with a mixture of small squares of fabric and screwed up balls of paper.
Gaudance and Danzile struggle to thread the sewing machine needle

Gaudance and Josiane stuffing a cushion

Lunch had been the subject of many inconclusive conversations with Rachel. The group decided they'd be happy with snacks, so a budget was made to send somebody out for a samosa and a chapatti each, a bunch of bananas, two boxes of fruit juice, and a moto ride up the hill with the provisions: about £5 for 5 people. We ate under the trees and reviewed the arrangements for tomorrow morning.

Josine and Gaudance will start the two cooking processes; Rachel and I will be available by phone for any queries before we arrive around 11.30 to start making salads; Danzile is matron of honour at wedding and can't come. Perhaps Marie Rose will be able to leave her child.

At 1.30 we took the basket outside to fill the gaps around the cushions with hay or similar. The grass was thronged with secondary school pupils having a mock election but we managed to scavenge what we needed and ignore the curious stares. We stitched a final cushion and stuffed it with hay to fit closely over the space for the cooking pot. A shopping list was reviewed and finalised. Gaudance will bring basil: she still has some left after trying out the recipes from Wednesday and inviting her neighbours to come and taste. Josiane, who is to shop with me, revealed that she won't be free till 5. (Shopping has to be completed today because the market will be closed by umuganda in the morning.)

'What are you going to do with the hot water?' Gaudance asked, referring to the product of the trial of the tyre cooker. 'Why don't we put it in the hay box to see how warm it is in the morning?' Ah, a true scientist.

It is now 4pm. The photocopies didn't materialise and Jean Baptiste has locked up and gone to take choir practice for Sunday. I don't know if he will be here tomorrow but probably not. I am grateful for the easy hospitality of the teachers, where, having commandeered a young man to carry the converter and sewing machine, I can sit on a sofa with a glass of drinking water and type this piece. I've more or less caught up on the emails after Wednesday's busyness and yesterday's poor internet service. Perhaps I should be looking for project management by distance learning.


PS
At 5pm Therese was back in the office and did the photocopying. At 6.15 - presumably after choir practice - Baptiste rang full of apopogies for forgetting the photocopying. By then the shopping was completed and I was on my way home, squashed in a taxi-bus that seemed smaller than ever but really perfectly OK.