Some troubles among the Twa (now with photos)

Written Weds-Thurs, 27-28 Oct; posted Sat 30 Oct

Since my first Growing Together workshops, I have always given seeds to the participants. They are lightweight, inexpensive, relevant to the work and straightforwardly symbolic. Even when I give enough for several packets per participant, they are opened, wondered at, sometimes sniffed, and shared around. For the first of the Twa villages the groups devised a system whereby a responsible person would be designated to share out the remaining seeds fairly after the sacks had been planted by people's houses.

When we returned for the second week, we heard rumours that seed had not been fairly shared. Was it the fault of the responsible person elected by the group? Arriving at the fourth village, adjacent to the first, Solange was approached by several members of the first group to ask me for extra seeds. She learned the story. While the responsible person was at school, a participant had approached his wife, who handed over the packets. And despite repeated protestations he was keeping them all for himself. I had no spare seeds with me; I arranged with Solange that she could take fresh supplies next month to the follow up day, to give to those who had kept their word and bought a sack.

This week's work is with two groups in the same resettlement village. Today was the first day for the second group. Other groups have settled quickly after the introductions to the first task – revising the lessons from the HROC workshop about trust and mistrust, trauma and trauma healing. These were restless. Soon the cause of their agitation was revealed. Two of the sacks planted the day before had been stolen in the night. This village is a long way from anywhere else – it had to be neighbours who had stolen from neighbours. What could be done to stop it happening again? Was it even worth carrying on with the practical work of preparing and planting the sacks if they would also be stolen?

The shock and loss were traumatic, if on a small scale. We agreed to discuss the problem in the afternoon, once people had had a chance to talk it through. Our team of three were clear we needed to model the good listening promoted as a tool for healing. An exercise from Joanna Macy's work on 'Despair and empowerment' came into my head. We could invite anybody who wanted to express their feelings about the outrage to do so and all the rest of us would affirm the speaker with 'Indeed, it is so' or something similar. I don't know why that didn't happen, but instead there was a conversation about whether the thief should be handed over to the authorities for punishment when found, or whether there should be an internal community process of discussion and reparation – a kind of Gacaca.

We moved on to planning for the next day's work – planting in small groups at one chosen house for each group. In previous workshops the decision had been made on practical grounds – who lived close enough together for the trainers to move between houses. Here all the houses were close together, with identical facilities. Dividing into groups and then cooperating had proved a difficult concept to convey. Last week, also, we had to get the four householders to stand and then direct each 'team' to stand together in a different corner of the room. Eventually this time we got to four groups with five women in each. Now to decide which house to go to. One group settled quickly while the others thrashed about, getting noisier and noisier, babies and mothers alike.

Solange tried to impose order by shouting. Hopeless. After checking with Rachel, I suggested a version of a technique I've sometimes used or been part of. In Quaker circles it's usually described simply as 'having some silence'. Here I suggested prayer, and I began, asking for guidance and a spirit of cooperation. Rachel translated, then added some words of her own. We waited for perhaps a minute.

Now please would they go back into the groups, then come and sit quietly upholding the others once they had decided. One more group found agreement, two still failed. Exhaustion was apparent. We would go home and hope for something better by tomorrow. On the way out of the village, we briefed Jean Claude, the community leader.

[Returning on Thursday, we caught up on the story. J-C rearranged the groups Solange had arbitrarily imposed, separating family members known to make trouble. The sanction he suggested was that we would work only with the groups who had agreed a location. They would then teach the others, after we'd left, when they were ready to work together. His strategy worked.

The women told us they had felt bad when we left while they were quarreling. J-C said he'd asked each new group to base themselves at the house of the person who was finding it hardest to accept the situation, on the grounds that this was the person with most to learn about cooperation and they should start with her.]


Caption: Rachel (l) and Solange at work once we get going



Caption: Some of our onlookers



Later, in the restaurant as we wait for our food, fits of laughter seize my three companions – Rachel, translator and fellow gardener, Solange N, the HROC facilitator who has worked most with the Twa, and Edouard, the Yearly Meeting driver loaned to us for the HROC car. I wait in hope of a translation. 'We know it's sad and serious, but isn't it ridiculous that men should get up in the night to steal as sack full of earth and stones! Do they think they'll find riches resulting from the touch of a white person's hand?'

More from the Batwa (now with photo)

More about the Batwa

I tried to come without romantic notions. I do feel a deep sadness at the way the dominant culture, now pretty much worldwide, continues to destroy the remnants of other ways. But my pity, my anger that so much of what the world may need again has been destroyed, won't help.

Hearing that Batwa in Rwanda traditionally worked as potters, I thought it might be viable for them to develop and market the cooler made from two concentric vessels, known as the Zeer pot. Ordinary containers for water or for cooking are cheaply available from other modern materials, but fridges depend on scarce electricity. Such a project could be next year's continuation. In one of the villages above Ruhengeri last week I saw a simple, elegant water pot lying close to the site for a sack. 'Where did that come from?' I asked. 'Oh, those Batwa down near the lake make them, and sell them very cheaply. They're not like us. We're getting developed – we work in building, for example. But they're not developed at all.'

Yesterday, Monday 25th, we began 4 days' work with two consecutive groups who have been recently settled in a kind of model village, built by a Swedish/Norwegian government sponsored programme. The houses have rendered walls and sheet metal roofs (the kind the president thinks every house should have), rain water collection, toilets, frequent trainings from NGOs. But they don't want to be here.

The land is parched, recently appropriated from what should be the National Park of Akagera, feebly fenced with two strands of barbed wire, and gardens are vulnerable to incursions from they don't know what animals – probably zebra and giraffe. At least it has rained a couple of times.

Today was stage 2 – going round to 4 houses where groups of 5 participants fill and plant their own sack. Outside house three an old woman was sitting on the ground with 4small clay pots drying. I asked to buy one or two, from courtesy really as I wanted to photograph her. She was sorry but she had none fired – getting wood is hard for her. She makes pots when somebody brings her clay from the valley bottom, because she's too weak to work the ground and she has to do something. God will take her soon and she's not worried because she's led a good life and never drunk beer or smoked tobacco.


I ask her where she learnt. From my parents. Has she taught any of her children? No, they're not interested.

Back in the church at the end of the day's work I show her photo to the group. It may have been preachy but I had to say to them that perhaps some of them might want to retain this skill from their old culture even while developing new opportunities to live in modern Rwanda. Tourism is developing and there will be a market, too, if they can hang on.

I'm reminded that the last Native American in Yosemite died only in 1978. By 2000 they had made a little museum behind the post office there, reconstructing what has been lost.

Solar devices

I've had a week of not being able to post, and without much email contact either. But I'm well and happy and hoping to catch up. I won't post the pic of Simon in the rain till I've got more text on its way.

I've written before about the low take-up of solar panels, even in the many places where there is no grid to supply electricity. (Part of Rwanda's new 7 year plan is to connect 50% instead of the current 10%.) When I ask I'm told it is too expensive, and anyway it's only seen as a stopgap before the proper supply arrives. So what about other solar devices?

There's Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) with two campuses in Kigali, prominent in internet searches. After the usual preliminaries I visited on a week ago. The usual preliminaries comprised several earlier attempts to interest anybody in facilitating a visit for me and an eventual personal contact.

The contact is through Augustin, my host for this visit, but he's in South Africa representing the Evangelical Friends Church of Rwanda at a conference of African protestant churches. So he arranges for Antoine to take me. We phone ahead, phone again from the car park, ask a guard for directions and eventually find the person we are looking for. He turns out to be attached to a unit working on entrepreneurial opportunities for young people and knows nothing about the solar and other technologies to improve cooking, illustrated and described on the printouts I am carrying. He does, however, take us to the director.

The director is clearly not very interested in us, but perhaps etiquette demands that he accompany us round the workshops. He shows us iron or steel chambers of various sizes – smallest 30 litres – for institutional cooking, insulated with mud bricks, and a bread oven similarly constructed. He is visibly disappointed when neither Antoine nor I express any interest in buying. (They do provide school lunches in several of Antoine's schools, but he considers the price totally unrealistic.)

Do they have any examples of the solar cookers whose descriptions I show him? He summons somebody to bring one and opens it for me to photograph, saying that to be honest it doesn't work very well. OK, thank you, and what about the one I have here on my paper? Oh, he thinks the students dismantled it and haven't yet made copies.

He is able to show us some experimental designs for small fuel-efficient cookers, and a larger two-pan standing-height version with a flue, that can be fitted in a kitchen and beautified with tiles.

Although I've forgotten to bring the printed information, I ask about the 'fireless cooker' one of my students says she has seen here. It's a kind of haybox inside a basket, and promoted by Practical Action, among others. It's also known as the peacemaker. No, they don't have that. I suppose it may be on the other campus.

According to information from May 2010, the federal government of Rwanda has officially approved and recommended a design known as the rocket stove. It uses much less wood than traditional open three-stone fires or the small charcoal braziers. KIST doesn't have one. I'm still hunting for shops or market stalls selling such a thing, and haven't found anybody using one at home. So no solar cookers and not much in the way of newer, safer and cleaner ways of using conventional fuels either.

Alongside KIST, a solar bakery project in Ruhengeri is also described on the internet and mentioned on many sites. On Monday morning, with 4 days ahead of me, I start asking seriously whether anybody knows anything about it. One of the pastor's sons finds a video clip on the internet site and lo, they recognise one of the widows in whose interest True Vineyard Ministries are developing several projects. The widow provides the name of a pastor and eventually – on Wednesday afternoon – a phone number is found.

The researches have taken a long time, our day is running late because this morning's students were two and a half hours late (because their food handouts had arrived and had to be collected), rain is coming, and I'm afraid that in the end the weather will beat me. Solange and I catch a bus before the heaviest of the rain arrives, and she comes with me in a taxi to the rendezvous with a young worker, Simon, who speaks good English as well as French, we're told. We phone from the taxi, wait, phone again, wait some more, and Simon arrives. Solange goes back into town in the taxi to an appointment with a friend. Simon and I, under umbrellas, pick our way to the project.

Simon is polite and charming – a sociology graduate in his first paid job and a pastor's son. He has no idea why I'm here. I tell him I want to see the solar bakery. 'You can look at it, but it doesn't work.' We go into a yard where half a dozen women are carding and spinning sheep's wool on a reasonably dry verandah.

There is the oven, imported from the USA by the American woman who set up the project and visits from time to time. It's on a trolley, under a roof of banana leaves topped with a UNHCR tarpaulin. It can be wheeled out when the sun shines; it swivels and various shiny plates tilt. But this is the coolest and wettest part of the country, and it simply doesn't get hot enough for long enough. They haven't yet managed to move it to somewhere hotter and drier, in the south or east. So don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Friends Peace House newsletter piece

Ruth Plett and Krystan Palinkowski, Canadian Mennonite capacity builders at FPH, are encouraging the Rwandese staff in putting together a bi-lingual (English/Kinyarwanda) newsletter to help the many 'peace' agencies in Rwanda to network. My contribution may be helpful to those who didn't begin reading this blog at he beginning, or who remember only that the beginning was around 70 posts ago.

As a volunteer with AGLI, the African Great Lakes Initiative of Friends Peace Teams, I am working for a few weeks at planting time during the rainy seasons over four years on a project called Growing Together in Rwanda. My main qualification for this work is that at home in suburban London I have had the same vegetable garden for over 30 years and it is still productive. To me the connections between good nutrition, good physical, emotional and spiritual health, and peace, are clear. At the most basic level, when people have enough to eat they are not so driven to compete over vital resources.

I began by teaching small scale vegetable gardening using organic techniques. The work has extended into diet, nutrition and promoting African Indigenous Vegetables (AIVs). The phrase 'growing together' suggests both 'working together on growing food' and 'building peaceful communities by working together'. My work was initially based in Friends Peace House, and I now also work with teachers and workers in the Friends Schools and with women's church groups.

This year a major part of my work is for a project with Batwa (now formally renamed as 'historically marginalised people) near Ruhengeri and Kayonza, in conjunction with HROC Rwanda. (HROC stands for Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities.) Through 2010, and continuing into 2011 if our funding from Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends is renewed, a series of events first reassures and recruits participants, then gives a basic HROC training in trauma healing, follows with a vegetable growing workshop and concludes with another HROC training and a community celebration. The words of Nyiramajambere Esperance, a participant from a village near Kinigi, capture the essence of the work: 'In the first workshop on trauma healing I learnt to recover from my inner wounds. Now your teaching about vegetables and how to grow them will help me heal my outer wounds.'

Elizabeth Cave

A small mercy

Oh happiness amidst the infuriating – or character forming – slowness of the internet connection! With no expectation of success, I copied a piece written in the netbook and saved as Open Office (because saving as Word no longer functions), pasted it into the blog, and it read it! Surely I tried that last year? Either blogger.com has improved – it keeps saying it has – or I got so into contortions between ways of saving, transferring and opening text that I failed to try the simplest. I shall still be switching between using my own netbook where there is wifi and borrowing other computers whose owners have a roving internet connection, but this is a great leap forward.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is a cause for delight. Now if only pictures would load in less than a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 17 minutes (so far), I'd be in blogger heaven.

Time for discussion

The two day workshop last week (11-12 Oct) was with a group from a Friends church just outside Kigali. It's the place where the Thomases have their moringa business but they are on furlough in Oregon for a year and I haven't managed to visit the site yet. This congregation is one of four where a programme called Discipling for Development is being taught. This seems to be an international programme whose syllabus teaches the virtues of hard work and persistence as well as practical skills, all in a biblical context. I'm a development worker, not a missionary. What I notice is that these women almost all grow more than one kind of vegetables – an unusual situation.

When we have had the introductions and agenda planning, and I have shown the basic diagramme of the sack garden and a slide show of examples from my earlier groups' work, we have time in hand before the mid morning break, when a participant will go home to get us a sack and a hoe. I invite the group to share their thoughts on connections between food and peace.

The church leader, Safari, our only man today, speaks up immediately. Having enough to eat leads to peace in the home and peace with your neighbours (because your children don't go begging to them) and peace in the community. His wife, Alphonsine, with their fourth child on her lap, adds that selling surplus from the garden can make money for the church.

One benefit of the sack garden which we have already discussed – that evaporation is reduced – is very good, says Philomena. Even having enough food to feel full without vegetables is not good for health: vegetables build up immunity.

Your home will benefit, says Louise. I grow cabbages, amaranth and peppers, to sell at market and to eat at home. With the money made I can buy clothes and pay my debts. I have bought a goat. I can pay my tithe to the church and give to special appeals. I can praise God energetically because my physical health is good. I have enough to share with others.

Gaudance brings us back to the topic. For example, she says, the security people come round asking for money to guard your area. If you are not having to buy vegetables you will have enough to pay them. You will have peace at home and with your neighbours because your children are not stealing from them. Will there still be a need for the guard if nobody is hungry, I ask. Oh yes – there is still your property.

Josepha's contribution is that you'll be able to buy the school materials for your children.

Seraphina says that last year she planted vegetables, sold the surplus, and bought a hen. She has sold some chicks and kept some and now she has eggs for her children. One has breathing problems and has been advised to eat raw egg.

I don't now remember how my next note links to the previous comments, but the conversation has moved on. Beatride (recently widowed and with 5 children) says that when there is not enough at home, children commonly leave home, naively thinking they will do better without their parents. She means children of 16 and 17 who set up house as a couple. Having children before 21 – the age of marriage - is frowned on and the father may go to prison because under-age sex is a crime of violence.

I ask for clarification and we are off! Please will I tell them the position of the Friends church in England on sex outside marriage for teenagers. I do my best to be both honest and relevant. To my surprise they thank me for useful information about how to advise their children. All I said is that we discourage early sexual activity and expect that an individual's conscience will tell them there should be relationship and equality. We all agree that contraception is better than unwanted children, though it is recognised that it's not yet straightforward for pastors to say so in church.

Now we've done sex and marriage we can get back to vegetables without further diversion, I say. Oh, but it was so interesting!

That magic moment (+ new pics)

[Photos from the 3rd Twa village, 19 October]


Every time it works! Sometimes the students seem to have no idea here is an issue a all. Sometimes they think ahead and ask how to solve the problem. I tell them to wait and see.

A 50 kg sack is to be prepared for planting, with a column of stones up the centre. The stones may be alluvial pebbles, or shiny quartz, or lumps of lava, or even fragments of brick or tile, only nothing with cement. I have not yet had to improvise in a location with nothing suitable, though we sometimes get quite muddy hunting out our small prizes.


Caption: lava pebbles provide amusement before going into the sack.


We cut the top and bottom off a 1.5 litre water bottle, stand it in the bottom of the rolled-down sack, fill it loosely with small stones, surround it with the best soil we can find... Then what? Will I produce another empty bottle from my rucksack? Will the pebbles somehow balance on their own now they know what is expected?

It's often said that teachers need something of the actor about them. This is my moment of high drama. Usually I am squatting close to the sack with one hand protecting the stones from the soil being tipped in all round. I brush off the back of my hand. Holding the sides of its rim, I jiggle the bottle. For a moment nothing happens.

Will this be the day the magic has deserted us? Not so far. The stones settle a little, the tube is raised but not removed. The filling continues.



Caption: raising the rim




Caption: this is from day 1 with Batwa(5 Oct) at Musanze Friends Church, not from 19 Oct.

At the end of each round a different student takes a turn: usually the men get to go first unless I make a special point of inviting an individual woman or girl. The nervous ones don't jiggle firmly enough and have to be encouraged. The bold risk dislodging the guide. Occasionally when the stones are large it takes an extra moment of suspense before everything falls into place.


Caption: nearly at the top

Such a simple satisfaction!


Caption: watering a completed sack - Solange looks on