Big Fish Day!

Feb 11th

Went into the office more in hope than expectation of finding Claude. Sure enough, he’s not there, nor anyone else, but the usual crowd of people waiting for him. When they’re really desperate they come to me and ask me what’s going on. How do I know? Nobody tells me anything!

Start using Innocent’s computer; it has got a continental keyboard which is brilliant for doing letters with accents but a pain in the backside for everything else. Takes twice as long as it should. Just get my blogs done when Claude breezes in all smiles, and says he’s taking a week’s leave to prepare for his wedding. Told you so! I ask him where and what time is the wedding; he says Saturday afternoon and he’ll take me there; I’m to ring him later in the week and he’ll sort out transport. Well, it might happen or it might not.

Next I discover I’ve got a really nasty little virus on my flash drive which threatens to mess up all my work. Thank you Innocent, or whoever put that little monster on his machine. Just when I think I’ve got things sorted, with my laptop staying at home and only the flash travelling between places, the flash itself is corrupted. I spend much of the rest of the day trying to work out how I can still use it.

Go down the town to use the internet café, because there’s nothing more I can do at the office except study some of Mans’ statistics on my (corrupted) flash drive. Meet Raima on the way and have a chat with her; she’s trying to sort out moral education for her primary school. She deliberately isn’t teaching any religion (I think her attitude is “a plague on all your religions; look what you’ve done to the world”), and wants Cathy and I to help her. I tell her I’m English and that the English don’t have any morals and I get one of her very straight looks while she tries to work out whether I’m being serious or just pulling her leg. I tell her I’m all for moral education.

Then I meet Cathy herself, and we’re both off to the internet café. We try the first one – and the power is off. We try the second, and the power is off there, too. What a place – power off all last evening and now in the middle of the day. We repair to a café and order food, which takes about an hour and a half to arrive. We sort out what Raima could do in her moral education sessions, but we’ve almost run out of things to say to each other by the time we eat. Cathy’s vegetarian so we can’t have brochettes. The place tells us they’ve got some good fish, so we order it. Turns out we’ve ordered a whole tilapia fish, and a load of the roast potatoes I like so much. It’s enough to feed about 4 people, and once again my daily budget is blown sky high. But it’s a beautiful fish. We eat with our fingers after the washing routine. The spuds are so hot we both blister our mouths.

Cathy goes back to the school and I try the internet café again. Power’s still off. This is just ridiculous. Gitarama’s the second biggest place in Rwanda – imagine the hoo-ha if Birmingham was powerless for a day. Everywhere there’s a group of people idling in shop doorways waiting for equipment to become usable again.

I go back to the flat and decide to “work from home”. Some of Mans’ stuff – especially official documents from the Ministry which don’t seem to exist in our District Office – is genuinely interesting. 47% of Rwanda’s entire population is under 14 years old; probably around 49-50% in Gitarama.

During the afternoon we have yet another intense thunderstorm, with rain so heavy it comes under the balcony door in a stream and I end up mopping frantically. It looks as if the long rains have come early and the short dry season was so short it only lasted a week or so! It’s the heaviest rain I’ve seen so far, and even the traffic seems to come to a halt. There’s a myth here that if you get wet in the rain, you’ll catch malaria, and people are reluctant to go outside. Motos don’t want to drive in it, and it’s considered an acceptable excuse for lateness to work.

Then, of course, our power at the flat goes off. And stays off for a couple of hours. By the time it comes back on, it’s getting dark outside and I need to brave the market to buy some veg. After the rain, and at the end of the day, they’re all desperate to sell up and get home, so I’m besieged by women trying to rip me off but stay ahead of their rivals. I get some tomatoes and onions.

When Tom comes back we make a big stir fry with leftovers from yesterday and egg fried rice; not our greatest achievement but I’m still full from lunchtime.

I text this week’s schools (in French) to tell them we’re coming and then we spend the rest of the evening chopping vegetables (me) and cutting up meat (Tom). I make a tomato and onion sauce with loads of fresh basil to use later in the week, and soon enough it’s bed time.

High point of the day – the fish dinner, even if it wasn’t plannedLow point – a computer virus which fills my flash drive with useless copies of a non-existent picture of Raila Odinga, the Kenyan opposition leader.