Genocide at Kabgayi

Here is another nuggett from today's "New Times". Kabgayi is only about a mile and a half from my flat. The mass grave is on the edge of the main road at the crossroads where I turn off to go to Shyogwe and Mbare schools. There are already two huge concrete lined burial pits; last year they had to create a third because so many bodies are still being discovered in this area - fourteen years after the genocide. Skeletons are found when pit latrines are dug out, when field ditches are re-dug and deepened, when old houses are demolished and their foundations excavated for rebuilding.

What's so horrifying in this case is the implied complicity of the Catholic Church - Kabgayi is its headquarters for the entire country - and the reluctance of most of the Catholic administration to confront the issue. It makes you wonder how much more is being hidden....

Over 60,000 people were killed at Kabgayi - Report

BY DANIEL SABIITI

Red Cross volunteers buried victims alive

SOUTHERN PROVINCE

MUHANGA — Details about the 1994 killings at the Kabgayi Catholic Diocese in Muhanga district have finally been officially released. The report was officially presented to Domitillle Mukantaganzwa, the Executive Secretary of the National Gacaca jurisdiction on Tuesday February 10, at the Muhanga cultural centre.

This development comes years after outcry from Kabgayi genocide survivors who were asking the Gacaca courts to investigate the killings and bring to book people responsible.

The report was compiled by a team of 18 Gacaca judges from former Gitarama Province - who since October 2008 collected various testimonies from Kabgayi survivors countrywide.

According to the report, more than 64,000 Rwandans, seeking refuge fell at Kabgayi Diocese grounds, during the Genocide.

A total of 458 cases (in category 1 and 2) (the categories for the most horrendous crimes) are set for trial, and at least 328 judges have been lined up to commence the trials this month.

The judges, who were present during the release of the report, said that this information is an answer to survivor’s persistent quest for justice to be done.
Ildésbald Ruzigana, who led the Judges, said that the testimonies indicate that most of the killings were planned by government officials, some religious leaders and residents of Ngororero and Kibuye.

Some of the officials cited in the report, according to Ruzigana, include Jean Kambanda, Bishop Thaddeus Nsenginyumva and Fr. Rukundo. Others cited in the report were working as Red Cross volunteers who allegedly buried victims alive.
Ruzigana, noted that some areas in the districts of Ruhango, Kamonyi and Nyanza didn’t provide sufficient information on the killings and residents there were reluctant to volunteer information despite briefing them earlier.

Details of the killings in the Catholic stronghold have been mysterious for the past 14 years and nobody including the Catholic Church had claimed responsibility.
Only the Bishop Smaragade Mbonyintege of Kabgayi, had previously promised cooperation in the process of collecting information.

Last year, Dr. Théoneste Niyitegeka, a former presidential aspirant in 2003, was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment by the Gacaca Appeal Court of Gihuma, for discharging patients before they fully recovered who were later killed by Interahamwe militia-who had camped at Kabgayi.

Ends

Righty angles and pallarel lines at Mushubati!

February 11th

Into the office and a hard working hour spent catching up with myself. Manage to get the invite to my party worded and sent to most VSOs but there are a lot of other people not on the VSO list who I need to contact.

I manage to get Claude to commit to an inspection at Remera tomorrow morning, and I decide to do two schools today and catch up on myself as far as work goes. So I ring the two schools and book us in.

Then at just after eight I amble down with Soraya through a cool and sunny Gitarama morning to the town’s main primary school. Hormisdas, the Head, is expecting us and have a very good business-like session looking at both his exam results and the problems he has experienced in adjusting to the new system

In many ways this is the flagship school of the District. It is big (1400 pupils) and vey central to the town. Its exam results are consistently excellent, which is all the more impressive in view of the school’s size. To be fair, it is drawing in pupils from surrounding schools in yrs 5 and 6 because savvy parents know that the chances of their children getting a secondary school place after attending this school are very good. So its results ought to be good. It has just started a Tronc Commun section with three classes (140 pupils), and thankfully lessons have already started. There is another one of these young graduate headteachers appointed with Hormisdas, but I still can’t get to the bottom of whether she’s the overall head and Hormisdas has been relegated, or whether she’s just running the tronc commun section. I really must clear this up with Claude tomorrow.

Somehow Hormisdas has managed to get hold of MINEDUC yrs 4-6 Science textbooks in English. This is a real turn up for the books – we had no idea such things existed. Apparently there are a few – a very few – schools in the Eastern province which have so many Anglophone refugees returning from Tanzania and Uganda that they teach in English, and Mineduc have translated the textbooks into English. Now wouldn’t you think that Mineduc would have known that and made all these books available to all the francophone schools in the country – it’s just a case of doing a quick print run. But no. Mineduc actually tells the schools that “they have to seek their own salvation”. What a way to run an education system!

I observe a yr 6 English lesson which turns out to be rather a waste of time. The teacher is very good, and the lesson cracks along at a fair old pace, but he is doing ridiculously simple work (simple plurals of words) for a yr 6 class. And, as usual, the range of vocabulary and examples he uses is very narrow. In fairness to this teacher he is about to launch into non-standard plurals in his next lesson, and intends the one I’m in to be a revision session, but I think he could have been more challenging and imaginative. He has, in the recent past, done English dictation with the pupils and you don’t tend to get them very often. I tell him, amongst other things, to get the children speaking more. I explain about the “vox pop” interviews I saw going on in an equivalent English lesson at Munyinya, and he takes the hint.

Then its yr 5 maths and we’re deep into geometry – angles on a straight line, right angles, acute and obtuse angles and so on. The teacher’s English is very clear and his accent is good. The children’s maths is good, too – here is a class which seems to have adjusted effortlessly to a switch from English to French. There are a few understanding difficulties with the pupils in terms of the maths concepts – opposite angles always seems to be an issue, but my only beef with the teacher is he keeps saying “shut up” to the children. Someone has told him it’s a cool, hip way of quietening them, but I explain to him that it would be politer and more acceptable to use “be quiet” instead.

Finally I go into a tronc commun lesson. This is in French because they’re still waiting for English textbooks to arrive. They’re doing Physics, and launch into International Standard Units of length, so everything is being written in forms such as 75.10-3. It’s unbearably dry and reminds me of why I hated the mathematical side of physics when I was at school.

The teacher is calm and gentle and he explains very carefully how to do the calculations – even I can keep up with him. Some of the children are up there and well into it, others are struggling and it must be only the second or third lesson of physics since the start of term.

This is the very first time I’ve been into a TC lesson as an inspector, so it’s something of an achievement for me. I occurs to me that I’m getting towards a score of dipstick inspections gathering information about the progress in teaching in English and the problems of the new system, and it might be worth my while to spend a week or two visiting all the new TC sections of local schools and to see how they’re settling down. I’ll run this past Claude tomorrow.

Meanwhile Soraya has been watching lessons in yrs 1-3. Together we debrief with Hormisdas and the hew headmistress, and set off back to the office. There’s time to write up my report before lunch, while it’s all fresh in my mind.

In the afternoon I leave Soraya and take a moto out to Mushubati. I notice in my last year’s blog that I say I liked the feel of this little school, and this afternoon’s visit confirms my feeling. Edith is on the ball, and her exam results are pretty good (21/94 in the district. Gitarama is 8/94). I see two lesson with the same yr 6 class (this sounds pretty lame but you’d be surprised how difficult it is to find classes in English at the exact time you visit!). The Maths lesson is – guess what – geometry and angles on a straight line. This means that, during this week, every single primary school yr 6 across Rwanda will be tackling the same topic and I can visualise every lesson in the country…..). This teacher is very energetic but a bit shrill, and her pronunciation isn’t as good as I’ve been hearing elsewhere. How do you keep a straight face when she solemnly tells them about “righty angles”, and the class repeat the phrase over and over again? I can’t intervene to correct her right there and then; it’ll have to wait until the end of the lesson. Things get even funnier when the children have to start using the phrase “parallel lines”. The dreaded “R” and “L” confusion comes all over one young boy who talks about “pallarel lines”. Bless them!

The class have exactly the same problems in getting the concepts of opposite angles and interior angles as at Gitarama. Isn’t that funny? And might it be telling me something about the way everybody has to teach in this country?

Then it’s staying in the same room for Science, which is in French. The male teacher is the same one who produced an excellent geology lesson when I came here last time, and he comes up trumps again. He’s going pulleys, and has made some home-made equipment with which he can do a demonstration. He has two pulleys made from banana branches threaded on sticks, with a groove cut into each to hold a rope. The rope he has made himself from banana fibre. The weight is a house brick. This guy has had no time to conjure up something in honour of my visit; it is very much a case of me dropping in on his normal lesson. All his equipment is home made, and it works! The kids, of course, are riveted. For almost the first time in all my school visits you can feel a sense of excitement and anticipation, just as you might in an English science experiment.

First of all we revise the previous lesson on levers; the teacher puts good, large, well labelled diagrams on the board. Then he makes sure that all technical words for the new lesson on pulleys are written on the blackboard and explained at least twice, in different ways. It’s a true mixed ability class and unbeknown to me I have plonked myself at the slow end of the class. The teacher divides the class into groups for exercises, and I have to a lot of prodding with the girls and boys around me.

At the end of the afternoon I praise Edith and her staff, and just as I’m leaving I notice workmen putting up an electricity pole. Edith has somehow found the money from her budgets and her parents’ committee to bring electricity to the school (as opposed to Munyinya where they’ve sent me an Electrogaz estimate and are waiting to see if I’ll magic up the money for them). Mushubati is starting a ratrappement centre (catch-up centre for older pupils who’ve dropped out of school) next week. There’s absolutely no chance of them having tronc commun unless there’s a substantial building programme this year, and it’s difficult to see where they could put the rooms unless they demolish an existing block and start putting up a two-storey block.

As I leave the school (at well after five o’clock) I’m surrounded by scores of children on their way home. They all want to walk with the muzungu and see what he does, so we look like a demonstration making its way up the main road. The little kids are all out in the road trying to keep up with me; there’s pushing and shoving to get closest to the muzungu and one little girl goes flying into the gravel. I have to flag cars and motos to send them out into the middle of the road to avoid the children. Gradually, gradually the entourage subsides as one by one they yell out “goodbye teacher” and veer off through the banana trees and maize fields into their houses.

Back at the flat I’m really, really tired, and so is Tom. We cook up a refried beans recipe from the VSO cookbook, and it’s all we can do to get the washing up done before tumbling into our beds.

Best thing about today – everything. It’s been a thoroughly good, productive day. But I’m beginning to feel the pace. You’d think that visiting two local schools in one day wasn’t particularly demanding, but it’s really surprising how much it takes it out of you.

Lazybones

February 10th

Into the office on a very cold day. As the morning goes on it gets colder and colder. It rains just before lunchtime and by the time I get to Tranquillité I’m so freezing that I have to order a cup of tea to warm up!

I don’t really get any work done at all. I spend the entire day with Claude’s modem, upgrading various programs, catching up on emails and blogs. Why do I feel so guilty? Claude’s off to inspect G S Nyakabanda; it’s one of our better performing schools so I’m not sure why he’s there. I want to pin him down and get decisions on things like which primaries we should go and visit, and also which secondaries, and tie down various dates. But if he isn’t in the office I’m left floundering.

In the afternoon I have great ideas like redeeming myself by translating some more Social Studies chapters, but somehow it never comes to fruition.

One funny point in the day is when I get a hand delivered letter at the office. It’s from Vérène, the head mistress at Munyinya. She’s got a quote from Electrogaz for putting electricity into her school. She wants to know if I (personally) can help with the cost of putting in pylons and cabling to the tune of 830,000 francs – around £1000. If I wasn’t committed to water tanks I might be interested, but there simply won’t be that sort of money around.

Also it’s a typical Rwandan response to a situation. We have a need, now who can we get to pay it for us because we’re poor Africans?

Well, have I earned my pay today – No. Have I worked hard today – yes, but at things for my benefit. My blog is well up to date and that’s about my only real achievement. Some things are really frustrating, like when I finally track down a Congolese CD I’ve been trying to identify from the odd track on my ipod, only to find it’s completely out of stock even in the most specialist of stockists. So my track-jumping songs will soldier on, and on, and on.

An envelope full of cash

February 9th

We’re all three of us up and leaving Épi’s place by half past seven. It’s a good thing Faustine is coming to work for Épi because she’s virtually out of clothes and there’s a mountain of washing for the poor girl to get through!

We say farewell to Épi and go to the bus park where we’re pounced on by ticket touts for at least three different companies. All the big, comfortable “Coaster” buses have already left (to be at Kigali by eight you need to have left Kibungo by six), but once again our luck holds and an extra Coaster arrives for the quarter to eight departure. So our ride back to Kigali is so comfortable that we both doze off along the route. The view from the window on the return trip is just as enjoyable as the outward one. Here in the eastern province, as in the far north of Rwanda, there are a lot of traditional round huts in use, and several still being built. Despite the large numbers of returned refugees settled in the east, levels of poverty and deprivation don’t seem as acute as in parts of our own southern province. We see no children with kwashiorkor, for example, and clothing is often a lot better than in the up-country parts of Muhanga.

Soraya gets off at Remera bus station to go to the VSO office; I carry on to the town centre and have a quick flip round the big Nakumatt supermarket before heading on home.

Back home I feel really tired and ready to crash on the bed, but seconds after I arrive Janine turns up to do the cleaning. She has another English test tonight as part of her university course, but she came top of her class in the last one she did so we’re not worried for her at all. As soon as she’s gone I make some lunch and then take a moto out to Shyogwe. I have an envelope of cash to give Stéphanie; we have to make a proposal for another sum of 2200 euros from Randstad, and at the same time I want to do a more formal visit to see how lessons are being taught in English and how they’re coping with the timetable.

I forgot to say in the weekend blog that we had a phone call from Geert in Holland on Saturday night; it’s lovely to hear his voice again. He’s probably coming out with a school party in the summer and I desperately want all the various financial projects tied up and finished when he arrives!

The Euros bit is easy – Stéphanie and I open Geert’s envelope together and count out 900 Euros, to be used to buy materials (rice sacks for posters, science equipment etc) for the classrooms. Stéphanie will end up as head of the best equipped state primary in the District. But then, she has well over 2,200 pupils. That’s far, far bigger than any primary school in England and bigger than all but a tiny handful of secondary schools. Funnily enough, the double shifting in place since January makes the school seem a lot smaller because only half the population is on site at any one time.

The admin block still isn’t finished; workmen are putting finishing touches to the doors and windows, but there’s no glass in either and nor are they painted. So drawing up a wish list for the 2200 Euros is quick and easy – paying for roof tiles (Stéphanie bought them on credit at the end of last term), paying for glass, paint, cement flooring and a cement apron round the building to shed the copious amounts of rain coming off the roof during tropical storms. (If you don’t do this, the building will quickly get undermined). Then we want to run electricity into this building. Fortunately there’s a secondary school next door with power, but we need to get an electrician in to see if the wires will cope with extra current or whether we need to be buying more cables and a transformer. If the latter, I don’t think that even 2200 Euros will be enough, so at the moment we live in hope.

No more progress has been made on my four classrooms and I’m so disheartened at the moment that I don’t even want to go and look at them. For all I know they have been reclaimed by the jungle and we’ll have to hack our way through undergrowth to find them at some point in the distant future!

I watch two lessons; one is a pretty good maths lesson, all in English and doing “proper” maths. The following Science lesson, with the same year 4 group, is less successful. The teacher gives the lesson in English and her pronunciation is adequate, but she translates most of it into Kinyarwanda. She has a diagram of the water cycle which is so small that half the class can’t see it and those who can, can’t understand it because it’s so unrealistically drawn. (If only I’d known she was teaching this topic; I have a full sized rice sack of the water cycle all drawn up and ready for use).

This lesson is a good illustration of the problems Rwandan teachers are facing when they try to teach science in English as Kigali is demanding. Firstly there is a lot of basic vocabulary which most of the children haven’t yet met because their English lessons are so grammar centred and with such a narrow range of vocabulary. So for the water cycle words like “sun”, “cloud”, “hill” river” need to be covered first. Then there are the technical terms like “evaporation”, “transpiration” which are harder to explain because they are more abstract and it’s so difficult to show them in a drawing. Finally there’s the completely abstract conceptual stuff such as the idea of a cycle within which water is constantly circulating in its different states. Now this teacher at Shyogwe is trying to get all that information across at the same time and in one 45 minute lesson, plus some notes copied out from a text book which sounds as if it’s intended for GCSE level rather than primary yr 4. You won’t be surprised when I tell you that most of the class end up with drawings that don’t resemble anything at all, and a jumble of poorly spelled words and terms in English. Way to go, Shyogwe, but a valuable lesson for me in just how tricky this language conversion is going to be. If only Rwandan schools would try to widen children’s basic vocabulary, they would find all this so much easier.

Apparently two teachers from Marchwood Primary school near Southampton have just spent a fortnight in Shyogwe. Neither made any contact during their time here which I find strange since there are such close ties at the moment between the school and the various English and Dutch VSOs. Shyogwe is getting more visits and help than any other school in my District.

I leave the school and call on Michael in his cottage just up the hill. We have a long conversation about everything, and I have sheets of data to give him to help with his Diocesan work. Tinks has just arrived back from England, but is off to Kigali today so I miss her. But it’s lovely to have her back.

We are getting very much closer to our planned expedition to inspect all the Nyabinoni schools, and I hope that we might have everything fixed by the end of this week. The Bishop has to confirm availability of his car; I have to book us in to the Nyabinoni presbytery, and Claude has to phone all seven heads and tell them it’ll be a sackable offence if they’re not in their schools and ready and waiting for us when we arrive! We can even do at least two separate training days at the end of the week, with me and someone else doing resource making and Soraya and the other one doing teaching methodology. We are provisionally booking all this for the first week in March, but things have a habit of slipping further and further back. I’m quite looking forward to the trip!

In the evening Tom phones to say he’s on his way home from Kigali and for me to take a shepherd’s pie out of the fridge. I’m feeling very tired by now, mishear the message and take out something from the freezer which I think is the meat part of shepherd’s pie but turns out to be a batch of vegetable dahl. When Tom arrives I’m peeling spuds for England to make the mash on top. Cue in a very perplexed Tom…! Anyway, the shepherd’s pie will live to die another day, and we make a massive meal out of dahl, rice, spuds and heaps of vegetables followed by fresh fruit salad. Tom seems to have spent most of Saturday cooking and preparing food, bless him!

Everything seems to be running late today, and by the time we’ve cleared away we’re both dead on our feet. Truly, it feels an awful long time ago since I was getting up in Kibungo at six this morning!

Best thing about today – just the idea of returning from a jolly and yet still managing to fit in a day’s work.

Worst thing – now I need a holiday to recover from the weekend……..

Kibungo snapshots

That's me looking rather hot and bothered at Rusomo; should have been with the previous set of pictures.... It was really baking hot down by the bridge.
Kibungo high street (at a quiet time on Sunday afternoon)

the bar with a sauna and massage (see Feb 7th-8th diary entry)

the view from Tina's back yard

Kibungo sunset; I didn't think this was going to come out at all but it' s ended up surprisingly "arty"!

Four go wild in Kibungo

February 7th-8th

Sometimes the day’s news seems thin; on other days there’s just so much going on there seems no time to write it down. This weekend has been one of the latter!

On Saturday I’m enjoying my first lie-in for ages. It’s eight o’clock and I can’t sleep because of the noise from traffic, the birds, the day guards and the hairdresser opposite. I text Soraya, who has a training day at Kabgayi, asking her to beep me when she finishes so that I can be ready to go to Kibungo with her. In the meantime I’m planning to stay in bed for another half hour and read.

Soraya phones back straight away to say there doesn’t seem to be anyone there for the training, and that she’s cutting her losses and coming home. And that she’s all packed and ready for the off so that we can go to Kibungo this morning.

Curses! I haven’t even thought about getting ready so soon! So I catapult out of bed and into the shower, have the fastest breakfast in the world and start shoving things into my rucksack.

At which point she texts me again to say sorry, but people have begun to show up so the training’s on after all…….

So Tom and I spend a leisurely morning cleaning up and I’m packing my rucksack and we’re reading newspapers until Soraya finally phones to say she’s ready to leave for Kibungo.

I’ve never been further East than Kabarondo, and never beyond Kayonza in daylight, so it’s nice to see some new scenery, even if I’m jammed in the back of a little matata with my knees up past my ears. The scenery around Kibungo is beautiful. We were both expecting it to be flat and dry and brown, but it is green and hilly. The valleys are wider than here in Muhanga, and the hills lower. There is a general feeling of much more space, and definitely of less pressure on the land. There are much bigger areas of unused land, but at the same time there’s a huge amount of radical terracing to make use of sloping hillsides.

We arrive at Kibungo in the late afternoon and Épi comes to the bus park to meet us. Kibungo is one of those towns which is by-passed by the main road network – the main road from Kigali to Tanzania goes about three km to one side of it, along one hilltop while Kibungo stretch along another ridge perpendicular to the main road. Épi lives at the place where the two roads join. It’s a house owned by the Anglican diocese of Kibungo (Kibungo is the biggest town in the south east corner of Rwanda and the general administrative centre for a very wide tract). They are rebuilding the main bus park and market in Kibungo, and there’s a temporary bus park and market about 500 yards from her house, which is really convenient.

Épi’s house is small but easily manageable. There is a bare earth yard at the back in which she could put some pots of herbs or veg; there’s quite a big front garden with grass, pineapple bushes and poinsettia trees. In a small plot just behind her house there’s a clump of banana trees; we’re not sure whether she can help herself or not. There are houses on each side of Épi’s; when three muzungus arrive at the place they all go aflutter with excitement.

She has a decent sized rectangular living room with electric light and power points, and a reasonable bedroom next door. At the rear of the living room is a lean to with a stick and corrugated iron roof and roughcast walls, which is the second bedroom. It hasn’t been painted and is rather dark, but at least it seems watertight. There is a toilet with proper sit-down loo, and a shower room with reasonably reliable water. Compared to her previous place at Gishanda this is luxury for Épi, and it’s so much easier to get to and from by road. The only problem is that the loo doesn’t have a door, and we all have to be very discreet when using it……. Rwandan planning triumphs again!

Of course there’s no kitchen; there’s a ledge built onto the back wall of the house where you can stand a kerosene stove or charcoal cooker. We decide to cook for ourselves that evening, so we fall into our routine. I get peeling and chopping veg, and make up a Brucey special fruit salad; Soraya gets the stove lit, and Épi finds all the fruit and veg and whatever else we need. It’s a quick way to prepare a meal and we eat well. While we’re cooking we’re joined by Tina who lives about a kilometre up the road, right next to the main road. (Her house shakes when juggernauts drive past on their way to and from the border crossing). She shares a place with Tom, who has gone up to Nyagatare for the evening, so Tina’s at a loose end.

In the middle of all this, workmen arrive with a bed. Épi’s ordered a bed, and has been waiting in all day for it to arrive. It’s a nice, sturdy effort, and just fits perfectly in the spare rom. We already have a mattress for it, so she’s well set up. Also, the new pastor is very pleasant and when Épi tells him that she’s having visitors he offers her a spare mattress for me to use.

It’s nice to see Tina, and we spend hours planning all sorts of adventures. She wants to come with the three of us on our Uganda trip in April, and if that all goes well we’re thinking of all four going to Zanzibar at some time later in the year, perhaps in November at the end of the school term. Meanwhile, I suggest we all go to Rusumo tomorrow and have a look at the place and the waterfalls there. None of the other girls have been, so we agree on an early start. We walk Tina home; there’s a bar quite close to her house with has a bad reputation and while she’s probably safer here than in London, we don’t want to take any chances. Besides, it’s a balmy night and here, as opposed to Gitarama, you can see the stars and hear a deafening noise from frogs and crickets everywhere you walk. On the way back Épi goes to collect the spare mattress from the pastor, and Soraya and I mooch through the pitch dark lane to her house, navigating by moonlight through puddles of dubious smelling water and slaloming past local lads on their way to and from bars or visiting each other in their houses.

Épi’s house is almost opposite a secondary school, and there’s a big transmitter tower about a hundred yards away, so it’s probably the easiest place in Kibungo to find. Just as we get back Épi arrives on a moto with the mattress tied in a roll behind her – looks really comical. We talk about house furnishings; what this little house needs is a paint party where a gang of us descend one weekend and slap new coats of paint on the living room, bedrooms and anywhere else we can reach. It would transform the place.

We get sorted and bed down for the night. Épi’s taking on a local girl (vetted by the Diocese) as housemaid, and she will sleep in the spare bedroom when she eventually arrives. For now, Soraya is using Épi’s bed; Épi is trying out the new bed for the maid, and I’m on a mattress on the living room floor. It’s funny trying to get to sleep in somewhere totally silent.

(The arrangement with the domestique is really sensible – Épi will have her living in during the week, and on those weekends when she’s away in Kigali so that house is guarded at all times. On the other hand, if Épi is staying in Kibungo at weekends, and is having visitors, the domestique will go back to her family’s house in the town).

In the morning we meet up with Tina at the bus park and get overcharged on the matata to Rusumo (it’s a Sunday morning and there isn’t a great choice of transport, so we can’t tell the convoyeur where to go and jump on an alternative bus). The road to Rusumo is beautiful. Compared to Muhanga, the roads are very straight, and the surface is pretty good. The hillsides are terraced for the most part, but here and there are still big expanses of land which seems to be completely unused. This is the only part of Rwanda where there is scope to absorb extra population. The valley bottoms have been drained of their swamps and are intensively farmed for rice. Most of the plots are just being planted out; the water glints in the paddies and every plot has a tiny corner with brilliantly green young rice plants ready for transplanting. Rice really is the most amazingly vivid green colour when it’s young. On one bare hilltop there seems to be a resettlement camp for returning refugees. Houses are being built; there are organised canvas clad toilet blocks, but the people are living in tents or makeshift shelters while they build mud-block houses alongside.

In places there are dense stands of pine trees giving the place an almost Mediterranean feel. It’s a long way from Kibungo to Rusumo, well over an hour in the bus, and yet you only pass through a handful of big villages. One of them is where Joe and Sonya are based; they are a long, long way from Kigali, but having the main road on their doorstep makes everything manageable.

Eventually we reach Rusumo. It’s quite an anticlimax, really. There’s a long, winding descent down into a big valley, and we can see the Akagera River in the distance so we know we’re almost there. We can’t see any waterfalls. There are funny little conical hills around, and we can see where the river is heading straight through a lump of high ground. But that’s about all.

We’re expecting Rusumo to be a big town like Gisenyi or Kibungo, but when we get there we find there’s almost nothing to see. The bus seems to drop us quite arbitrarily at a roadside stop in the middle of nowhere. We have to be told to get off the bus because we’re all convinced there must be some bigger stop a few miles further on.

A group of transport lorries are parked up in a field; one has a prominent “Manchester United” badge, obviously its owner’s pride and joy. There’s a ticket office for a bus company in the middle of a maize field; I don’t think Onatracom has many services operating out of Rusumo!

Down at the border itself we come right next to the river. It’s chocolate brown and there are great clumps of weed floating down from the lakes higher up its course. Two men are swimming across it from Rwanda into Tanzania. We’re not sure whether they’re just having a swim, or smuggling stuff across the border. We assume the river is crocodile free; there’s quite a strong current even on the quietest stretch of water.

The road is jammed with lorries waiting to cross into Tanzania, and lorries that have just made it across the border bridge. There are a slew of bars, cafes, forex moneychangers; the usual stuff at frontiers. But compared to the Congolese borders at Gisenyi and Cyangugu this place is so, so relaxed! The border itself is a big metal bridge, built exactly next to the main waterfall. It is perfect for taking pictures. We hear the waterfall long before we see it. A troupe of baboons is playing next to the bridge, and a bored looking Rwanda policeman stands next to the barrier pole. We amble up to him, all smiles and politeness, and ask if we can go on to the bridge to take pictures. We’re fully expecting to be turned back, but the situation is so relaxed that he just waves us through. (By contrast, when I was at Cyangugu with Tu Chi we nearly got into trouble for insisting that we only wanted to take a few picture and not smuggle ourselves into the DRC…).

So we scamper onto the bridge and take loads of photos. It’s really hot now, but there’s a strong spray coming up to the bridge from the boiling waters below which is cool and refreshing. The water is the colour of milk chocolate, and I can now see exactly what Védaste was writing about in his master’s thesis – tonnes and tonnes of Rwanda’s best topsoil is being washed away downstream beneath our feet.

At some point a sackload of plastic sandals has been tipped or fallen into the river; they’re caught in an eddy right under the bridge and green and blue sandals swirl endlessly round and round in the vortex.

There is one main fall, and a series of rapids above and below it. The falls are not excessively high or wide, but the river is flowing high at the moment (we’ve inadvertently come at probably the best time of year to see it), and the force and speed of the water is very impressive. There’s no way you could shoot this fall in a raft or canoe.

Downstream a man is fishing with a round net on a long pole; the water is so opaque there’s no way he can see any fish down there; he’s just swirling the net around in the hope that an unlucky fish will get washed into his net by the current. In all the time we watch him, he doesn’t manage to catch anything!

When a juggernaut crosses the bridge the whole thing sways and creaks. A steady trickle of pedestrians is crossing in both directions, too. There are a few private cars and NGO vehicles, but there crossing is not busy and it just feels very pleasantly relaxed. Downstream of the bridge the river enters a gorge, and there’s a dramatic change in the scenery. (And a few miles further on the land will flatten out just as dramatically as the river enters the Akagera National park with dozens of lakes and swamps). Somewhere here is the point where the new railway line from Isaka to Kigali will, cross the river; I imaging they will build a railway bridge alongside this existing one. That’ll be a pity because it’ll spoil the view from the road bridge. That’s another reason why we’re lucky we’ve come here at the right time!

We take pictures upstream and downstream; photos of ourselves on the bridge; photos of lorries crossing it; photos of the baboons who are sitting next to the barrier pole as if they’ve been trained to wait for permission before going from one country into the other.

Eventually we decide we’ve had enough, and adjourn past our friendly policeman to a bar. It’s barely mid-day and we’ve already “done” Rusumo. (If we decide to go overland to Tanzania and Zanzibar, as some VSOs have done, we will have to walk across the bridge and try to find a matata on the Tanzanian side to take us along to the nearest town and a “proper” bus further east. That can take a long time and will take some thought)!

By now it has clouded up and the mid-day storm is arriving. Once again, just by luck we’ve even been fortunate in arriving early in the morning. We sit out the storm in the matata while we wait for it to leave; my only regret of the whole episode is that it’s raining too smartly to be able to take pictures out of the matata windows.

Back in Kibungo we explore Tina’s house (bigger than Épi’s, but it had rats when they moved in which wasn’t very pretty). Tina has a very lovely valley view out of her back yard; I take some pictures but just now the sun’s now at the wrong angle and I hope I’ll come back here again and take some more.

In the late afternoon we take a bus up into the middle of Kibungo and drift back on foot to Épi’s place. On the way we pass a bar which doubles as a sauna and massage saloon. That’s really unusual for Rwanda, and especially in a place as provincial as Kibungo. We’re all sure it must be some sort of sleazy joint or brothel, but as we’re all together we decide to have a look. (Just in case it’s legitimate, not just in case it….. oh, you know what I mean!). To our amazement it turns out to be a real, proper sauna and massage establishment with a delightful young owner.

This puts an even better gloss on Kibungo. Soraya and I are really getting to like this town more and more. If we do return for a painting party at Épi’s we’ll combine it with a sauna and massage, especially if we can negotiate to have the whole place to ourselves…..

In the evening we decide to eat out; it’s already quite late and the only place open is the most expensive joint in town. Its pleasant, but the service is slow. When out brochettes and ibirayi arrive we find that some of the brochettes are zingalo – goat intestines wound into a coil and threaded on the skewer. Now as you can imagine, some of the girls are not too keen on goat guts, especially at RwF 1000 apiece, so muggins gets to enjoy this culinary high point of Rwandan cuisine. I can report that they’re not unpleasant; not even chewy, but I can’t say that I’d squeak with delight if I saw them again.

We walk Tina home and then drift across the taxi park and up the slope to Épi’s place. Faustine, the domestique, has arrived with her stuff and already set to work washing up and cleaning. This creates a logistical problem; there are only three places for people to sleep and now we have four people. I offer to go and sleep on a siofa at Tina’s but we decide it’s better to send Faustine home on a moto and tell her to come back tomorrow. She’s quite happy with the arrangement, and we pay her moto fare. She only lives just up in the town and she can leave all her possession in the bedroom ready for tomorrow.

It’s been a really lovely day, and we all feel relaxed and happy. Épi’s getting anxious about work in the morning; we need to be up and away by half past seven.

The fight against AIDS

Here's a little extract from today's "New Times" newspaper which gives you a perfect examnple of the day to day problems we face here in trying to reduce the incidence of HIV. You're fighting against traditional beliefs and especially men's insecurity - they're desperately afraid that they'll be shown as "weak" if they test positive, so they prefer not to be tested. Ignorance is bliss.......

It's a particularly typical Rwandan slant on the situation that in the last paragraph you notice that the Police chief and director of medical services appears to be the same person. So no potential conflicts of interest over confidentiality here, then......

KAYONZA — Men in the Kayonza district are shunning voluntary HIV testing, which is proving to be an impediment to the fight against the HIV/AIDs scourge.
Technical assistant, for the District Aids Control Commission (DACC), Edouard Muhima Luhayisha, further revealed that despite the fact that Saturdays had been set aside for the testing of couples at specified centres, only women turned up for testing.

These women are sent back for their reluctant husbands, and often they themselves don’t return, but instead choose to go to other health centres where they don’t have to be accompanied by their husbands.

Apart from shunning the tests, health officials say men normally blame their spouses whenever they test positive. This year’s theme for the fight against HIV/Aids focuses on testing of couples.

According to Muhima, men claim they know their HIV status from the results of their partner’s test, which is wrong because there are cases of discordant couples where only one partner is infected.

“It is funny sometimes they assume that a woman’s results would automatically be similar to theirs. And when a woman tests negative, her husband blames her for infecting him,” Muhima explains.

According to the November-December 2008 HIV test results in the district, of the 22,962 couples tested, 262 couples tested positive, while 424 were found to be discordant couples.

Muhima says they have embarked on a sensitisation campaign to bring men on board, warning that women could lose heart in the exercise if their husbands remain reluctant. He is however optimistic that the campaign is bearing fruit as more people have started going for testing and counselling.

“The campaign also involves encouraging married partners to remain faithful to each other,” he concludes.

Meanwhile, the Assistant Commissioner of Police and Director of Medical Services, Dr. Wilson Rubanzaha calls on couples to report cases of infidelity. Addressing residents on health issues recently, he advised married couples to be faithful to their partners and urged infected couples to use condoms to avoid re-infection.

What I find interesting is that the infection rate is so low - 486 positive results in 22962 couples is only 2.1% which is remarkably low for sub-sharan Africa. So is it the case that the only people who turn up for testing are those who are pretty sure they'll test negative?