African Birthday, and une ecole orpheline

Mar 14th

Yay, my first African birthday! Christmas in Kenya in 1999, now birthday in Rwanda in 2008. Can’t be bad; I’m SO happy I’m somewhere exotic to pass my 60th, but I wish all the family was here to spend it with me.

Woken up at just gone six by Geert phoning to sing “happy birthday” in heavily accented English. Well, it’s a lovely thought and it certainly did wake me up….

Off to the office, dropped in at the Post Office on the off chance and yes, there’s a huge parcel from Teresa just come in. Somebody up there is definitely looking after me! Balloons and party stuff, a new fleece for when it gets cold again, even more DVDs (we’ve now got the best collection in the area, especially of old classics), and a baseball cap so I don’t have to look quite such a fright in my current hat.

Enough. Today is a working day. Off to visit Bwirika school, another little primary lost deep in the banana groves of Cyeza secteur. Two men greet me; I assume one is the Head and the other, in white coat, is one of his staff. White coat doesn’t leave us to it, but trails us round the site, and eventually it dawns on me that actually white coat is the Head, Idebald Niyorora (these Rwandan Christian names are a knockout) and the other guy is the chairman of his parents’ committee which roughly translates in English terms as Chairman of the Governors.

Both guys are very pleasant, direct and honest and the next four hours pass quickly. The chairman of governors sums the place up perfectly by saying they feel like “une école orpheline” – an orphan school. They’ve had no extra money for rebuilding; every building is in “semi-dur” (mud-brick); every room in the infant section is too small. The school’s grown from 610 to 725 children in just over two years and there’s been no extra building to accommodate them. It just means children jammed even tighter into rooms; four to a desk instead of three, and so on. You name it, they’re short of it.

OK, that’s not much different from several other smaller primaries in my patch. What stands out about Bwirika?................

The school site is huge and they take their farming very seriously. Not just a small grove of coffee trees, as at Gatenzi and Kivumu, but a big field, and being extended, too. And several acres of manioc; some thriving, but even I can tell other plants have a wilting disease.

On the edge of the site, and well within the area in which children play, there’s a huge brick-lined pit about twelve feet deep. It’s an old pit latrine, I think, now disused. It’s a potential death trap. There’s absolutely no barrier or any form of protection around it. If you fell in you’d break a leg at very least, and once inside it there’s no way a child could climb out. I bet at break times there are kids swarming all round it.

Here is a school of 700+ which not only doesn’t have water, but where the nearest water supply (down a hundred feet or so at the bottom of the valley) is contaminated and frequently makes children ill.

Even more astonishing, here is a school of 725 in which, according to the Head, there are 128 orphans. That’s over 17% of the entire roll and a huge figure. They can’t be orphans from the genocide (after all, even if we count the post-genocide killings which went on till 1996, the youngest victim of those would be 11 or 12). It’s also too many for them to be AIDS orphans or victims of family feuds. They might be children in households headed up by a young person who was originally a genocide orphan, but the whole thing is a mystery. Idewald doesn’t elaborate and the facts get lost in the opacity of Rwandan conversation.

Interestingly enough, although this school is in the same secteur as Bilingaga and Kivumu, and only a couple of miles away as the crow flies, Bwirika doesn’t seem to have the same difficulties in getting children to come in uniform and with shoes. I ask the chairman of govs directly about this, and about why Cyeza should be so poverty stricken relative to the other secteurs surrounding it. He cites poor soils (there’s so much mica in the soil that it’s painful on your eyes in bright sunlight), and the pressure of too many people per acre, so that farms are being subdivided and subdivided again until there’s not enough land to support families properly and the soil gets exhausted. It’s a worrying and dangerous situation and isn’t going to improve. It also helps explain why they had no alternative but to remove the majority of the old Akagera National Park and use it to settle returning refugees from Uganda.

Back to Gitarama on a moto, and lunch at the Tranquillité. I’m just starting to swallow my mélange when one of the waitresses comes up shyly and drops a birthday card onto my table! Someone has tipped them off that it’s my birthday, and they’ve bought me a card and all signed it. And the card would have cost them more than the value of my meal today. Must have been Cathie who put them up to it…..

Back home and write up my report on Bwirika. Tom arrives; he’s also been to the post office and during the day a card has come in from Mike and Ann. Talk about expert timing!

During the afternoon and evening there’s lots of texts from people either confirming they’re coming to the bash tomorrow, or crying off because of cost/distance/tiredness (and I can absolutely understand that, especially for those teaching in secondary schools. They’ve got exams to set and mark and all the usual end-of-term exhaustion). Tom and I finalise our arrangements for tomorrow’s picnic while we prepare a massive fruit salad and box it up for the freezer; and so to bed.

Best thing about today: the parcel from home; everybody’s kindness today
Worst thing about today: how can you allow a situation to exist where a school’s only water supply makes its children ill? It’s crazy. There’s so much rainfall here that you could have clean drinking water for all the children all the year round. You just have to pay to install a cistern and filter and connect it up to roof gutters.