Heading off to Byumba

March 2nd

Didn’t get to sleep till well after 2 in the morning (memo – never again ask to sleep in the same house where the party’s taking place!). And only got some rest then because they all went off to a club at Kigali Business Centre till around 4.30.

In the morning discovered that Marisa and I were the only two who had, after all, stayed at Kersti’s. Went with her up to the VSO office and managed to get all our blogging done, so feeling good. Came back to Kersti’s and not only were she and Nick up and about, they were cooking us omelettes for lunch. Wow! Met Buffet, the dog they’ve taken on. He’s a huge black Labrador, very strong and high spirited. The reason they’ve got him is that his original owners have been accepted to adopt a Rwandan baby and you can’t apparently combine a dog with an adopted baby. Something like that; I don’t know the details. Anyway, Buffet is a super dog and scares the daylights out of any Rwandan he passes. I should think Nick’s house is now one of the safest in town. Dogs are slowly reappearing in Rwanda, but they’re still rare and people are extremely wary of them (with good reason…..)

In the afternoon Marisa went back to Nyamata and Kersti and I took a matata to the town centre to join up with the rest of the Refugee Camp volunteers. We’re almost all of us the older volunteers, and it was clear we were going to have a real party the second we all met up. (The younger volunteers are nearly all teachers and bound into their school timetables. We oldies are almost all education officers with a much more flexible schedule. Mind you, I’ve never asked Claude for permission to do this lark, so I might be due for a rocket when we return)!

The road to Byumba is different again from either the Akagera or Gitarama – Butare roads. At first you pass several miles of rice paddy, with brilliant green rice and glints of sunlight off the water in the fields. Then it’s mile after mile of sugar cane in the flat valley bottoms, but with the hills getting higher and higher and closing in on you. We’re on the main road to Uganda; there are lorries every few yards including some that have come to dreadful ends when their brakes have failed on steep slopes. The road, too, is the first main road I’ve discovered in Rwanda to be in poor condition. For several miles you drive at jogging speed because you have to wander left and right across the carriageway to avoid the worst potholes.

Next, you start climbing; a steady, continuous climb that just goes on and on. You reach a junction where the main road descends into the tea plantation part of Rwanda (I’m cross I didn’t manage to see the tea fields because I wanted to get photos for you people. Never mind, I’ll come again). But you climb up and up and up. The views are just beautiful.

By this time you’re definitely into mountains. It’s like entering the Alps or the Pyrenees, but with banana trees and eucalypts instead of pines, and slopes which are terraced.

Byumba sits at 7200 feet, and is the sixth biggest and definitely the highest town in Rwanda. It’s cold; there’s no other word for it. Occasionally you feel the heat of the sun, but for almost all the time it’s like an early Spring day in England. Everyone is wearing woollens or fleeces or padded jackets except for one stupid Englishman who didn’t make room in his little rucksack.

We are staying in the former (Anglican) Bishop’s palace, which has been downgraded into the church guest house. The new Episcopal palace is next door, and palace is the right word. Obviously either construction costs are very low here, or else the clergy are far better paid than teachers)! Kersti’s little cottage is joined on to ours and is the flat for the former palace housekeeper. She’s got hot water but rainwater leaks into the house; we shower in cold water but are dry.

We spend the rest of the evening and all next morning preparing our stuff (me with Polly on monitoring and evaluation). It hits me for the first time that I’ve really taken on something which is going to stretch me to the utter limit. Not the refugee aspect of things, (though that’s going to be an enormous emotional engagement), but professionally in terms of coping with the language and the pedagogy. Polly can’t speak French at all, so I’ve got to do it all. I’m going to be doing teacher training, INSET, in a foreign language, with a lot of technical vocab I’m unsure of, to teachers not just from secondary schools but primaries and even “maternelles” (nurseries), and in the context of a Rwandan educational system I’m only just getting to grips with. If I think about this too much, I’ll panic. But it shows you perfectly what VSO is all about – it drops you into situations where you just have to cope; into situations you’d run a mile from in the considered environment of England! But I do confess it gave me a very sleepless night on Sunday.

The food at the guest house is wonderful. We’re treated like kings by two charming cooks who burst into giggles every time we pay them a compliment. I think they’re so used to being ignored by Rwandan men that they don’t know how to cope with normal civilised banter from their guests.

The biggest surprise of the day is to find that we’re sharing supper with another group. Twenty ladies from a church in Cheltenham have raised huge sums of money back in Gloucestershire and are here seeing that it’s spent wisely in repairing and building houses for the poorest people in Byumba. Some of the ladies are doing the actual work themselves. They’re a jolly bunch and as soon as they learn who we are and why we’re here, the party really gets started. The Bishop can barely make himself heard above all our din, and when Phineas (Kersti’s former headteacher and co-worker in the diocesan education office) arrives, everything moves up another notch. Phineas is a great guy and everyone loves him. After a beer each, the atmosphere’s more like a raucous harvest supper than two groups of strangers politely getting to know each other.

Alas, the ladies are leaving tomorrow, but no doubt to return after shaking a lot more coins from their parishioners’ pockets!

We opt for a (relatively) early night because at least some of us are shattered after two nights of almost no sleep. We, for the record, means me, Geert and Kest. Kest is just wonderful. He’s 66, a retired primary school teacher, who belongs to the same running club in Holland as Geert. He’s been out here for about three weeks on a holiday, staying with Geert. What sort of person spends a considerable chunk of his African holiday volunteering to work in a refugee camp, and doing at least as much work as the rest of us in his third language? Just think about it!

Best thing about today – the journey up to Byumba and everything that followed
Worst thing about today – the journey from Kimironko to the town centre in a crowded matata. Not only did Kersti and I have heavy and full backpacks, but we also had a broom, buckets and paper bags full of food for our breakfasts in the coming week. We caused havoc as people tried to climb over us and our stuff to get in and out. I’d love to know what they were saying about us. I’m sure they assumed we were father and daughter, which we both thought was a huge joke. (For the record, it was Kersti’s 30th birthday).