I hate having no electricty

Mar 30th

Quiet Sunday. Off to church for the first time in a month (three full hours on hard seats, and it ends with the Pastor telling off the congregation for arriving late, for not giving notice if people intend to give witness etc). We have a visiting Pastor and his wife from Cyangugu at the service; I wonder if he still has a church standing after the earthquake!

Tom is off to Kigali immediately the service ends so I’m home alone. All along the side of the main road there are heaps of mud dug out from the drains during umuganda yesterday, so I fill a couple of food tubs with the soil as I walk home. Cue a small crowd of curious Rwandans who are totally baffled as to why a white man in his Sunday best should be scooping mud from the roadside. Dead right, too – the ways of muzungus are indeed weird and mysterious!

After lunch I fill all my empty tins and jars with soils and plant out the rest of the sweet pea seeds I brought from home. (Still got stocks seeds to plant, and the beetroot seeds from Tiga). Problem is, firstly that some mud has leaked into my rucksack and onto my cagoule, and also it smells very drainsy. Wish now that I hadn’t used our food tubs to collect it, because I haven’t got any disinfectant. And all the seeds need protecting from the heavy rains, so I rig a shelter with our emergency jerrycans of water and a big cooking pot lid.

Cook up a vegetable stew for lunch, and I’m able to experiment. Firstly with grating nearly everything instead of chopping it (so that it cooks faster), and also by using my peanut flour for the first time. The flour makes a great thickener, and I find it neither tastes floury nor overwhelmingly peanutty. Perhaps I didn’t put enough in. Watch this space. What I nearly overdid was the red hot piri-piri chilli pepper – half a teaspoon in a huge pot is absolutely the maximum!

Spend the afternoon reading books and wishing I had power to use the laptop. In the evening spend time listening to the radio and reading books by candle and torchlight (at least, with a wind-up torch, you don’t feel guilty at wasting light). Very frustrating – I’ve got a pile of ironing and I’m running out of work clothes; I’ve got a pile of census forms I could be working on; I’ve got emails I want to send to people and I can’t even read the ones I downloaded on Friday. This lack of electricity is a real nuisance.

Long phone call with Teresa, and wish I was back home.