Bunchy top and bacterial wilt.....

If you've just read the blog posting below this one, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm banging on again about unspeakable diseases affecting men's private parts.....

But, no - bunchy top and bacterial wilt are two serious diseases of banana crops that are starting to cause havoc across Africa from Angola up to Uganda, and including Rwanda. In most of these countries bananas are THE staple food crop. Any of you reading this who have been to Rwanda will know just how omnipresent banana plantations are, and how much they figure in the local diet.

So these diseases could lead to widespread famine if they are not tackled. They're both spread by insects; bunchy top stunts the trees and reduces the yield; wilt kills the trees and makes the fruit inedible.

Just as if Rwanda doesn't have enough problems!

Cross your legs, gentlemen.......

An extract from today's "New Times". And when Rwandan authorities say things like this, they have a habit of meaning it.....

Massive circumcision drive on the books

BY IRENE V. NAMBI

A massive sensitization programme on circumcision is expected to kick off early next year as one key measure to combat HIV/AIDS. The exercise has for long been delayed because of the lack of capable personnel to carry out the circumcisions.

Mass male-circumcision, a policy that was adopted by government last year, as a way of reducing the HIV/AIDS infection rate is at a snail-pace due to lack of capacity to carry it out countrywide, according to Dr. Richard Sezibera, the Minister of Health. Sezibera said that training programmes have been introduced in a number of hospitals like King Faisal Hospital to ensure safe circumcision.

“We do not want to use local methods of circumcision so we are training enough personnel to carry out these operations.

It is however very vital for the public to know that although this is a preventative measure, it is not 100 percent effective,” the Minister said.

“Despite the fact that it reduces the circumcised person’s risk of getting HIV, it does not protect his partner. So other preventative measures like abstinence, faithfulness and use of condoms must apply,” he advised.

Rwanda launched a campaign to encourage all men to be circumcised, to reduce the risk of catching HIV/AIDS.

Health experts say that men who are circumcised are 60 percent more likely to be protected against HIV during sexual intercourse than those who are not.

The ministry said that soldiers, policemen and students would be asked to come forward first for circumcision. (But not teachers or VSO volunteers - hooray!)

The National Coordinator of HIV clinical prevention in TRAC plus, Elévaniè Nyankesha Umunyana said that, once training of health specialist is done, a mass sensitization campaign of this policy will begin.

“By the end of this year, there will be enough personnel to carry out these surgeries at all hospitals in the country.

Apparently we are ensuring that all health insurance companies include circumcision as a priority and so far RAMA has adopted it,” Umunyana explained.

The 2007-2008 Demographic Health Survey revealed that only 15 per cent of the men in the country are circumcised.

However, citing army personnel who have successfully undergone the operation, Umunyana expressed optimism that once the public is informed about the policy, attitudes will change and more men will come forward.

So just what do they mean by "local methods of circumcision", eh?

Sit up and listen, you guys - the muzungu's talking to you!

August 26th

0600a.m. Another beautiful morning. As I draw the curtains the sun is just rising above the horizon, blood red as it shines through all the dust. The sky is grey but within an hour it perfectly blue and cloudless. There’s a cool breeze blowing at this altitude and it’s a joy to walk through the town. As happens most days, my little “girlfriend” comes running up to me for a hug as we pass on the way to Ahazaza maternelle for her, and the office for me.

0815 a.m. I manage to catch Claude before the big head teacher’s meeting and get him to brief me on the local government re-shuffle. It is less dramatic than I originally feared. Claude has been promoted (I think); he’s been given a new post which gives him responsibility for Health and Good Governance (ombudsman) as well as retaining overall responsibility for education. Valérian takes over the day-to-day role as education supervisor. The position of chargé disappears. Innocent stays as youth and sports co-ordinator, and Béatrice retains her secretarial role. In other words they all retain their jobs; nobody is sacked, and nobody new is taken on. Claude’s role widens; the others stay the same. Very surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be any dramatic expansion in either the number of posts at secteur level, or the transference of day to day running of education to secteur level (which we all thought was the whole purpose of the re-shuffle). The key issue for Muhanga is whether Claude will be able to put the same amount of drive and energy into education in his new, expanded role, and whether Valérian will come across as a dynamic leader rather than a capable administrator. He seems efficient and respected in his 1:1 dealings with people in the office, but I want to see him cracking the whip in front of a hundred and fifty bolshie heads and telling them to get on and do things they’d rather not! Well, I might find out very soon at this morning’s meeting!

There is no provision in the new order of things for a Rwandan to do the job I’m doing when I leave, or when my replacement leaves. This is worrying, because the whole premise of VSO is not that we’re an extra pair of hands to help the Districts, but that we build capacity so that when we leave they can do the jobs we’re doing themselves. From this particular point of view my placement has been a failure. Neither Claude in his new role, nor Valérian, will have the time to do my job of day-to-day visits out to schools, inspecting, advising, and acting as their advocate when they express their case and plead for things they need. Neither Claude nor Valérian could ever be called lazy; it’s simply a case that you need a Rwandan doing my job as adviser, just as you have always had in the English schools’ system. I’m going to have to brief my VSO successor on all this before he/she starts working here.

1500 Well, the big meeting has finished after four hours, and I’m just back after a bite at “Tranquillité”. We talked about laptop computers (one for each school) and we had a guy from Kigali talking to us about the specifications. They can’t make up their mind whether to choose ACER of H-P, but the machines they are ordering are excellent – every bit as good my new one and loads better than Claude’s! But in Rwandan style they are buying the computers first; then they’ll start negotiating for solar panels. meanwhile there are 116 computers which almost nobody can use because they don’t have any electricity to power them….

Then we come on to the primary census results. Claude presents the powerpoint I made for him, and I have to stand in front of the assembled hordes (150 heads) and summarise the key issues and get them thinking. What a difference to last time when we were doing this in the middle of a thunderstorm, so that the power went off and we had to do it all from memory! I get a round of applause when I finish speaking.

Next we go on to the secondary school results. Those for the first year of secondary include the new tronc commun schools. Jeanne, my friend the head teacher at Nyabisindu, has the unfortunate joy of coming bottom of the list in most subjects. I’m not prepared to have her made a scapegoat, and I’ve always promised to support her, so while I’m writing this I’m waiting for her to come back from her lunch and we’ll put our thinking caps on as to how we’re going to raise the performance of her staff and pupils. The results at all levels of secondary schools are fascinating. Some of the little isolated rural secondaries in the far north of Muhanga have done well, even beating some of the established giants of Gitarama. Some of the new tronc commun sections have also beaten long established secondary schools. Not sure yet why this should be; is it luck? Leadership? Group Scolaire St Joseph finds itself congratulated for having a whole bunch of among the brightest pupils in the district, and immediately after vilified for filling many of the bottom twenty places, too. But that’s because its twice the size of most other secondary school, so of course it will have more than its share of the very able and the “why are these kids in school?” types.

1530 Still no sign of Jeanne. And I took a moto from town so that I would be punctual. Meanwhile, outside the office window there’s another party atmosphere as all the heads congregate to take with them the latest batch of text books to arrive here (Social Studies for years 1-3, all in Kinyarwanda).

2200 Time for bed. Jeanne never did show upo; I don’t know whether she feels ashamed about her school’s performance, or whether something more urgent came up. I’ll go and see her at the school tomorrow. She needs an action plan; something to show she’s aware of the situation and that she’s not just going to shrug her shoulders and pretend things haven’t happened.

Tonight I cooked an experimental meal; I bought a load of imboga, cooked it, and tried to pulp it with the liquidiser to make a sauce. Unfortunately I left too much water in with it, and the sauce was so runny that even after adding peanut flour it still didn’t work properly. Oh well, you can’t win them all and at least I did eat it!

My watch has stopped working; that’s a nuisance but at least my phone keeps reasonable time so I can live without the watch for a while

I spend the evening going through Védaste’s thesis for one final time. I have to change a lot of his tenses; he wanders about from present to past tense in the same sentence. I think I’ve given him enough of my time now and he can do any last minute alterations himself.

Just when I think I’ve finished I get a call from another man who I think is a bit mentally unstable; he has a missive he wants to send to Tony Blair and wants me to translate it for him. I say I’ll do it; he’s one of these people who are obsessed with one particular issue and I know I’ll get no peace from him unless I’ve done it for him. He says he’s going to bring it to the office early tomorrow.

Tonight I’m really seriously tired; I try to read before bed but the pages keep swimming in front of my eyes…. The water’s gone off again and the electricity has been flickering all evening.

In my “Guardian Weekly” they’re celebrating the paper’s 90th birthday with reprints of selected articles. Amongst them is this advert. I guess it comes from around the 1920’s and just reading it shows how much the world has changed in less than a century:

“Opportunities in Kenya: Active young men with keen outdoor interests and moderate capital find that settlement in Kenya opens up wider opportunities than are to be found in England. Live for a year or two with a local farmer and learn how to farm. Land is fertile, climate equable, labour and other costs low. Inquire about Kenya now!” Contact Colonel Knaggs, Kenya Government Agent, Dept. 22, Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square, London WC2.

I wonder what the good Colonel would make of Kenya in 2009?

Best thing about today: doing the presentation in front of all the heads. I’m no longer just the muzungu volunteer; I’m someone who works at the District and who is giving them information they don’t know and which they need to take on board.

Worst thing: I’m bored with proof reading and correcting endless dry paragraphs about soil mulch and soil chemistry.

A day to forget

August 25th

Not a nice day today. But I think I might have solved the mystery of the containers in the plot of land next to the flat. I don’t think people are about to start building houses or shops there after all. The old “La Planète” bar seems to be home to a group of Indian men. I have been assuming that they are Ugandan or Kenyan Asians coming here to start up businesses. But I discover that there’s an Indian company about to start building a hydro plant somewhere in the west of Muhanga district, close to the Nyaborongo river. I think these Indian men must be engineers working on the project, and the containers hold their equipment and tools which are too big to store in “La Planète” itself. I’ve only got the haziest ideas of where the scheme is and what it will look like. There’s not going to be a huge dam across the river or anything spectacular like that; more a case of diverting river water through tunnels to cross existing watersheds and generate power before the water is returned into the Nyaborongo. Anything to give us more reliable and cheaper electricity is a good thing, but I wonder what the effects might be on agriculture during the dry season if large amounts of river water are taken away. Rwanda has a history of catastrophic droughts in the last century, especially in the east of the country, and even during the time I’ve been here it’s been touch and go with the late summer harvests.

Time and time again you realise that there is only one real necessity to life, and that is food to eat. Everything else – shelter, clothing, companionship and family – everything else is negotiable and disposable. And even today there is not enough food security in Rwanda. Taking the country as a whole, my guess is that there is enough food produced to feed everyone adequately (but not excessively). If there were to be a severe drought, the question is whether there exists the infrastructure and organisational ability to deliver food to the remotest rural districts where famine always hits hardest.

Becky and Karen have had to sack Delphine, their domestique. I’m caught in the crossfire because Delphine is a “friend” of mine (she comes to me for English lessons and to practise her keyboarding skills on my laptop), and I was the one who suggested her to Becky as suitable for the job. Becky came home early one day this week to find the gate to the compound locked and the key still in the lock so that she couldn’t get in to her own house. There was a long delay before Delphine came to the gate to let her in. Inside the house Delphine had a boy with her, and the curtains and shutters on some windows were drawn. We started to draw the obvious conclusions. We don’t think anything was stolen, but out here we’re paranoid about our security, and our domestiques, especially on days when we leave our bedrooms open to be cleaned, have the perfect opportunity to go through all our things and know exactly what we have and what could be stolen. Delphine swears that she wasn’t up to anything and that the boy is the “chef du classe” from her old school who wanted information from her (she says). But she’s handled the situation all wrongly, and there’s absolutely no future in having a domestique if there’s the slightest shadow of doubt about her trustworthiness or honesty. Delphine is very tearful and wants me to intercede for her all day, but in this situation its Becky and Karen’s call and I’m not going to put any pressure on them. If I was in their situation I would very probably have sacked her too.

For Delphine it’s disastrous. The whole idea of her working was so that she could start saving up money to put herself through university. Now she’s lost two thirds of her income, and the remaining third comes from being domestique to Moira and Kerry. After this week’s episode there’s no certainty that they’ll want to keep her on, either. I hope they will, because I think the girl has learned a hard lesson. I think it was a simple error of judgement on her part to let the boy into the house (she could always have talked to him at the gate), but it was a disastrous mistake and she’s got to learn.

In the evening a gang of us go round to Becky and Karen’s for a lovely meal; afterwards we try out some games Becky has brought with her. I get everyone playing “consequences” which seems new to all the others, yet it was one of the first party games I ever learned. We end up laughing like drains when we read out the stories and it occurs to us that this would be an excellent way of filling in the time while we wait to be served at restaurants.

Ho hum; it’s been a rotten day for all of us – me, Becky, Karen and especially Del. And right at the end of the day we get even more disturbing news. Soraya has been out to two schools in Kabacuzi and word from one of them is that in the District re-shuffle of jobs, Claude has been replaced as Director of Education by Valérian, and given another post. We don’t know whether it’s a promotion or not, or whether he’ll still have any input into Muhanga schools. I can’t imagine working here without Claude’s energy and sharpness; nobody else can touch him. If we really do have a new regime about to start, then I’m glad I’ll be out of it in a few months’ time.

Best thing about today – the evening meal.

Worst thing – just about everything else. Tomorrow there’s one of these big meetings of all the heads in the District. Nobody’s told me about it; I picked up the news from Soraya and she only heard it from the head teacher of Kabacuzi. Another triumph for District office communication and another reason why we really do need those Monday morning briefing sessions.

Cukiro and Nyanza - two schools for the price of one!

August 24th

Into the office expecting another slow day. Sure enough, Claude seems to have abandoned the weekly team meetings. They lasted just twice. In fairness to him he’s very busy this morning; within a few minutes of the office opening there is a queue of people waiting to see him or Valérian.

Another school has pushed its census data under my door – only three left now. I spend the first forty minutes keying in the details. During the night I’ve convinced myself that there’s a secondary school at Shyogwe which I’ve completely forgotten, and I make plans to go out quietly and see them in the afternoon. But eventually I remember that the school has changed its name, and I have their information under the new name.

That reminds me, in the new primary school atlases there seems to be once again a wholesale renaming of towns in Rwanda. The town of Gitarama has, for the past three or four years, officially been the town of Muhanga; now I notice in the atlas that it’s called Nyamabuye. Muhanga and Nyamabuye are both the names of secteurs within Muhanga District; Muhanga secteur is roughly in the middle of the District, and Nyamabuye is the little secteur which contains most of the built up area of Gitarama. It’s inconceivable that the atlas has been produced without being scrutinised for political correctness, so we must assume there’s some intent on changing the names again. It’s ridiculous and I wish they would make a final decision and stick to it. There are practical implications, too. On road signs, even on the new ones, where places have changed names someone has painted out the names on the road signs in black paint. Of course, this being Rwanda, they haven’t finished the job; the “wrong” names have been painted out, but nobody has bothered to paint in the replacements. Perhaps they know the names will change every year or so, and they don’t want to go down as the operative who put the wrong words on the signs…. It also means that all the rice sack maps of Rwanda we have produced with teachers during the past year are all “wrong”, too. And yet, everybody knows exactly what you mean if you speak about “Gitarama” as a town.

Soraya comes into the office and says that today she’s off to Cukiro school in Nyarusange to do some training with them. I’ve been trying to motivate myself to get out to a school and do a visit, and this is the ideal opportunity. We ring Cukiro and ask if I can come too; I’ve already inspected the primary section but there’s a tronc commun part now, only one class, which I haven’t seen yet. We discover that the head is at Nyanza school. Nyanza is a “satellite school” of Cukiro; in other words it’s a new school to cater for the ever increasing rural population of Rwanda, and until it reaches its full complement of six years of pupils it is administered by the nearest school – in Nyanza’s case it is Cukiro. I have never been to Nyanza and haven’t the faintest idea where it is. So it turns out into a perfect day for me. Soraya arranges the motos and at eleven o’clock we roar off through the countryside to Cukiro. Cukiro sits in the extreme south west corner of Muhanga, a long way along an earth road. It’s not the easiest school to reach. You leave the main road after about twenty kilometres, wind round a hillside and descend into a broad valley. At various intervals along the valley bottom there are log bridges, some very flimsy, which you have to negotiate to cross streams. The main river is shallow and prone to flood during the rainy season. At the moment, at the end of the dry season, there is no problem of flooding, but the road close to the river is covered with fine sand brought down by last season’s floods, and for a hundred metres or so it’s like driving along a beach. The bike fishtails and at one point I’m sure I’m about to be unseated. You next have a long winding climb up a hillside, on and on. At each corner you think you must be there, but all you see is the next spur of hillside. The surroundings are wall to wall banana trees, cassava plantations, stands of maize or beans, and in many cases fields already harvested and dug ready for planting at the start of the rains.

We arrive at Cukiro to find that Nadine, the head, is still at Nyanza but is on her way back to meet us. Soraya waits for her, but I go straight into the tronc commun class because their lessons finish for the day at two o’clock and I’m hoping to watch two lessons, one with each of the two teachers employed to cover the curriculum with them.

The teacher hasn’t yet arrived for this lesson, which was supposed to start ten minutes ago. The pupils are without exception in uniform; pale blue cotton shirts and dark blue trousers or skirts. The uniform is perfect and they would put an English secondary class to shame. The entire secondary school consists of one class of around fifty pupils. Because Cukiro is out on a limb in the extreme corner of the district, it has not reached the size hoped for. Pupils from Kaduha school are supposed to come here, but Kaduha is on the main road and it is easier for their children to go to Nyarusange village where there is a much bigger school, and electricity, and even a shop! On the other hand, children from the corner of neighbouring Ruhango district find it easier to come to Cukiro because their designated school is miles away, up hill and down dale, and the whole situation illustrates the sheer difficulty of getting yourself to a school in this hilly terrain.

The teacher is in his first year of work. His English is just about adequate and he’s clearly flustered by having a native speaker in the room. We’re doing basic algebra but, my God, I’ve never seen algebra made so theoretical and dull. Why on earth can’t he give them some practical examples to show its relevance and break things up a bit? The class is attentive, and seem to understand the work at least as well as I do, if not better. (It’s interesting how the way maths is taught varies so much from one country to another that something which we all understand from our upbringing can seem completely unintelligible when presented in another culture).

One thing I do like is that he splits the class in groups and they work competitively against each other in their groups. From the way they go into groups it’s obvious that he does this habitually, and it’s not something being laid on for my benefit. But on the other hand he hasn’t learnt their names, even though he only teaches fifty pupils. I hate it when the teachers says “you” and points to a pupil. It’s so dehumanising and it undermines what is otherwise a good rapport from a new teacher and his class. He’s hot on his gender equality, asking boys and girls alternatively, but he hasn’t thought to put any stimulus material on the walls. As with most of these tronc commun sections in Muhanga, the walls have just one or two tatty old wall posters, usually home -made and in French, dating from when the room was in use by primary pupils. Oh well, all this goes into my report for Claude and he can make of it what whatever he likes!

On we go on the motos to Nyanza, the satellite school. In my mind I have the notion that this is just down the road. It isn’t. It’s down the long winding hill, across the river, and up another winding hill, then across a windswept, bleak, bare piece of ground and on ever smaller paths so that we’re convinced someone has directed us the wrong way. Needless to mention, neither of our moto drivers has ever been here before and you can sense they’re getting twitchy about being so deep into the countryside.

Eventually, against all the odds, we drive across a full-size football pitch which occupies almost the whole of the only flat hilltop for miles around, and there, nestling into the side of the hill is the school. It only has 264 pupils, and is one of the smallest schools in Muhanga. There are only five year groups, but there are also only four classrooms. This school is only made possible by double vacation. Also, for this year at least, they have a full sized staffroom. At the back of the school are no fewer than twelve latrines. Nyanza has, without a doubt, the most generous provision of toilets in the whole of Muhanga. There’s no water on site at all, and the nearest spring is about a mile away and down a long hill. So water isn’t used very much to clean the loos and the smell is overpowering within ten paces. There is a hedge all round the school and a small patch of sweet potatoes. A few very stunted trees line another side; these trees have been pollarded almost to death for firewood.

All four teachers are outside their rooms watching us arrive, and this sets the tone for the afternoon. Nyanza has absolutely no sense of urgency at all. The children are compliant enough, and teachers keep on disappearing from lessons to talk to each other outside the rooms. I know that some of this is to do with how they’re going to cope with the two of us visitors, but it’s unnecessary. I watch two more maths lessons; in both cases the children are simply given exercises to do. After twenty minutes or so, the class stops and pupils in turn are told to come up and work the examples through on the blackboard while the rest of the class looks on and corrects them. Understandably the class gets bored and fidgety.

I say to the teachers that next time they’re to divide the class in groups, divide their blackboards into panels (the blackboards are enormous and cover two entire walls of the rooms), and make each group work the examples in their own wall space while the teacher watches and corrects. The staff nod and say the right things, but I know that as soon as I leave they won’t take a blind bit of notice of what I say. I’ll talk to Nadine, who spends a day a week covering Nyanza from her base at Cukiro, but what this place desperately needs is a proper headteacher in permanent residence to put a bomb behind the lethargy and get this place off its backside! The walls are just as bare as at Cukiro, but at least one of the teachers seems to know his pupils’ names. Two of the teachers have so little English that we can’t use it to converse, and I have to do all my reporting back in French. The class one teacher seems to be doing little else but getting the children to sing – sing their alphabet, sing the parts of their head etc.

During one lesson it’s difficult for any of us to concentrate because a posse of villagers comes right up to the door and windows to stare in at the muzungu and see what he’s doing. One man, possibly one of the parents’ committee, comes right into the room in his gumboots and sits down just behind me, pushing the two boys up to the far end of the desk. He never speaks to me; he just stares at me. He looks intently at my lesson evaluation sheet but I’m pretty sure he can’t read, and so it’s all meaningless to him. The class teacher has to shift herself and tell the parents to buzz off so we can get on with the lesson. You certainly don’t get many white men in this corner of the District!

By the time I finish and debrief the staff it’s late and our moto drivers are unhappy; they don’t want to get caught out after dark in this sort of remote terrain. We bounce back over the rutty tracks to the main road; everywhere along the track we have people coming out of their houses to see muzungus who are evidently so rich that they can travel by moto instead of on foot like everyone else. It makes me feel slightly uneasy….

Back home it is almost six o’clock. I know Soraya won’t have much food in her house, and I have plenty, so we join forces for a meal. Vegetable soup; my “Simba salad” with homemade potato salad, eggs, cheddar cheese from home, salami and loads of fresh salad vegetables; and finally fruit salad. Mid way through, Becky and Karen come round with a problem and we agree on a resolution between the soup and the main course!

By the time this is all over I’m too tired to either write a blog or write my work reports, both of which I’d promised myself I’d do before bed. The only thing I do is bag up loads of red beans, which I’ve part cooked, and freeze them for the future.

And so to bed. Best thing about today – without a doubt, getting back into schools. Thanks, Soraya, for putting a bomb behind me!

Worst thing – I hate going to bed with work unfinished.

Latest pictures from Shyogwe

Inside the new admin building. Somewhere safe to store textbooks, and work stations for the teachers. This is unheard of luxury for the staff at Shyogwe, yet in any English or Dutch school we would take it all for granted...


Inside the new office and staffroom. Electricity, computer, printer.... What a difference a year makes here!


The administration block looks neat and attractive. There's even the beginnings of a flower bed, and (of course), railing to lean your push bike on!


The new block from the front. Very little different to this time last year, I'm afraid.


Inside one of the classrooms.


I couldn't resist this picture. It is a beautiful acacia tree which both Geert and I have noticed at the back of the school. More than any other trees, these acacias are the ones we're both going to remember as typical of Africa.


The roof tiles on one side are just about finished.


Geert with Stephanie. Behind them is a pile of earth; this is mixed with water to make a mud cement to bed the tiles onto the canes and to seal the gaps between the tiles and the outside of the building.


Geert, Stephanie and the (very camera shy) master builder.

Ruaiari's half ton

August 22nd – 23rd

Ruarai’s half ton

This weekend is dominated by Ruarai’s 50th birthday bash at Kigali. Le tout VSO will be there. I spend the morning pottering around, ironing, shopping and getting through the usual loads of other boring things. I’m also just getting into a new book, “Never let me go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is so unusual in its premise that it makes riveting reading.

Tina is back in town and texts me to say she has booked a room at St Paul’s, so I agree to share costs with her. It means I have a very stress free breeze into Kigali (though with a maniac driver on Atraco who jerks the bus round every vehicle in front of us so that we back seat passengers are thrown every which way on top of each other).

In Kigali the FOREX giving very good exchange rates is closed, but I notice that English dictionaries are very cheap in the Nakumat supermarket, so I make a mental note to buy a batch for Gitongati school on Sunday morning.

I bump into Tina outside UTC and we go for a coffee and meet up with various other VSOs who are already gathering for the evening. As you can imagine, the Irish contingent is there in force, and I meet Paula’s dad who is spending his second visit with her.

The evening is complicated because as well as Ruarai’s do, there is the 50th birthday party for Primus beer being held at the big stadium in the evening. It features various bands including J Mpiana, who is one of my Congolese heroes, and ends with a firework display. There’s talk about going on to this after Ruarai’s but we’re not sure about it. There’s going to be a lot of cheap beer and therefore an enormous horde of very drunk Rwandan men by the end of the night, and while the music and fireworks will undoubtedly be the best Rwandan can manage, we don’t want to get tangled up with aggressive, drunk men making a beeline for our girls. I know that reads very racist and patronising, but we can see it coming and maybe it’s best to anticipate trouble and just avoid the possibility of risking any confrontations.

Ruarai’s party is grand. He’s wearing the same outfit he wore to Gitfest. It’s a lovely Kenyan costume, complete with hat, which he bought in Nairobi. Not Rwandan at all, but in it he looks every inch the tribal chieftain. His mother is here on a visit, a charming lady who must be as fit as a fiddle to cope with the exhausting schedule Ruarai’s devised for her. The two of them seem to have done every corner of the country in about ten days!

The party is taking place in Kigali’s new Indian restaurant, a rival for Indian Kazana. The food is absolutely top notch, and Ruarai has negotiated an excellent rate for such a big group. We’re most of us unused to such rich fare, but that doesn’t stop most of us going up to the buffet for seconds! Drinks, however, are wickedly expensive (wine especially), and the waiters are both slow in bringing our change and sometimes seem to be adding VAT at about 50%..... But nobody is going to make a scene and let this spoil the party.

Midway through the evening the staff bring a birthday cake for Ruarai with much banging of tin trays and a sung version of “happy birthday to you” which manages to be not quite Indian, certainly not African and several steps removed from the English version! The waiters are all decked out in sky blue pyjama suits with blue turbans, and pink waistcoats. Inside the restaurant it seems to work but there’s no way anybody would want to be seen on the streets of Kigali wearing that rig!

By the time we finish eating we discover that the Primus party at the stadium has finished. The big decision therefore is whether to go clubbing or move somewhere else and continue drinking. The latter course wins, and yet again we have a party which doesn’t end at one of the night clubs. We drink and talk at “Chez Yves” until around four in the morning, by which time there’s about six of us left, and the staff are desperate to see us off the premises and get themselves to bed. We decide we might as well go the whole hog and see in the dawn before sleeping (we’re all staying at St Paul’s which is only a few hundred yards away), but at this time in the morning there’s nowhere open except Nakumat supermarket. And the ambience of the café outside Nakumat is so dire that even in our drunken stupors we know it’s a certain party pooper.

So we end up sitting under the casuarinas trees on a grass verge at the side of the main road, just above the Péage traffic lights, drinking from a bottle of whiskey which “Fair Construction” John has bought, and playing “truth or dare” and “spin the bottle”. We must look quite a sight: six drunken westerners (Tina, Amy and Becky; me, John and Eric). All sensible people have long since retired to bed.

While we’re amusing ourselves there is a steady trickle of Rwandans going jogging up the main road. Who on earth gets up at four in the morning to go for a run? I don’t know who is the more surprised – us to see so many people out for a run, or them to see six muzungus apparently having a picnic by the town centre. Now if only Kigali had some town centre parks, like most big cities do, we would really have appreciated the chance of a quiet, leafy place to see the sun rise.

Eventually it starts getting light, and we feel we can retire to bed, honour satisfied; we’ve partied all night. John, unfortunately, has taken a tumble down a steep bank and received a nasty cut on both legs.

We decide we’re hungry, so since Nakumat supermarket is just a couple of hundred yards away and open 24 hours, we pile in and buy pastries for breakfast. Then we creep as quietly as we reasonably can (or as noisily as he can manage in one case), into the St Paul’s centre and crash out in our beds for a couple of hours. Whatever you might think from reading this, it has been a good night. Nobody has been seriously hurt, or started fights, or been robbed, and that’s something to be thankful for.

As you can appreciate, come ten o’clock Sunday, when we need to be up and out of St Paul’s, we’re not at our brightest and best. There have been two church services next door already, and an Intore drumming troupe is practising noisily somewhere close so that if you lie down, the thuds from the drums travel through the concrete floor and up through the bed into your brain. Try sleeping through about twenty drummers giving their heart and soul for the cultural heritage…

We drift up to Simba; me via Nakumat to buy my dictionaries. As I enter Nakumat I’m shadowed by a bunch of street children, hungry, who think that if they pester me long enough I’ll give in and buy them food. They are at my heels all the way into the shop, but have to give up in disgust when they realise I’m not buying food, but books – and schoolbooks at that. Ha! – they can eat their words…..

Finally Becky, Karen and I get the bus back home. I have a house full of vegetables which won’t be nice by Monday evening, so I set to and make up an enormous batch of soup, most of which gets put in the freezer. (I could withstand a siege for just about a week, now, provided I’m prepared to live on a diet of vegetable soup and fruit salad…)

The muzungu meal is a restrained affair with only six of us. Some are at Gisenyi; the rest are who knows where. Then it’s back home and a reasonable early night.

Best thing about the weekend – Ruarai’s bash. A wonderful meal, and an entertaining night – literally!

Talking crap at Mata

August 21st

Into the office as usual, and I find good news and bad. The good news is that ETEKA (“École Technique de Kabgayi”) has managed to get me its census, which I promptly process. The bad is to discover that there’s another secondary school which I’d completely left out and which I’ll need to chase.

VSO Kigali confirms that the Shyogwe money has definitely left them. I gather that the Diocese has several bank accounts, some in dollars, some in Euros, some in Rwandan francs, and that the Dutch money could be any of them. I just wish they would make finding this money their top priority for a day, so that we can all get on with life….

Karen and Becky both arrive at the District Office to get their green cards. Since I’m the volunteer who knows where to go and who to see to get green cards done, people usually arrange things with me, and I make sure Leo is in his office to save them a wasted journey.

Then I take a moto out to Mata school, and straight away it feels nice to be out in the countryside. As I walk through the eucalyptus trees lining the road and up the concrete steps to the school I ring Teresa to wish her a happy birthday.

Mata has asked me for money to buy a water tank. I have told them I don’t have enough, but could go halves with them if they can find another sponsor. When I look round the school with Mugabo, the new headteacher, I discover they already have a tap, fed by a water tank on the hill nearby. The tank is shared with nearby houses and is insufficient; it runs dry at the end of the dry season. Things are not helped by some faulty plumbing, either, which means that a steady trickle of water is escaping from the tap the villagers use. Anyway, I refuse to pledge any money for the tank but say I’m interested in any small scale projects. (This means I can spread benefits over a larger number of schools).

I soon discover that Mata school has a much more acute problem than lack of water. Its toilet facilities are a disgrace. There are just eight toilets for a school of around 1200, with a second year of secondary students due to arrive in January. Furthermore, the toilets were intended for little primary children; they are barely big enough for the strapping great adults who attend the secondary school; some of whom are in their early twenties.

Mugabo has his PTA well organised, and they have already started to create an extra eight toilets. The foundations and pits are all there; all that’s needed is the superstructure. So I agree on the spot to pledge RwF100,000 (a little over £100) to their funds on condition that the parents and school capitation funds provide the rest. Mugabo is overjoyed; the pump priming by the muzungu adviser will help him convince his parents that the project is worthwhile and should ensure their commitment. I know the money I’ve been sent from England is intended for water tanks, but this is a very small fraction of the total, and in terms of basic hygiene the toilets are every bit as important as the water.

When the toilet facilities are inadequate in a school, children go to relieve themselves in the nearby fields. This eventually causes even greater health problems, to say nothing of the safety risks of young developing girls squatting in the long grass and bushes well away from any adult supervision….

Mugabo is recently married; his wife lives in Nyanza, presumably in the family home. He wants to save money as much as possible, and he shows me where he has converted two tiny store cupboards at one end of the school into a micro living quarters. These two rooms are about six feet by ten each, and to say they are equipped basically is to make Sparta look opulent. He has a bed, a few nails on the wall to hang clothes, a couple of shelves to store stuff, a bedside table for valuables, and that’s about it. He eats one proper meal a day at school (it’s one of the schools where they employ a woman to come in and cook for the staff at lunchtime), but it’s no way for the head of a big school to live! What’s more, the fact that he’s on site all the time means that in effect he becomes an unpaid night guard; when anyone comes on site during the night he hears them, and he’s constantly up and down chasing away predatory villagers who come in the hope that someone has left a door or window open so that they can find something to steal, and then sell for food money. There’s a public right of way through the middle of the school yard, too, and that doesn’t make for a quiet life at evenings. At least he goes home to Nyanza every weekend.

When I leave the school Mugabo comes with me to see me safely off on a taxibus. We wait for ten minutes; then the first vehicle that passes is an Onatracom bus. These goliaths normally stop for nobody. But Mugabo sticks his hand out, as I do, and miraculously the bus stops. By sheer chance there’s one empty seat. Finding an empty seat on an Onatracom bus is like finding an empty compartment on a rush hour train in England. I’m the object of intense scrutiny and interest while we’re driving back to town, so I explain what I’m doing and who I am. As usual, there’s somebody educated on the bus who wants to try out his English and we have a busy discussion so that the journey only seems to take a couple of minutes. What’s more, the slip road into the town is closed for gravel laying, so we’re diverted right past the District office, where I want to go. “Assigara kw’Akarere!” I shout – “Drop me by the District Office”. And the driver does. I can’t ever remember seeing one of these buses stop along the wayside. And even better, the driver refuses any fare. That’s twice in a couple of days I’ve enjoyed free rides. I thank the driver profusely and wish everybody on the bus a good day (“umunsi mweza”), and they all wave as they turn sharp right and head for Gitarama town centre.

It’s been a good morning!

In the afternoon I work from home; my “handover notes” are getting nearly finished, and I’m having great fun doing thumbnail descriptions of every school I’ve visited. (OK, I know it’s not much more than half the total, but the thumbnails come to around 12 sides of paper and I’ll doubtless do some more before I leave).

By late afternoon I’m getting seriously jaded, not to mention developing square eyes and a headache. So when Moira and Kerry ring to say they’re in the Plateau bar just up the road and I do I want to join them, I down tools and take off straight away. A couple of beers and the odd brochette and chips later it’s got dark, and my busy social whirl is just getting started. All the muzungus head into the town centre where Piet picks us up and we go out to his place at Gitongati for a film night. Piet has cooked sphag bol, and we’ve all brought biscuits or guacamole or similar, so we have (another) good feed. Piet’s domestique’s speciality is homemade ice cream. It’s wonderful! (Even though it has ice crystals in it which grind against the spoon and bowl, much to Kerry’s irritation. She says it’s as bad as scratching your nails down a blackboard!).

I can’t even remember the name of the film we watch; it takes us about as long to decide on the film as it does to eat the meal. But it’s good fun, and by the time we’re ready to come home the weekend is already shaping up to be a good one. Piet drives us back to the town. While we are packing up to leave he tells us how, the other day, he say a body lying in the main road between my flat and Kabgayi. A young man, probably drunk, hit so hard by a passing vehicle (maybe whose driver was also less than sober). Bits of skull and brain matter all over the road. I must say I’m amazed that it doesn’t happen a lot more often. The street lights are not working or non-existent; and as soon as the traffic police go home the drivers dash around like mad things. Vehicles are so clapped out that they floor the accelerator on the downward hill at Kabgayi to help them make it up the uphill section. If you’re in the dip at the bottom you often have near death experiences with someone doing around 60, one hand busy with his mobile phone, or with moto drivers who rarely have both their lights working, or cyclists who never have any lights at all.

Since we seem to have had proper running water for several days now, I put the immersion heater on overnight. I’ve promised any of the girls who want to come round that there’ll be hot showers in the morning. Ah, there you are – the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. The way to a girl’s heart is through a hot shower……. Yeah, right!

Best thing about today – everything, really. It’s been a good day.

Worst thing – just this bloody delay in Shyogwe’s money arriving at the right place and being noticed.

Moving in high circles?

August 19th and 20th

As I re-read this entry before posting, I realise the timings and tenses are all over the place because I’m writing both retrospectively about what happened yesterday and also what’s happening right now. Sorry about that. Treat it as a challenge! It’s also turned into a massively long posting, but that’s because a lot happened today.

I’m starting to write this just before six on Thursday afternoon. I’ve already had to put the lights on. Above Gitarama the clouds are very thin; you can almost see blue sky. But all around, for 360 degrees, it’s really stormy; murky dark grey clouds and thunder are already booming in the west towards Like Kivu and Congo. The dust is being whipped up by gusty winds; a sure sign that there’s a storm around.

We’ve had weather like this for several days now, as the rainy season approaches. It looks as if the rains are coming early this year. The temperatures have dropped; there’s no comparison between the stuffy heat of Kigali this morning and the coolth (!) of Gitarama this evening. All the market ladies have their jackets on.

On the news they’re talking about excessively heavy rains in Sierra Leone, with flooding, collapsed buildings on hillsides and washed out crops. That’s what we dread happening here. People don’t have food security, and if their crops are washed out there will be widespread suffering and malnutrition. More than 80% of Rwandans are subsistence farmers and there is no system of food reserves at a national level to cope with unforeseen disasters.

I’m just back after a shop up. Beat this, you folks back in England: beautiful fresh carrots; 4 big ones for 5p. Three ripe avocadoes for 10p. Four pounds of potatoes, this time at the extortionate local price of 30p, but once again they’re absolutely fresh and look just like Désirée (pink skins). I turned my nose up at the local celery; today it’s limp and tired looking. After a good rain it will come back again. And a kilo of top of the range dried beans for 28p; from the look of these there be next to no wastage from grit or muck in with them (though they’ll still need painstakingly sorting, bean by bean). That’ll keep me occupied for half an hour tonight while I listen to my iPod. And five sweet potatoes for another 10p.

Once again it’s been a funny couple of days. I seem to keep writing this phrase, but it’s true. I’m finding it really hard to get settled into my routine after coming back from England. Partly my normal routine is thrown askew because Tom isn’t here. Partly, also, it’s because deep down I know I’m on the final leg of my time in Africa. Partly, too, there have been a lot of interruptions with VSO activities both this week and last week, and two schools wanting me to come out to them to discuss fund raising issues. It’s not that I’m not doing anything; rather that I’m not in my usual rhythm of inspections and trips up country. So I really must take myself in hand next week. (And, OK, I know I probably said that in last Friday’s blog, too!).

More thunder outside. I’ve got the dinner half ready; what’s the odds on the power going in the next hour or so? Going to stop now and finish the meal – eating trumps blogging, I’m afraid!

**********

OK, dinner’s done and I’m back at the computer. The power’s still on but I’ve lit a candle just in case…. The lights are flickering all the time. The thunder has moved away, but it could come back during the night.

I’ve cooked far too much just for me and the guard; I’m beginning to understand how it feels when your children leave home and you’ve suddenly got to adjust your quantities from cooking for four or five to cooking for just one or two! Good job I’ve got some peppermints to take care of indigestion!

The plot next to our house – the very last green site between here and the town centre – looks like it’s just about to disappear under bricks and mortar. A big crane has arrived after dark and there’s the usual crowd of dozens of people arrived from nowhere. They stand and gawp and watch. Boredom must be so desperate here that they’re prepared to come out of their houses to watch a crane being set up. And, of course, our night guard – where is he? Is he guarding the flat against all these people, any of whom could use cover of darkness to try to break in? No, of course not. He’s out there in the middle of the throng, talking to everyone he knows. All he’s done is push the gate so that from a distance it looks shut.

(I only know this because when I go to take his dinner down to him he isn’t there. I wait ten minutes and go down again, with cold dinner. Somebody in the crowd has spotted me, of course, and warned him, and when I go down the second time he’s well inside our compound, and all obsequious and “murakoze papa” over and over). Slimy toad!

Yesterday started well. Claude was in, and Soraya and I sorted out some stuff with him. We decide that we’ll hold on to the census forms until the big heads’ meeting coming soon, then zap them while they’re with us. It’s our fault that we don’t have the census sheets; somehow they’ve got lost within the District office. I’m certain I haven’t been stupid with them, but there is so much paper flying around every day, and the system is so casual, that the errant sheets could be anywhere.

Then at around eleven o’clock we are visited by Mike (the country VSO boss for Rwanda), Charlotte (my programme manager, and two important guests. I remember to give Charlotte my signed contract, and that’s another little box I can tick as finished!

One of our guests is Marg, who is the CEO of VSOP worldwide. In other words, she’s the top managing executive of the entire VSO system. She’s relatively new in post and is travelling round to various countries in which VSO operates to see things at first hand and talk to volunteers. The other is Tiziana, who is Italian, and is the senior VSO officer for the whole Horn of Africa region – Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both women work from Putney in London. Every few years VSO undergoes a large scale strategic review, and I think they are either in the middle of one, or about to start one, right now. This could, in theory, result in wholesale changes to the way volunteers work, so it’s an absolute privilege to have two such senior people come out to see us and have the opportunity to share ideas with them.

One specific topic we cover is the possibility of putting volunteers into secteurs rather than districts. The logic of such a move is clear. With the ten or so schools within a secteur, volunteers can make a real impact instead of being spread thinly across more than hundred schools in the average District. But the secteurs most in need are usually the isolated ones. Acceptable houses might be more difficult to find; running water and electricity almost certainly absent, and volunteers would be a long way and a long time from shops and each other.

We existing volunteers have got used to being mainly in towns, and with good roads so that it is easy to meet up at weekends. Any volunteer put into an isolated secteur would be in a very different situation, and would probably feel hard done by, even though isolated placements are the norm in many other countries. It’s a tricky decision, and it is an example of the sort of serious rethink of operations that VSO in Rwanda is starting to make.

We talk for half an hour or so with Claude about the volunteer system, about how effective we think we’ve been, about Claude’s perception of having volunteers etc. Then we take them all to Mbare School, in Shyogwe secteur. Mbare is where Nicole, one of the short term volunteers, was working from January to March. The idea is to show our visitors a school where the presence of a VSO has made a real difference, and this is very apparent at Mbare. Iphigénie is a good head teacher, but her office has been transformed thanks to Nicole. There are display panels with lots of pictures; there are loads of home-made resources in the store room; there is a set of sports strip Nicole brought out with her; on Iphigénie’s wall there is a year planner (though I notice there aren’t any entries on it from mid August to the end of the year).

Our visitors have a peep into one of Mbare’s classrooms. These are typical mud-brick, with bowed roofs, tiny, unglazed windows. They look tired and dark, but the children are all hard at work and totally overawed at the prospect of six muzungus descending on them! A couple of words with Iphigénie and the year six dance team are let out and form up behind the classrooms, next to the smelly toilets. (Behind the classrooms so as not to disturb those children still in classes). Lunchtime is in around fifteen minutes. But do you seriously think any work is going to get done when they can hear their seniors chanting and dancing? Fat chance!

They give us a lovely impromptu display, with six or so dancers and the rest of the class all chanting and clapping the songs. One tiny little boy grabs a stick to use as an imitation spear and does the warrior dance, prancing and posturing among the dancing girls. All are dancing barefoot. Everybody knows exactly how the words and tunes go. Within seconds we have little children coming out of the surrounding houses to watch, and soon we have the local women surrounding us as well, some with babies on the breast. It takes very little to start a celebration in Rwanda!

Everyone takes pictures and applauds, and suddenly we’re all back in the cars and bouncing along the rutted earth road from Shyogwe back to the main road and Gitarama town.

On the Shyogwe corner there are major earthworks in progress. Bulldozers and diggers have removed dozens of trees, and are gouging out a whole hillside. I can’t work out why. The earth and subsoil are being dumped across the main road at the edge of the marshes in the valley bottom. That’s potentially risky because it could interfere with the drainage system and irrigation channels in the marshes, which would destroy hundreds of little fields and thousands of local peoples’ food security. The tree trunks have already been removed, but dozens of men, women and children are swinging axes to break up the branches and roots left lying around. Every few minutes someone walks or pedals off with an enormous bundle of free firewood – an absolute bonanza for these folk. The site being cleared is right next to the big Shyogwe mass burial site. It’s possible they are clearing ground in anticipation of a lot more skeletons being discovered, but the scale of earthworks seems out of all proportion to the need for another burial pit. It’s a pity. Where there used to be a complete wooded hillside – a rarity in Muhanga where every scrap of land is used for food crops – there is now an ugly reddish black scar across the landscape.

Back in town we treat our guests to the delight of “Tranquillité”’s self service buffet. Twice the price of the set meal but more choice and you can pass on the cassava. However, the chicken and rabbit are just as tough and stringy as elsewhere, as Mike eventually discovers!

Then we go our separate ways. I’m back out to Shyogwe on a moto to meet up with Geert. He returns to Holland on Thursday (as I’m writing this blog he’s winging his way on Brussels airlines and no doubt tucking into something a lot tastier than stringy chicken, rice and beans). When we trot down to the school I get a big surprise. The school’s admin block is finished and in use. The building looks really lovely. It has electric light and power. Inside the big room Stéphanie is sitting using one of the two laptop computers she’s just been allocated, and she has a printer plugged into the mains and working. And to think that when I first went into the school last year she had no office at all, and spent her days sitting at the back of whichever classroom was least crammed at that time of day, carrying all her paperwork around with her from room to room in a tatty bundle. And she’s head teacher of the biggest primary school in the District, with 2300 pupils.

It’s an amazing transformation. The staffroom is lined with the school’s textbooks, and contains desks and tables at which those staff not actually teaching at the moment are preparing work or marking. In other words, Shyogwe has the luxury of a staffroom. What is supposed to be Stéphanie’s office has the other laptop computer, and a bunch of men are working on it at some document. The building has been given a ceiling of corrugated iron; it should act as a noise insulator against the rain but I fear it will radiate heat down at mid day. But, then, we made sure we gave the building a tiled roof, and tiles don’t conduct heat as much as metal. This building is a million years away from the termite infested classrooms of the oldest parts of the school.

Geert and I move on to the classroom block sponsored by Randstad. Here things aren’t looking as rosy. The canes (“roseaux”) on which the roof tiles will rest have been put in place. One entire side of the roof is tiled, but not the other. There are no doors, windows, or floors installed. But the master builder is on site, and we talk to him. There seems still to be an issue with transferring the money from Randstad to VSO Holland to VSO Rwanda to Shyogwe Diocese. The money seems to be stuck somewhere between VSO Rwanda and Shyogwe Diocese. VSO says they have sent it on; Shyogwe says it hasn’t reached them. With Geert on the point of flying home, its good old me to try to sort things out again. Honestly, I really hoped we’d have all this finished and the building virtually completed before Geert returned home.

I take some pictures, including the key one I’ve been wanting to get for weeks, with Geert and Stéphanie in front of the building. We agree that I’ll chase VSO and she will chase the Diocesan accountant constantly until the money arrives. Then we spend it according to these priorities – first the roof, because you can’t teach in a classroom without a roof in the rainy season. Then doors and windows, because you can’t leave anything in an insecure room, and that includes the furniture. (Why go and scavenge for firewood along the roadside if you could pinch your children’s’ school desks and chop them up for cooking wood?). Then the floors to be concreted on a base of big stones. And then, if there is any money left, we’ll plaster the walls and maybe stretch to some emulsion to make the rooms feel light and airy. Will we have all this done by Christmas? Your guess is as good as mine. But Geert has been to a school in Ruhango district which is similarly trying to scrape together money to finish a classroom project, and they are so strapped that they have tarpaulins as roofs for the rooms, but have installed doors and windows. That seems a crazy prioritising of needs to him and me!

Back again into town. I flag down what I think is a moto for hire, but it’s just a man on his own bike! He very kindly takes me to the main road, and for free, but can’t take me further because he doesn’t have a spare helmet and it’s against the law to have a pillion passenger without his “casque”. I just manage to get the five o’clock bus into Kigali, and by soon after half past six I’m at Kersti’s house in Gishushi. Kersti and Nick aren’t there; they’re at a wedding, but we’ve arranged that I can stay, and Étienne, the guard knows me. So I drop off my backpack and head up to Sole Luna restaurant. Here I meet up once more with Marg and Tiziana, and also some of the other members of the Volunteer Committee. As things turn out I’m the only education volunteer present (Sabine, Christiane and Florence are all on the disability programme), and spend the evening once more talking about our perceptions of VSO and at the same time enjoying Rwanda’s finest pizzas.

It’s been a long and interesting day. We’re eating good food and drinking cold beer, and Kigali’s lights spread out below us as far as the eye can see. Kersti and Nick arrive at the house at about the same time as me, but we’re all shattered so it’s off to bed pronto.

Best thing about today – Shyogwe’s new administrative block; being able to talk to two of the most senior people in the VSO management team.

Worst thing – seeing the Shyogwe classrooms not much further forward than last time I visited – almost a full year ago.

On a lighter note – I forgot to mention in a previous blog. Becky was telling some hilarious tales about one of the Kamonyi schools she went to this week, including one incident where the teacher was trying to carry on as normal while a goat clip clopped up and down the tin roof of the classroom. How can anyone keep a straight face when there’s a goat on your roof?

Also, from time to time we all get texts asking for money. While I’ve been writing this essay I’ve just received the following, all in upper case:

“MY FATHER WHAT IS THE NEWS OF MANY DAYS. I BESEACH YOU HELP ME TO SEACH AN ATHER FRIEND HELP ME TO CONTINUE MY STUDY. I AM VERRY POWER THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT”

I’m pretty sure this is from a secondary school student who happened to be sitting just in front of me on the bus from Kigali to Gitarama last week. It’s commonplace for them to ask for your phone number; it seems to be a status thing to be able to say that they have a muzungu’s number in their address book. Usually there’s no follow up at all. Unfortunately this guy, like all the others, is wasting the cost of his text. There is just no money to support school fees, and it’s high time the government abolished fees for ALL pupils, and not just those in lower secondary.

Oh for my own transport....

August 18th

Another frustrating day. Into the office to find Claude about to set off for Nyakabanda, up-country in Kibangu secteur. If he’d only let me know the night before, I’d have rung a primary school and agreed to go out and inspect. I can’t just go out on the off-chance, so here we have two good opportunities to visit the remoter parts of Muhanga within a working week, and both chances missed.

At least Claude gives me the modem. And the vice Mayor has excelled himself and signed my contract papers; he can barely have glanced through them.

Simple things are often difficult. The big photocopier is broken, and the office where there is another machine is closed; the staff who work in it have decided that it’s not worth coming in to the office on Gacaca day. So even something so easy as making 5 copies of a census form becomes a serious task. Eventually I give up and ask Valérian to do them for me; he has a knack of disappearing for ten minutes at a time and coming back into our block with photocopies from somewhere.

Védaste comes to borrow the modem and gives me a copy of the latest version of his thesis, which he wants me to go through and check his English. This thesis is a work in progress; I think I’m now helping him with version three!

And I spend most of the rest of the day on the computer. I research air fares to Zanzibar, and find that we can come back on the train, as I had hoped, but that it will take us a lot longer than we had planned. If you leave Dar es Salaam on Friday evening (there are only two trains a week), you arrive at Mwanza on Sunday morning. You will have done 1220 kilometres through the heart of East Africa. I read some travellers’ blogs from people who have made the journey and they say it was the highlight of their time in Tanzania. Mwanza is a lake port on Lake Victoria, and after we get there we will have to find a bus or other means to get us to Rusumo on the Rwandan border, but that isn’t an impossible task and people do it every day.

Among the books that we have been giving out to schools is the teachers’ guide to Political Education for lower secondary. This is an enormous and very detailed book. It goes into infinitely more detail than, for example, the English “Citizenship” programme of study. I take a copy home with me because it deals with the genocide, and for the first time I’m able to read the “official” version of what happened as it will be taught to all pupils. It is an enormously sensitive point. In recent months we have noticed that “the Rwandan genocide” has morphed into “the Genocide of the Tutsis”, ignoring the fact that thousands of sympathetic Hutus were also killed, and that a very large number – some say as many as in the original genocide – were murdered in reprisals after the official end of proceedings, most of them Hutus. Oh dear, the power of books to rewrite history!

As I look through my blog postings I discover to my shame that I’ve never actually posted a series of pictures about the water tank at Gatenzi school. I think I got it all ready, but somehow it escaped me just before I came home, and during a period when it seemed impossible to get a good enough connection to send lots of photos. So I spend an hour or so doing a big picture essay and put it out for the world to see.

I’m still amazed by how many people from around the world are looking at this blog. An average of 37 people a day are reading it. Within the last two days I have had visitors from Latvia, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, England, Canada, the USA, Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, India, Spain, Sudan and South Africa. When I started writing it I had in mind just my family, my fellow volunteers who I had trained with, and my local community in England. I had absolutely no idea it would get discovered and visited by so many others. Anyway, welcome to all of you, wherever you are!

In the evening I go round to Becky and Karen for a meal. As I arrive at Karen’s there’s a bunch of little girls outside the gate, and Becky is entertaining them with a bubble-blower. The girls are entranced, and one or two even manage to blow bubbles themselves when she gives them a go.

The mayor of Becky’s district has been sacked or resigned, according to whose story you believe, for being involved in a land-grabbing scam. Kamonyi seem to be further ahead in reshuffling their District officials in this re-organisation of local government than we are in Muhanga, and it is starting to give Becky problems in terms of who she reports to in terms of her immediate supervisor.

And that’s about it for today. Best thing – having the chance to play about for a long time on the internet.

Worst thing – another missed opportunity to visit a school up-country

Political education

August 18th

Another frustrating day. Into the office to find Claude about to set off for Nyakabanda, up-country in Kibangu secteur. If he’d only let me know the night before, I’d have rung a primary school and agreed to go out and inspect. I can’t just go out on the off-chance, so here we have two good opportunities to visit the remoter parts of Muhanga within a working week, and both chances missed.

At least Claude gives me the modem. And the vice Mayor has excelled himself and signed my contract papers; he can barely have glanced through them.

Simple things are often difficult. The big photocopier is broken, and the office where there is another machine is closed; the staff who work in it have decided that it’s not worth coming in to the office on Gacaca day. So even something so easy as making 5 copies of a census form becomes a serious task. Eventually I give up and ask Valérian to do them for me; he has a knack of disappearing for ten minutes at a time and coming back into our block with photocopies fom somewhere.

Védaste comes to borrow the modem and gives me a copy of the latest version of his thesis, which he wants me to go through and check his English. This thesis is a work in progress; I think I’m now helping him with version three!

And I spend most of the rest of the day on the computer. I research air fares to Zanzibar, and find that we can come back on the train, as I had hoped, but that it will take us a lot longer than we had planned. If you leave Dar es Salaam on Friday evening (there are only two trains a week), you arrive at Mwanza on Sunday morning. You will have done 1220 kilometres through the heart of East Africa. I read some travellers’ blogs from people who have made the journey and they say it was the highlight of their time in Tanzania. Mwanza is a lake port on Lake Victoria, and after we get there we will have to find a bus or other means to get us to Rusumo on the Rwandan border, but that isn’t an impossible task and people do it every day.

Among the books that we have been giving out to schools is the teachers’ guide to Political Education for lower secondary. This is an enormous and very detailed book. It goes into infinitely more detail than, for example, the English “Citizenship” programme of study. I take a copy home with me because it deals with the genocide, and for the first time I’m able to read the “official” version of what happened as it will be taught to all pupils. It is an enormously sensitive point. In recent months we have noticed that “the Rwandan genocide” has morphed into “the Genocide of the Tutsis”, ignoring the fact that thousands of sympathetic Hutus were also killed, and that a very large number – some say as many as in the original genocide – were murdered in reprisals after the official end of proceedings, most of them Hutus. Oh dear, the power of books to rewrite history!

As I look through my blog postings I discover to my shame that I’ve never actually posted a series of pictures about the water tank at Gatenzi school. I think I got it all, ready, but somehow it escaped me just before I came home, and during a period when it seemed impossibole to get a good enough connection to send lots of photos. So I spend an hour or so doing a big picture essay and put it out for the world to see.

I’m still amazed by how many people from around the world are looking at this blog. An average of 37 people a day are reading it. Within the last two days I have had visitors from Latvia, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, England, Canada, the USA, Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, India, Spain, Sudan and South Africa. When I started writing it I had in mind just my family, my fellow volunteers who I had trained with, and my local community in England. I had absolutely no idea it would get discovered and visitors by so many others. Anyway, welcome to all of you, wherever you are!

In the evening I go round to Becky and Karen for a meal. As I arrive at Karen’s there’s a bunch of little girls outside the gate, and Becky is entertaining them with a bubble-blower. The girls are entranced, and one or two even manage to blow bubbles themselves when she gives them a go.

The mayor of Becky’s district has been sacked or resigned, according to whose story you believe, for being involved in a land-grabbing scam. Kamonyi seem to be further ahead in reshuffling their District officials in this re-organisation of local government than we are in Muhanga, and it is starting to give her problems in terms of who she reports to in terms of her immediate supervisor.

And that’s about it for today. Best thing – having the chance to play about for a long time on the internet.

Worst thing – another missed opportunity to visit a school up-country

Water tank for Gatenzi primary school

I realise that due to an oversight I have not got round to posting any pictures of the water tank we've installed at Gatenzi. Here is a photo essay to show you what the whole water tanks project is about. Total cost of this tank = about 2.5 million francs (about £3125). Estimated life span - at least 20 years. Number of children who benefit over its lifetime = 1265 x 20 = 25300. Estimated cost per child per year = 2.5 million /25300 = 100 francs a year per child, or 12 pence per pupil per year. A pretty good use of 12p per child, I'd say!

Apologies to all my Dorset friends and supporters for being so tardy in posting the pictures.

As usual, if you double click on a picture it will open to full size.

Welcome to Ecole Primaire Gatenzi. The sixth biggest primary school in my District, with 1265 children and 20 teachers.

Two of the three main teaching blocks. The little building in the middle was formely a private house. The school bought it some years ago and it has been made into a kitchen. Every teacher pays a small sum of money so that one of the village women can come in and cook them something to eat at mid day. It's too far for the teachers to go home and back if they live in Gitarama. Now that all children are doing half day shifts at school, we don't need to think about providing meals for them. (There is a separate United Nations FAO project whereby childrfen are given cans of oil etc if they make sure they come to school).

As with many Catholic primary schools in Rwanda, Gatenzi has the local chapel as one of its buildings. When it isn't being used for services or church meetings, the school can use it as an extra teaching space. Countless thousands of little feet are slowly wearing away the soil from around the foundations....

This is what we're getting away from. These children are off to fill their water cans. The yellow cans are old cooking oil containers. The blue cup isn't just for drinking from: the water at the stream is shallow and muddy and if you want to get reasonably clear water to drink, you have to painstakingly skim water from the top few inches of the stream using the cup. Just imagine how long it takes to fill the yellow pot, and then imagine how much school time is being wasted every day by over a thousand children at Gatenzi.

We decided to put the tank on the end of the block on the extreme right in this picture. If you look at the roof on the left, which is the same size, you get some idea of just how enormous these roofs are, and therefore how quickly a tank will fill with water during a storm!

Gatenzi school sits on top of a ridge with wide views in all directions across the Cyeza countryside.

Strong foundations to carry an enormously heavy tank. Imelda says the children, and their parents, got really excited when they saw this stonework being built. The school has wanted a tank ever since it was built, and at last they realised they were going to get one!

Guttering being fixed to the roof. The roof is lightweight metal, and fairly flimsy, so you have to be careful how you attach the gutters. It all looks a bit Heath-Robinson, but I assure you it works!

The little pipe sticking out of the bottom of the tank is to drain it should we ever want to empty the tank (e.g. for repairs). The big pipe at the top is the overflow. The size of this overflow gives you an idea of the volume of water which can be rushing into the tank at the height of a torrential rainstorm. Overflow pipes are essential. If we didn't have them, the weight of excess water backing up the inlet pipes and guttering could cause them to collapse and probably damage the roof, too!

Water comes out of the tank through the silver pipe to a tap in the concreted apron. I like these concrete aprons; they prevent the main tank from being eroded by people collecting water, and the make it safer and a lot less slippery when you fill a jerry can. Eventually we can have two taps, with two cans being filled at the same time.

The workmen finish fixing the box-shaped filter to the tank. They are securing it so that nobody can tamper with it and pollute the water. Don't you just love the improvised ladder?

A selection of children who had come to see what I was doing, but who go to the school, happily pose by the tank. They aren't in uniform because the picture was taken during their summer holidays.

A happy Imelda poses with the two workmen. All we need now is rain....

(Footnote: we had a tremendous electrical storm on the night of August 14th. I saw Imelda yesterday; she told me the storm has just about completely filled the tank, and the children are all using water from our tanks this week).

Well done Bradpole!

Runny jelly, and the great text book bazaar

August 17th

Into the office as usual on a Monday determined to get more done than last week. Fat chance. Claude’s lost the rent invoice (again), so nothing doing there. I manage to get the process of signing and stamping my renewed contract underway; with any luck it’ll be signed sealed and delivered just as I’m finishing. (But apparently it has to be done so as not to queer the pitch for future volunteers). It’s now in the mayor’s in tray. But the mayor is away on holiday, so we’re hoping the vice mayor might deign to cast his eye over it.

There’s no Monday briefing meeting for us this morning; by seven thirty Claude is already besieged by visitors. I really can't adjust to this crazy system they use in Rwanda whereby nobody is able to delegate, and everything has to be read, signed off and stamped by just one person. The more important that person is, the bigger the queue of people beating a path to his or her door, and the greater the chaos when that person is away. Just imagine the pile of paper that’s building up because the mayor is taking her holiday at the moment…

I pinch the internet modem and get blogs posted and emails written. Béatrice has printed me off a blank secondary school census sheet and somehow I’m going to have to get it out to the five schools for which we have no details. That could take some time.

Soraya and I have a serious talk about Zanzibar and agree to use the evening for planning. After Saturday night’s party we know that Épi is OK for the dates we have in mind, and I won’t feel secure until we have some sort of draft programme sorted. And maybe the odd booking might help, too!

Today turns into one of those silly days when I need to speak to Claude to organise things, but he’s so busy I can’t disturb him. (I know I could always play the muzungu card and walk in and interrupt whatever he’s saying to a Rwandan visitor, but that Rwandan may have travelled since four in the morning to get here from Nyabinoni, and I think it’s not polite or culturally sensitive to pull rank).

I spend the time seeing what needs doing to finish my handover notes for my successor. The chief job is to go through every school (150+) and for each give a brief description of what sort of place it is, how to get to it (method of transport, cost, time needed), and a thumbnail description of the main points about it. That’s going to take me some time, but it will give any successor an enormous advantage when he/she starts working. All I received when I came to Muhanga was a printed list with the names of schools (and some were missing), their head’s names (some were out of date) and phone numbers (many of which proved to be impossible to ring because of the hills). I also want to do little sketch maps for each secteur to show where the schools are within the secteur, but you’d be surprised just how difficult that’s turning out. A lot of schools that I’ve been to, especially those I visited early last year, are so remote that there’s no way I could even begin to place them on a map. I find myself repeating over and over again phrases such as “you have to make sure before you leave Gitarama that your moto driver really does know where to find this school”!

While all this is going on, there is a party atmosphere in the lobby to our building. We have received an enormous number of textbooks – the small conference room has been stacked to the ceiling over half its length. It seems typical of the way this country works that textbooks come, not in dribs and drabs, but in deluges. We have beautiful primary school atlases, specifically made for Rwanda. They are absolutely excellent. We have social studies textbooks for yrs 4-6 in English. So the French ones we received in November last year are already redundant. We have lower primary science books in Kinyarwanda; we have upper primary Kinyarwanda language books; we have reprints of upper primary science books in English. We have lots of reading books in Kinyarwanda for every year group at primary – these are a real triumph; they are colourful and absolutely suited to their intended readership. But we also have a lot of books arriving still in French; books which must have been ordered just before the decision to switch from French to English. It’s a book bonanza.

Among the books is a big, lavishly illustrated volume paid for by two Americans. It’s all about the gorillas, the pressures on their habitats and why it is so important to ensure their survival. It really is a most beautiful book, but it must have cost an absolute fortune to produce. Isn’t it funny the effects the gorillas have on people! I bet this book is the result of this American couple coming to watch the animals, and being so impressed by their beauty that they’ve decided to invest their fortune into materials for Rwandan schools.

And almost every primary head teacher has come to the office to make sure his/her school gets its share of the books. They’re all laughing and chatting like primary children at playtime, and occasionally squabbling if they think someone’s pulling a fast one and getting more books than they deserve. A fleet of pickup trucks has been chartered by the District, and for each secteur one truck is being loaded with all their schools’ books. I have a squint at the weather – it would be a real tragedy if we had a downpour while these books are being taken out to the schools. Fortunately the day, while cloudy and cold, doesn’t look likely to give us rain. I only see one pickup truck with a tarpaulin to protect its cargo.

At the end of the afternoon I head to the market. Vegetables are starting to become more expensive. A kilo of onions has gone up from 300 to 350. Spuds are 135 for ridiculously tiny and rubbery little things. You can’t get decent peppers for less than 50 each. I’m almost out of soya flour, but nobody seems to have any that looks half decent. I buy more peanut flour instead, but I must get on and use it and not leave it to go mouldy as happened last month.

As I walk down the newly finished main road through the town there are clouds of grey dust hanging in the air. The road is covered with gravel chippings, far more than can adhere to the tarmac. Every time a vehicle passes these loose chippings become more and more comminuted, and tiny particles float up into the air as dust. And because this little piece of road has a nice smooth surface, with no bumps and no traffic police, everyone's driving like idiots; as if this was a clear road in open country. You wouldn’t credit how a road can suddenly become twice as dangerous in a matter of days. None of us pedestrians have adjusted to the speed of the traffic. We all tend to walk in groups of two or three abreast; when we meet groups coming the other way one group just steps out into the road without looking behind, because in the old system traffic was moving so slowly it always had time to slow down or swerve. Not now. Every time we go into town we see near misses and its only a matter of time before somebody gets hurt. Hopefully it won't be me.

When I reach the flat the electricity is off again. Our flat, and the outside lights, and the MTN shop, have no power, but for some reason the SORAS shop is OK. I’m fed up with this – I’ve got a big meal to cook and however fast I work I’m not going to be able to get it done before dark. Why on earth has the power supply suddenly decided to go awol, and in such a random way. Tom and I were just beginning to think that our electricity cuts were a thing of the past. So I go downstairs and ask the SORAS manager to phone Electrogaz. He’s really nice and says rather than phone, he’ll go and demand action in person. (It’s just before five and his office is about to close – and so’s the Electrogaz office). Tomorrow is Gacaca and you can bet your boots nobody will come out then, so we’re potentially without any electricity until Wednesday. The manager’s words have some effect, and I later learn that MTN has been beating up the poor Electrogaz manager as well. A technician comes and after two false starts we get our power back. But I’ve got no confidence that technicians know what they’re doing, and I race round like a madman to get my dinner ready in case we lose power again. Cooking by candle light may sound romantic but it’s not just inconvenient – it’s bloody dangerous!

After all this fun Soraya comes round and we start doing some detailed planning for our Zanzibar trip in November. Just reading about perfect white coral beaches suddenly makes me feel better. I can’t wait to get to the Indian Ocean…. We break out my Mars bars from home and toast each other in chocolate to balmy nights and happy days to come on the spice island.

Oh, and why the mention of runny jelly in this day’s title? I make up a jelly in the usual way, but try to customise it by adding some fruit salad before the jelly has set. There’s not much liquid in the fruit salad, but it has the effect of preventing the jelly from setting. Curses! I end up with a pint of blackcurrant flavoured juice, with bits of pineapple, pawpaw and banana floating around in it. That certainly wouldn’t win any prizes in the Melplash show, so I treat it as a sort of fruit cordial. It's tasty; but liquid rather than jelly-like.

Tomorrow’s plans for going up country to do a school are thrown because Emmanuel at Ndago rings Soraya mid evening. He wants her to come on Thursday instead of Tuesday. So first thing tomorrow I need to redraw my plans for the week.

Best thing about today – hmm. Not one of the most active days. Just thinking about turquoise seas and white sand on Zanzibar has got to be the best bit.

Worst thing – power cuts. BLOODY ELECTROGAZ! I hope your ears are burning!