Miss Rwanda's Bright Orange Banana Gardens

So, it’s now been two weeks since the last blog post (apologies for the gap; things have got rather more hectic). What’s changed? Well, there is one thing- apparent to anybody with eyes. In fact, it’s probably even apparent to creatures with mere photo-receptive patches of skin, like those of the near-blind deep-sea fish (animals that have seen no colours but the lures of predators): we have discovered the market’s ability to make us clothes, and have not shied away from the brighter fabrics. Some of them are very bright indeed. Among the more luminescent weaves are those of Jordon’s new shorts, which are probably capable of giving a demure maiden aunt or shy and retiring grandmother a minor fainting fit at thirty paces. Or, for that matter, capable of giving a canny deep-sea fish a heart attack on the spot- compared to the radiance of Jordon’s chosen orange, a predator fish’s lure is pretty feeble.

Rwamagana Market

The market is a fantastic place. There is a bizarrely comprehensive range of clothes: you can, of course, have a tailor-made set of traditional African garb, but you could also, if you were so inclined, emerge from the market kitted out in a shell-suit, Red Nose Day 2013 wear, or regalia from any of a good dozen of the globe’s golf clubs.  Equally, you could also buy tennis balls (bounce sold separately), or a large framed hologram of a family of tigers. As a place to visit, it’s fascinating. It is constantly full of people, from those frantically dashing from one place to another, to children whose sole aim in life seems to be to ambush a muzungu when unawares. The one exception to this state of perpetual motion is at lunchtime, when the rush of the lifeblood of people thronging the market’s veins and alleys ebbs down to a dull murmur, and it’s nigh-on impossible to find an Arsenal shirt because all the little shops are shut. I was able to get my Arsenal shirt when we returned to the market on Saturday; I learnt, on that day, just how bad I am at bartering. Having been told that haggling is the way forwards, the conversation went something like this:

Customer: ‘How much is that Arsenal shirt?’

Shopkeeper: ‘Six thousand’.

Customer: ‘Three?’

Shopkeeper: ‘No, six’.

Customer: ‘Sorry, I didn’t speak very loudly- Three?’

Shopkeeper: ‘No, six.’ - With a slightly bemused look

Customer: ‘Ah. Four?’

Shopkeeper: ‘No, six. Six is best price.’

Customer: ‘Four?’

Shopkeeper, finally realising he is dealing with an idiot, reduces the price to five thousand out of sympathy.

One person not rubbish at bartering –who is, in fact an unstoppable grandmaster of the art- is a brilliant seamstress that we have found, and upon whose guidance we now rely wholeheartedly. Jordon had had his eye on a pink, white and black fabric (to the general disgust of Ingrid, Anaise and Cynthia, for whom pink is a colour to be worn only by girls); the cost, however, had been raised to a ‘muzungu price’ of eight thousand francs (rather than the standard three). Jordon mentioned this regretfully to our helpful seamstress, resulting in a scene like this:

Enter SEAMSTRESS, mouth pursed, head shaking, disapproving tutting under breath. Strong, confident steps.

Seamstress: ‘I hear that this cloth is being sold at eight thousand francs a piece?’

Shopkeeper: ‘Ah. Yes.’- Aware that his hour has come; slightly nervous.

Seamstress: With fierce gaze: ‘But the usual price is three thousand.’

Shopkeeper: ‘Ah. True. Well, how about three thousand, five hundred?’

Seamstress: ‘Three thousand is the usual cost, I think.’

SHOPKEEPER concedes defeat, privately glad to have got off so lightly.

The week (and, really, this blog, because that was a massive detour) began on Monday. Monday, it transpired, was a day off. We didn’t know about this until eight thirty the night before, because whether or not people went to work on that day is up to the President’s discretion, and His Excellency  is apparently a bit indecisive. The reason behind this public holiday is Hero’s Day, on which Rwandans remember all those that have given their lives for the country. By the end of the day, though, we all considered it a very apt name. It didn’t begin especially well. At four in the morning, one of the chickens in the house next door realised that it was, after all, promising to be a fine day, and that it might be nice to take a stroll over the wall before it all got too busy. So far, so good. At this point, though, it set up an almighty clucking, waking up everybody whose room was at the front of the house. Quite what its motives were in making this noise, we do not know; it may have been especially charitable, wishing to show us a pleasant sunrise. If this was its aim, it met with success, for Jordon went out to reason with it. Seeing Jordon coming, it took a fancy to the roof, which it used as a pulpit from which it could attempt to alert those still sleeping to the benefits of an early start. The day continued in a similarly challenging vein: Cristophe, our dear cook, had malaria, and was very clearly extremely unwell. As a result of this, we were cooking, which always elevates the tension a bit; in addition, there was no electricity, and hence no water for showering or drinking. But, all things considered, we pulled through it in remarkably good order.

This is a chicken. It is not the chicken; we don't have a photo of that radical preacher. But it'll do as a stand-in.

On Tuesday, we headed back to the Field in order to build a pair of drying stands on which crockery could be dried without providing a breeding ground for malevolent microorganisms. This was all done without a great deal of difficulty: we dug holes in the ground with machetes, slotted the thicker bits of wood in, and then lined the thinner bits over the top of the square that this made. Having done this, we secured them with hammer and nails. There were lots of things that needed nailing, so we all got the chance to use a hammer to our hearts’ content; some discovered that they had a talent unknown up until this point, and others realised that, when it comes to nailing things down, their heart is contented rather easily. We all agreed that is was very satisfying to be able to see that the work we had done was having a clear and immediate impact; in addition, it was also good to return to Harriet’s house, which was the one that we had repaired the week before, and to have a bit of continuity in our helping.

Nailing down the slats on the drying stand.

The team with a successfully completed drying stand.

Wednesday brought with it another maths lesson, which was dispatched with ease by the crack team of Lucy, Jade, Cynthia and Jordon. Maths is turning out to be surprisingly easy to teach; we had expected it to be probably the toughest, but the subject has a certain logic to it which English appears to lack. The ways in which a verb slots into a sentence are many and diverse, and all equally inexplicable; the ways in which one set of digits is added to another, however, are reassuringly smaller in number.

Jade and Cynthia helping pupils out with their maths.

On Thursday, we returned to the Field, visiting another kindergarten. It’s just across the road from Harriet’s house, and so some of us had already had a look inside: it’s a primary school run on the same basis as the first kindergarten that we’d visited. That is to say, it was set up by the local Self-Help Group to give their children a better start, and as such, it was far less well-equipped than the private kindergarten that we’d visited the previous Thursday. There was one classroom –without a door- in which there were desks donated by AEE. 

A group of pupils, one in the throes of a full-blown existential crisis, sits on the desks provided to the kindergarten by AEE. I should add that we did have better photos, but I find this one too funny not to be shared with the wider world.

While we were teaching, several children poked their heads into the classroom repeatedly. They were initially too nervous to stay if we looked at them; after a bit, though, they grew bold enough to just stand and look in. This wasn't welcomed by the kindergarten children, many of whom objected strongly to their presence at the window.

Apart from those desks, there was nothing to help the solitary teacher to educate her fifty-odd charges; the floor of the classroom was made of mud, and outside the classroom, in the adjacent room and ‘lobby’-type area, the ground was covered in large chunks of rubble, over which the smaller children stumbled as they walked. 

The doorway to the kindergarten's classroom; to the left hand side is another room, apparently not currently in use. The rubble floor stands out.

It was, as I’ve already remarked, painfully different to the private kindergarten a short distance away: it is worth remembering, though, just how far it’s come, and from what origins, especially given how short a time it’s been there. In fact, the distance it, and the Cluster Level Association behind it, has travelled is very heartening, even while there are naturally difficulties still to be surmounted. While we were there, we taught the children some English (mostly through the use of songs), and told them some stories before going outside with a parachute and bubbles, which elicited the same rapturous response we’d met with at the previous kindergarten.

Children playing with the parachute. They absolutely loved this; when they parachute went on the ground, they all dived on it like it was a rug, and when it was lifted up, they sprinted under it and danced around like delighted dervishes.

Bubbles, it seems, are about the best thing you can give to a child.

The following day, it all got a bit more full-on. That morning, we were asked to help write a comprehensive annual report of one of the partner organisation’s projects, and to write up the work plan for the organisation- right away. Lucy and Sam stayed at the office headquarters to start on this, while the rest of the team headed down to Centre for Champions, where they finalised the timetable and discussed other school projects that could be started up in the near future. In the afternoon, we gave staff coaching to the combined AEE staff of the headquarters and Centre for Champions. We first gave a comprehension session using a scene from The King’s Speech to teach them English, and then gave a seminar in using social media, focusing on how to improve their Facebook page, which is currently largely devoted to office rental. The session on The King’s Speech proved a bit tricky, due in part to the accent and stutter of Colin Firth, and in part to a speaker not behaving as expected. The talk on social media, however, was met with enthusiasm; in fact, we’ve had a request for an encore.

On Saturday Patrick fell ill, and went to the hospital with Lucy for far too long (‘The queues, the queues!’, as Conrad might have written); he left for Kigali on Sunday to receive treatment there. We had been planning to visit the ‘beach resort’ of the nearby Lake Muhazi on Saturday, but with Patrick’s illness and the continuing need to power on through the annual report this was put on hold for the time being. On Sunday, we led both the children’s and the main service at the ADEPR’s international church: Jordon gave a talk on drugs and the grace of God to the adults, while Anaise, Ingrid and Sam told stories to the children.

Monday came with several more lessons. The first was Social Science, an amalgamation of History, Geography, and some Politics. We –Jade, Cynthia, Anaise and I- were teaching geography, and went at it with gusto. We covered the uses of hills and rivers (hills: rain, rocks, fertile soil; rivers: transport, fish, water- yes, we are now experts), before lurching off the syllabus into the far more interesting realms of volcanoes, plate tectonics, and erosion. This effectively derailed the lesson (they had a seemingly endless reserve of questions on the topic- among which, brilliantly, was ‘Does a pebble ever grow?’), but also made it much better fun for both teachers and teachees. After geography Lucy, Ingrid and Jordon took ‘Coca’, a sort of general studies slot which we can fill as we see fit with useful info. That Monday, Coca was on the topic of drugs- first a lively debate on the pros and cons of drug-taking, and then a period during which the audience listened with rapt attention while Jordon told them of his own history with drugs.

Football, with the Premier Division team practising in the background.

In the afternoon, Jordon and I returned to Centre for Champions to take a sports session. We had several difficulties in getting started. We had been under the impression that we had the entire school pitch, and so had been expecting to play a competitive match of some sort; upon arrival, however, we discovered that a) very few people had turned up for sports, and b) the local Premier Division team had the use of half the pitch on Monday afternoons. That was not a typo: the local Premier Division team –the equivalent, I think, of Stoke or Sunderland: 'mid-table mediocrity for the win!'- uses the school pitch on arranged days. I suspect that if Stoke or Sunderland were forced to time-share a rather beaten-up patch of sandy grass for their training, their Premier League days would be even more closely numbered than they are at present. Having claimed our bit of pitch, we then proceeded to puncture the ball, continuing after borrowing the adjacent kindergarten’s football. We started off with some doubles football; as we played, more and more people came to join, so that by the end we had twenty and were able to play a match. Anyway, it was good fun, and it was also great to get to know the students a bit better, because it’s difficult to build up relationships in class.

When we returned from football Anaise, Cynthia and Ingrid were in a state of great excitement after finding out that there was a ‘Miss Rwanda Day’ on at a nearby café. Extrapolating from our test group of Anaise, Cynthia and Ingrid, the Miss Rwanda contest is the highlight of the year for most Rwandan girls: it is, at any rate, viewed with a level of passion and commitment inversely proportional to that of Miss UK. Rwandan viewers can –and do- vote for their favourite candidate once a day; all candidates other than the one chosen to be supported are the object of continual scorn and derision. In the initial stages, for instance, it was agreed upon that several were ‘destroying Kigali’ by taking part, although quite how they were razing the capital was not explained. Anyway, we had been looking forward to watching the semi-final on Saturday, only to find that our television’s aerial was defective; when it was discovered that the semi-final was being repeated in pomp in this café, Anaise, Cynthia, Ingrid and Jordon hot-footed it.

Anaise and Cynthia running to tell the rest of the team about the Miss Rwanda Day: testament to the passion it inspires.

On Tuesday 10^th, we were in the field again, this time at a banana plantation in the middle of nowhere. Rwanda is famously called ‘The Land of a Thousand Hills’, and, having been crammed in the back of a car bouncing up and down what felt like the majority of these hills (along tracks that seemed determined to emulate on a smaller scale that over which they wound), we can confirm that this is for a reason. Patrick says Rwanda actually has a thousand and one hills; at present we cannot confirm or deny this claim, but if all the country is as densely populated by hills as the part we travelled on the way to the banana plantation, I reckon it must have several orders of magnitude more. Once we arrived at the plantation we marvelled at the view for a bit (hills may not make for comfortable travelling, but they definitely pull their weight in the scenery department) before starting on the field itself. 

The view from the plantation's hill. It was just starting to rain -heavily- as we were driving away.

The banana trees, which had been planted several months ago, were still small and stunted; this was because there was a large amount of other plant life sharing their space and nutrients, and so with hoe on hand we fell on the intruding cocktail of cassava plants, maize stalks and assorted small weeds. 

A line of Hoers.

As before, our hoeing ability left something to be desired, but it did at least amuse the Self-Help Group members. After breaking up a goodly amount of soil and root systems, and having accumulated a satisfactory collection of blisters, we held what turned out to be a seminar on family planning. 

These two laughed at me constantly while hoeing. The guy on the right also asked some rather tricky questions during the discussion on family planning.

The sizes of families is something that concerns our partner organisation, and so they asked us to give a talk on it; the SHG members had quite a lot of questions, some clearly matters of great concern to them, and it was a very interesting discussion. 

The discussion on family planning.

That evening we had a celebration for Anaise’s birthday, the gifts to her including a beautiful drawing of jiggers dancing on floating green bananas in a sea of African Tea, with a backdrop of a mountain of grated cheese: all of Anaise’s favourite things, in fact, and a piece of art that is sure to be a great inspiration to her for years to come.

It's apparently a Rwandan tradition for a birthday to be celebrated by large quantities of water (symbolising blessings) poured over the head. We entered into this idea with enthusiasm, leaving Anaise quite wet.

Anaise 'Happy Birthday Jolly [a nickname, due to the fact that she laughs all the time]' cake. 

Wednesday was the partner organisation’s monthly day of prayer and discussion, which we also attended (along, in fact, with Vestine and Deo, two in-country volunteers from Lucy’s previous team, who arrived unexpectedly to general surprise and happiness). This was also interesting in its own way, with some heated argument over the meanings of certain passages (the place of judgement in our lives, for instance, occupied an hour or so of heavy debate), and a large amount of dancing and clapping.

On Thursday –yesterday- we returned to the Field, this time going to build a kitchen garden. The day was very hot, and kitchen gardens require a lot of effort –hoeing, digging, hammering, macheteing (apparently this isn’t a word), and transporting manure- so it was extremely tiring. 

Jordon tried his hand at sharpening stakes with a machete. It's a lot harder than it looks.

In addition, Lucy and Apolone (the Associate Field Coordinator of the partner organisation) had to go and advise a member of the community on a sensitive issue, which took some time: by the time we left, we were a) experts in cracking maize corn off its cob to be made into flour (a slightly more restful alternative to hammering, macheteing etc.) and b) exhausted. 

Pushing corn off the maize cobs, so that it could be ground up and made into flour.

Artistic shot of somebody (Anaise?) cracking corn.

Ingrid hammering stakes into the ground; the stakes were then covered by a plastic-type bag, which kept the soil in to form layers of raised garden, allowing nutrients stored in the centre to be efficiently distributed.

The team standing with the finished kitchen garden; it'll allow the Self-Help Group members to have a more rounded, balanced diet, and the fact that they've taken part in making one will give them the knowledge to go away and repeat the process for themselves.

In the afternoon Patrick, Ingrid and I went up to the office to help process some of the partner organisation’s paperwork; when we returned, candles were once again burning in the dining room (a power cut, not a Lady and the Tramp re-enactment), and much of the household was rather stressed out by the absence of charcoal, a substance crucial to the making of fires and hence edible food. The man who had been commissioned to bring charcoal from the market at around three o’clock didn’t, in the end, make it to the house until approximately nine- and even then, only after being shouted at down the phone for most of the intervening hours, demonstrating that even African Time can be stretched too far.

Well, that was very long, but then, the past two weeks have contained rather a lot. All prayers and encouraging contact are, as ever, very welcome!