Milk, Meals, and Madmen in the Road and Church

It’s now been two weeks since the last blog post was written (and three since the last one went up; we’ll gloss over that, however). The last two times I’ve started with an elongated segue from blank page to ludicrosity, penning two Openings (feat. Market and Miss Rwanda); this time I reckon I’ll throw you straight into it. No musings on an obscure topic; no needless meanderings round things you didn’t come here to read about; not a bit, nothing, of tautological repetitions in order to find a way in. Hard stuff, Opening. Most difficult part, by a country mile.

Anyway, I left off on Sunday (the 21^st; how time flies, eh?), the day after the momentous occasion of the Miss Rwanda Final and the trip to Lake Muhazi. Sunday passed in a fairly unobtrusive manner, as Sundays seem wont to do; church, cooking, spot of clothes-washing. It was livened up, though, by a visit from Cynthia’s parents, who swum into view, unlooked-for, like ministering angels of chocolate and pizza, the latter of which is decidedly unavailable in Rwamagana. Sunday took a further few tentative steps off the beaten track of Tradition when we agreed that, to save us all the chore of cooking, we would hold supper in pot-luck fashion, with the team splitting into two and wandering off into the wilds of Rwamagana to hunt down such game as might be found. The game available in the Rwandan urban outback transpired to be a goodly herd of chapattis, a few young samosas (spicy, but incredibly edible- a definite, positive change from the usual Sunday evening fare, cooked as it is by inexperienced hands on a charcoal stove quick to seize upon any such advantage), and a crop of various fruits. This was capable supported by an Undefined Lump purchased at Patrick’s recommendation (it turned out to be a sponge cake), and topped off by the (metaphorical) cherry on our (real) cake, the gift of Pizza from the Prometheus-like Parents of Cynthia.

The day after –Monday, for any readers who struggle with the days of the week; though, if you’re reading this and struggling with that, I don’t know quite h- but I digress- was a school day, and was spent in the manner standard for those who work at a school. We eased our way through a lesson on social studies, and edged confidently through a talk on Health in our coca slot. The afternoon was taken up by various admin activities, and by a talk given by Anaise on hunger and poverty across the world, during which she unleashed a fair battery of statistical craziness. Such as, Europe’s yearly spend on ice cream could give safe water to the world. And furthermore, America’s yearly spend on cosmetics –cosmetics (incidentally, you can tell I’m a boy because I’ve italicised that and not ice cream)- could provide basic education for all. Try them on for size.

On Tuesday, the team went out to build a pair of tippy-taps. Sanitation is, of course, a very large issue, and the vast majority of people, at least in situations similar to those in the Self-Help Groups or child-headed households, have no tap with which to wash their hands after they have visited the latrine. Given that the latrines –we’ll return to this subject- are typically in no great state of cleanliness themselves, it’s important that those who use them are able to wash their hands in a sanitised manner afterwards. Hence the tippy-tap, a cunningly simple way to address the problem, working as follows. First, a small jerry can is taken, and a few holes hammered into the top of the side with a nail.

Ingrid hammering holes in the jerrycan.

The jerry can’s handle is then threaded through a stick, which is itself then nailed between two stakes hammered into the ground, with the jerry can thus suspended between them. A piece of string is attached to the top of the can, and the string is then tied to a piece of wood –a pedal- on the ground.

The finished tippy-tap

People are thus able to wash their hands without touching the source of water, meaning that the spread of diseases is minimised.

Lucy demonstrating the tippy-tap.

Wednesday, being another school day, was spent in the same way as Monday; we taught maths, French and English, then got caught in the rain on the way back. The following day we went to help repair a latrine with a child-headed household forum. I wrote a moment ago that the latrines are often sanitarily dodgy, and this was a case in point. Latrines are no more than a deep hole (deep, deep, deep: when a group of children played daredevil around –and across, spread-eagled- a new hole, I nearly had a heart attack) with a crude building of mud bricks around it, a corrugated roof over, and perhaps a curtain for a door. The hole itself is covered with planks so that the user can sit on them while conducting their business. This latrine had no roof and no door; it also had only small walls, the roofless mud bricks having been greatly eroded by the recent rain. Worst of all, though, the planks across the hole were visibly rotten: several of them were blackened and moulded, with large chunks having fallen away already, and they bent like reeds if the slightest weight was put on them.

The planks over the latrine hole: in a very dodgy situation.

It is worrying to think that many latrines may be in such a condition: the hole, as I have said, is deep, and if somebody were to fall into a partly-filled latrine it would be extremely difficult to escape from the quagmire at the bottom. To address these problems, we started off by building a roof. The metal roof was in transit, and so in the meantime we cut down some trees (Jordon here demonstrating that his macheteing skills have come on in leaps and bounds) and carried them back, one tree slung across the shoulders of two people.

Jordon cutting down a tree

Lucy and Patrick carrying one of the trees

These trees were then cut into shorter poles, which were dug into the four corners of the latrine’s building and tied in a cube-shaped frame between these poles. Onto this frame was then nailed the sheets of corrugated steel, providing a sloping roof to protect against the elements; and, easily as importantly, the rotting planks across the hole were reinforced with the remainder of the poles from the trees.

Nailing the roof onto the frame of poles

This was exhausting for those involved (especially, for most, the carrying of the trees from the copse to the village, a not inconsiderable distance bearing not inconsiderable weight), but it was very good to be able to see the immediate impact –potentially life-saving- we were making in our work.

On Friday we taught maths and did a large amount of admin; Saturday whipped by unexpectedly quietly; and then Sunday came round again. This Sunday was not so eventful as the previous one, but our visit to church was unusually memorable. Lucy and Jade were called upon to teach Sunday school to approximately seventy children; and, for those of us still in the church, it was clear that the preacher (who, we were told, had given talks at the previous two services that day as well) had by no means lost his voice. The UK volunteers have had reason to notice that the preaching style in Rwanda, or at least in our part of it, is rather different to the manner of presentation back in Little England. The vast majority of speakers here (secular and religious) do not use notes: they make it up as they go along, perhaps following a pre-considered plan, or, as the case may be, perhaps not. Volume –quantity- of speech is also highly prized, and, coupled with the shunning of notes, this can lead to a great deal of meandering. Padding is liberally employed in order to meet this requirement, with the result being that an enormous number of utterly random parts are shoehorned into every speech: sometimes they drive off from the main course of the narrative at an unexpected tangent, sometimes they ignore this convention and nip in to give a bizarre twist to the plot of the argument by deserting the subject entirely, quite possibly never to return. Comic stories abound in speeches, regardless of the rest of the content: of these, vicars conducting themselves in fashions unbecoming to the Cloth seems to be the most popular option. In addition that type of volume, the other kind (the one measured in decibels; pack a robust piece of kit if you’re hoping to measure any in churches) is treasured as much, if not more, than the first. Lungs of iron are a necessity if one is to be a preacher; and, to aid the natural capacities of their bodies, a good number of preachers also call on testosterone by making themselves bull-mad angry, leading to people bellowing, with bulging eye and bared teeth, the Good News that Jesus died for them.

On Monday morning we visited a local nursery in the hour or so before school began. The children there were extremely cute, rather shy, and eager to do anything involving a football. We started off with a story, and then moved onto songs, beginning with Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

Telling the story of David and Goliath: Goliath, standing up at the front, later went on to demonstrate his knowledge of Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

We were on safe ground here, we discovered, because one of the children was a keen aficionado of at least the first half, and was happy to take over from me (I was leading) by repeating the titular part, apparently ad infinitum. If we hadn’t stepped in to introduce the altogether trickier concept of the face, she would probably still be there now, tiny hands patting first the shoulders, then the head (she had a tendency to occasionally muddle herself). Then, in the middle of the next song, we were interrupted by a plaintive cry from the middle of the room: ‘My pen! My pen! I’ve lost my pen!’ The song paused while all the children near toddled over to search the surrounding area until one small pen was produced, at which point the poor child was appeased and, clutching his pen, was content to continue. After this we returned to the school, where we taught social studies and a coca session on human trafficking, the latter at Jade’s instigation following on from her structured learning on the subject. In the afternoon Cynthia delivered her structured learning on the effects of climate change upon communities.

The next day we were reunited with the roads of Rwamagana district, and also with our old driver, who had presumably been off on other assignments for the previous few weeks. The roads in Rwamagana are, especially as you get deeper into the countryside and further from the town, a little bumpy; when your transport is piloted by someone with a passion for bumps, however, the divots and little dykes seem to become a whole lot more pronounced. Our car careered from pothole to pothole with the nimble daring of a mountain goat, if that goat weighed two tons and had three legs. Our driver gently stroked the wheel with one hand, the other holding a phone or the remote control for the CD player; he had bought a new CD during a short stop, and his attention was summarily focused on that, the car flirting with cliffs or other wheel-borne lumps of hurtling metal all the meanwhile. Occasionally he would glance up and cackle as we narrowly missed a terrified child or caused a bike to swerve out of our path; we seemed, though, always to dodge at the last minute, our driver having a prodigious knack for getting his eyes back on the road seconds before disaster occurred, and we were thus able to reach our destination in one piece.
Our destination was a house, belonging to a member of another child-headed household forum, which we were to assist in renovating. We first went to fetch water; this was a simple task compared to the previous time some of us had done this, the jerry cans presumably having settled down for a nap shortly before we arrived, and we had no trouble.

Sam, Lucy and Jade admiring the view before heading up the hill with their water

Once this had been done we began on the meat of the trip. We had noticed as we arrived that there was a great pile of large stones at the side of the road; these had to be carried down next to the house, where they could be used as a foundation for the floor or crushed up for a sort of stucco-like plaster. We set ourselves up in a bucket line and began passing the stones along; we carried on like this for a fair while, feeling pretty satisfied with our rate of transport. About midway through this we were interrupted by a truly impressive thunderstorm, and, although we were not at the centre of it (fortunately, at that, because from the sound of the thunderclaps Thor had a bad hangover), and took shelter in the house.

Ingrid, Jade and Sam look out at the rain

It was now that we saw just how few of the stones we had carried: our competent method apparently wasn’t delivering much. After the storm had moved on we got back to the stone removal service, varying our method so that it was harder but more effective.  Once this had been done Anaise, Jordon and I gave a short talk on health.

The pile of stones we had moved: far, far smaller than we felt it had any right to be

The next day, Wednesday, was the monthly day of prayer at our partner organisation, which we attended.  The day after that we returned to the field, this time driven by a more naturally cautious driver, so that we could plant banana trees: little baby ones about twenty centimetres high. Our ICS team worked in pairs with the Self-Help Group, hoeing the ground and mixing the manure with the soil, then hollowing out a small hole with our hands, into which went the little banana plant. After this Ingrid, Jade and Patrick gave talks on health and a sensible diet.

Patrick planting a tiny banana tree

Friday, by an administrative freak, saw us in fact taking no lessons whatsoever, although we were coaching the staff of our partner organisation first thing in the morning. The subject on which we spoke to them was social media, and it was an unqualified success, sparking a great enthusiasm in them for all things Internet.

Staff coaching: one of the staff reads out a success story she had written during a short workshop

We filled the time thus opened to us with several trips to the market and then, in the afternoon, an eagerly-awaited visit to a small cafe a little up our road. Earlier in the week some of us -particularly Lucy- had been much taken by the sight of a pair of old men strolling into this establishment and requesting a donut and a pint of milk, the latter served in an old-fashioned pint glass like a small, dimpled barrel of glass with a handle. Being informed that this milk was fermented did not deter us, and we headed to the cafe determined to enjoy this unheard of delicacy; the ICVs equally keen on seeing how we took it. The milk itself was stored in a medium-sized yellow jerrycan in the cafe’s fridge; we communicated our desire for it by pointing first at it and then at the coveted pint glasses (despite the fact that there wasn’t enough milk for us each to have a pint of it; this wish greatly amused the proprietress). The milk was then poured oozingly into the glasses. It had the consistency of yogurt and a potent smell, which we figured fitted the bill nicely. When we tried it we discovered that, unusually for milk in our experience, it was mildly fizzing. In supermarkets in the UK you find little bottles of ‘live’ milk; the contents of those bottles is child’s play compared to this beige gloop. What we had in our glasses was Frankenstein’s milk: it was as live as milk can be without requiring the use of a forceful spoon to keep it confined to its container.

An as-yet untouched tankard of 'milk', sitting next to some doughnuts.

Jordon, Patrick, Jade and Cynthia clink glasses shortly before falling on their milk.

It also had a strong suggestion of sausage. We discussed this, and came to the conclusion that it was probably due to the fact that the jerrycan in which it was kept held cooking oil previous to this employment. In wine terms, this milk was ‘Full-Bodied; Slightly Sparkling; With a Hint of Sausage’: it was so full-bodied, we realised, that the sugar -ladled in heavily to combat the Hint of Sausage- sat in a little heap on the surface, refusing to make the plunge to the pale depths below. The milk was accompanied by a donut, an object dense enough to make David’s sling-stone look like a sponge. All in all, it was a fantastic Experience.

On the way back we took some photos, much to the bemusement of passers-by.

So, that's what we've done in the past week! Just one week left- a truly bizarre thought. We'll try to do as much as we can in this last week, and any prayers or words of encouragement are, as ever, very gratefully received.