View from my garden

Here are some slightly better pictures of the world beyond my garden wall - I stood on a chair to take them!  Notice the terracing in this first one (to the right, near distance) - very common in the Land of a Thousand Hills, as Rwanda is known.  (Also known as the Switzerland of Africa, with somewhat less justification)

In this one you can just see some of those thousand hills in the distance:

And finally here's one that shows a bit of that roof construction I mentioned in my previous entry this morning:

All for now.  Wish me luck at work tomorrow.

First walk in the countryside

I’ve been out for a two hour walk.  Closer to African pace than my usual speed as it’s like a hot English Summer’s day here, though with an occasional cool breeze.  I walked out of town on the tar road and then turned off onto a dirt road which took me up a hill.  Rwanda is all hills, and all of it I’ve seen so far is cultivated apart from the odd grove of trees.  The houses never seem to be far apart, even outside towns and villages.  Each has crops growing around it, most of which I don’t recognise, but always including banana trees, maize and potatoes plus quite a few avocado trees.  Some houses have a couple of goats or a cow, also chickens.  Many of the houses have a neat border of flowers in front, or a flowering hibiscus bush.  Most of the houses were made from hand-made bricks.  They look like they’re just soil and you see them drying in the sun when they’re first made.  Most people then render over them.  A few houses were made from factory-made bricks.  The roofs were mostly tiled; the beams local saplings, with a lattice of smaller branches on which the tiles were laid.  Mud was added round the edges.  Most of the houses had doors and windows which had been bought.

People stared, but no more than in Gitarama itself.  Whenever I said hello, people replied, many smiling and some shaking my hand and saying things I couldn’t understand.  I can manage, ‘Mwaramutse’, to which the response is ‘Mwaramutse’.  Then you say, ‘Amakuru?’ to which the response is always ‘Ni meza’, even if you are at death’s door.  Then you ask, ‘Namwe?’ and they reply ‘Ni meza’.  The conversation may end there, but if it goes on, then it’s totally behond me at the moment.  Quite a few adults speak a bit of French though and the children can mostly speak a bit of English.  Even though they no doubt thought me very odd walking through their village, people were polite and I didn’t feel unwelcome, just a bit uncomfortable at being such a spectacle. 

I’m sorry there are no photos but it doesn’t seem right to wander around with a camera.

Back home now and pleased I managed that walk.  I even bought two bananas for 6p on my way home from a very friendly woman in a tiny shop.

This is all way outside my comfort zone though.  I’d expected it to be a breeze coming back to Africa as I’d found South Africa so easy to be in.  This feels very different though and almost everything is a challenge.  I started sleeping better after a couple of nights in Kigali, but haven’t slept so well again since getting to Gitarama, so that’s not helping.  It’s not that it’s noisy at night, just that I don’t feel relaxed here yet.  Plus there’s a man with a drum who goes round shouting at 5.30am; the town alarm clock, I suppose.  I’m rather dreading tomorrow, which will be my first full day in the office; hoping I’ll have the energy to get through the day.  Then Tuesday is a public holiday.  I’ll just take it one day at a time.  If I make it to Saturday, a friend of someone in the VSO office, who has a music studio, has offered to meet me in Kigali and show me where I can buy a guitar.

Home Sweet Home

I am living in a five-bedroomed house with two other VSO volunteers, Rose and Julia, in Gitarama, Rwanda’s second town.  On the plus side we have a hot shower!  Almost unheard of for volunteers, many of whom don’t have running water at all.  On the flip side, the water is off most of the time and the boiler sometimes heats the water and sometimes doesn’t, or maybe the tank doesn’t refill when the water comes back on or something we can’t fathom.  So any time we get a shower at all we are grateful and if it’s hot it’s such a luxury.  Indeed, every time I hopefully turn on the tap, I get a thrill if even a trickle of water comes out. 

We boil our water, cool it and then filter it.  Some of the mazungus (white people) in Gitarama do both, some just boil, some just filter and some do neither.  It’s fairly clean, though has lots of yellow stuff in it if you don’t filter it.  We have electricity, again unlike some volunteers, and the supply is quite reliable.  We have a double electric ring for cooking.  It was giving Rose shocks yesterday but I seemed alright, maybe because I was wearing flip-flops.

We don’t cook much though as we have a domestique, Mado, who cooks for us Monday to Thursday.  She prefers cooking on charcoal so does it that way.  She cleans too and makes our beds.  She does the beds beautifully, tucking the mosquito net in under the mattress.

We have a night guard, Damacene, who sleeps in our five-bedroomed annexe.  Yes, that’s ten bedrooms altogether.  We don’t really need a guard as crime is rare in Rwanda, but he came with the house and VSO pays for a guard if you want one. 

Damacene fills our six jerry cans with water whenever it’s on.  They used to contain petrol and the water still smells of it no matter how many times they’re refilled, but the filtering process sorts that out for the water we drink.  We just put up with it for washing in when the water if off, and use it for washing up and for flushing the loos.

Rose and Julia have made me very welcome in the house and also shown me round the town, helped me open a bank account, shown me the market and which shops they use.  There are several alimentations, like little corner shops, in Gitarama.  There are also tiny shops selling just a few items at the end of our road.  I managed to buy something I asked for as papel de toilette and asked for imineke (bananas) which they didn’t have, so I bought a papaya for 300 Rwandan francs.  That’s 30p.  Not sure if that’s the going rate or the mazungu rate.  The lady was very friendly, gave me the prices in French and congratulated me when I managed to translate the numbers into faltering Kinyarwanda.

Our house is a few minutes’ walk off the main tar road, along a dirt track and then a dirt path.  Or you can go along the dirt track and go the long way round, which is wide enough to drive a vehicle along.  Whenever we appear, half a dozen children shout ‘Mazungu, mazungu’ and come and say ‘Good morning’ to us.  It’s always, ‘Good morning’, regardless of time of day.

Here's the view from the house of our little front garden, our big wall, and Rwanda beyond.  I don't much like the wall but it does give us privacy, which is welcome as we are constantly stared at when out. 

And Alis this one's for you; look who's taken up residence in our garden:

Kimironko Market

Some of us went to Kigali’s main market today.  See the lady on the left here carrying a basket on her head:

The fruit here is delicious.  We have pineapple every day for breakfast and it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, sweet and juicy.

If you buy eggs (amagi), you are given them in a paper bag. 

You have to barter in the market:  ‘Oya, ni menshi! Gabanya!’ (No, that’s too much!  Reduce the price!) 

Here are some Rwandan-made handicrafts for sale.  They will be bought by local people for everyday use, not by tourists.  Tourists wouldn’t normally come here but I am likely to shop here regularly when I move back to Kigali.

These women in one section of the market make up clothes.  You buy the fabric first, then tell them how you would like it made up.  They can copy any style if you take them a garment you already have.

The balloon-like objects hanging above the sewers' heads are painted gourds, which I presume are used for storing water.

It's Sunday evening and there's a cricket chirping loudly outside my door.  I'm feeling rather pleased with myself because I've just been told that several people here find me calm, tactful and patient!! How wrong can one be.  I must still be on my best behaviour.

That's all for now.  I probably won't write another entry till after I finish my training and go to Gitarama on Wednesday.

First impressions

I’m impressed!  The country is surprisingly together, considering it’s one of the poorest in the world and considering also that in the 1994 genocide, a million people were killed, a million exiles returned, and two thirds of the population was displaced either internally or into exile.  It was pretty much year zero.  Yes, things don’t work as smoothly as they do in the UK, but it’s no worse than South Africa. 

People are friendly and helpful.  It’s very safe; Kigali is Africa’s second safest city.  Even here it’s safe for a woman to walk alone at night.  Okay, don’t worry, I’m not going out on my own yet except in daylight.   

55% of the population lives on below $1.25 a day (the US poverty line) and many live on well below that.  It’s developing very fast though, as a result of sound government, low corruption and the willingness of some countries, particularly the UK, to provide substantial aid.

I originally posted another paragraph here covering politics, media and ethnicity.  I have since taken that down as I now understand that I might inadvertently displease the government and embarrass VSO and YWCA by writing about these subjects.  Volunteer blogs are widely read.  I will therefore not cover these subjects in this blog. 

It’s densely populated; Rwanda has 11,000,000 inhabitants and the country is the size of Wales.  Its biggest foreign exchange earners are high end tourism, high end tea and high end coffee.   Let’s see if we can get high end handicrafts onto that list!