11th April 2019

As my time in Rwanda draws to a close, I’ve been trying to see as much of the country as I can. This last weekend we decided to go to the Virunga Volcanoes National Park in the far North of the country, bordering both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We stopped at the ‘twin lakes’, which were very beautiful. Lake Burera is higher than Lake Ruhondo, and I’d read that there was a waterfall between the two. Driving between the lakes we saw a steep valley that looked like it had once been a waterfall, but was now jungle-green and full of vegetation. There were a number of soldiers at the top, who strongly suggested that I should not photograph the valley.

Slightly confused we headed back down towards the shore of Lake Ruhondo, as I’d read that there was a restaurant on an island, and if you phoned ahead they would send a boat to bring you across for lunch. The path to the lake took us to a hydroelectric power plant, and suddenly the lack of waterfall made sense – the water was now funnelled through a huge steel pipe to create electricity. I suppose that explains the soldiers too. We were pretty sure that a hydro plant wasn’t the place to catch a tourist boat, but apparently we were wrong! The guard directed us to an empty field near by, and the boat appeared like clockwork.

Fish from the lake made a wonderful lunch with an even better view, and we made to our guest house in Kinigi just before dark. It turned out our ‘island’ was in fact a peninsula, but it would have been a long drive around, and the boat trip was magical, so who’s complaining?

The next day at 7am saw us at the National Park offices buying passes for Golden Monkey trekking. The park is most famous for its Mountain Gorillas, and people come from all over the world to see these majestic beauties, but the pass for the monkeys was significantly cheaper, and besides, who can resist something called a golden monkey?

After a short drive and a lovely walk in through the bamboo forest at the foot of the volcano, we had a full hour to hang out with this large family of monkeys, watching them hop from tree to tree, munching on bamboo shoots or skipping across the group. Interacting with each other a little, and ignoring the people and their cameras completely – there were moments when we had to be careful not to tread on a monkey tail! A truly magnificent experience.

Sunday 24th Feb 2019

Been a pretty busy couple of weeks at work.  We’ve been working on closing the books for year end, so my project has been pretty much on hold as I’ve been helping out getting that done.  

It’s been feeling more like a normal job recently – reviewing prepayments against GRNI accounts, working with the accountants to check expenses have been posted to the correct code, and reviewing the fixed assets register is work I could have been doing at most organisations, almost anywhere in the world.  Given the scale of One Acre Fund, and use of big, standard systems, perhaps it’s more similar to the corporate world than a smaller NGO or charity might be, but I think it also speaks to the universality of finance, and transferability of accountancy skills. I think that’s kind of neat. 

The last few weekends have also been much more like standard weekends back home, as I’ve not left the city or done much touristing. I moved house last week, so I’ve been settling in and doing normal things like going for dinner or a drink with friends, shopping for food and house bits, and a good amount of hanging out in coffee shops.  There’s a lovely middle eastern cafe very close to my house with Turkish coffee, home made flatbreads, and views of the golf course,  All slightly surreal given I’m in East Africa, but no complaints! 

Last weekend there was no water at our house for 24 hours or so because of a burst pipe in the district, so that seemed like a pretty good excuse to go find a swimming pool that had showers…I walked 45 minutes or so to the sports centre at Nyarutarama which had a pretty good sized pool with just about enough space to swim lengths, a small diving board and best of all free hot showers!  It started raining while I was swimming, and the pool emptied in as much hurry as if somebody had seen a shark. People can’t have been worried about getting wet, so I don’t know if it was just the general Rwandan habit to run for cover as soon as the skies open, or if people were worried about lightening, or what, but it was quite relaxing to have half the pool to myself for five minutes of swimming in the rain before the clouds moved on and everyone hopped back in.

Then, this weekend I went on a plant shopping adventure with a colleague who is also new to Kigali, having moved from Malawi a couple of weeks ago.  I do like to have lots of plants about the place, and it’s fun to recognise old favourites and learn some new ones. 

The nursery was a short walk from my new house, by the side of the road, with different terraced areas all up the hill and heaps of different plants growing together, each in pots or bags or smaller ones in old plastic bottles full of soil.  We went for the plants growing in the shade of a large tree in the hope they will tolerate the low light conditions inside, but there was a huge collection of outside plants too, from strawberries and mint to baby frangipane trees (so tempting!).  The pots are made right next door to the nursery, heaps of terracotta pots all shapes and sizes, many are really lovely, some are absolutely huge.  They also make ceramic liners for water filters there, as well as pottery cookstoves, and a few bits of garden sculpture. 

I made a bit of a bargaining error – thinking I would wait til the end and then ask for a discount off the total price for buying a few things. But it turned out each pot and plant belonged to a different person who had either made or grown it, and they each needed to be paid their fair share, so in total I spent a bit more than I’d intended – definitely some Muzungu prices, and a sweaty five minutes with me in the middle of a big circle of people, trying to work out to whom I owed what and dishing out 200RFW notes.  A very different sort of accounting!

Monday 11th Feb 2019

Three weeks into Kigali life, and a huge market fan, I decided it was time to visit the big general market at Kimironko.  About an hour’s walk from my place in Kacyiru, and a brisk, sweaty, overcrowded ten minute bus ride home again, I was told Sunday was the most chilled day to visit, as several of the stallholders take the day off and the pace is a little slower.  Sounded perfect.   

The market is a pretty good size, organised into sections for veggies, fruit, hardware, clothes, meat, fish, eggs and fabric.  I got a pretty good stash of fresh fruits and veggies pretty cheap – I don’t tend to haggle hard in these places, it always seems a bit crass when everyone in the negotiation knows I can afford the extra 200FRW more than the lady selling tomatoes, but I did get a few francs off some over-priced mint from one guy, and a free lemons with my mango from another.  Mostly I was just asking for smaller quantities – everything comes by the kilo, and that’s a lot of beans when you’re cooking for one, but ‘half, half’ seemed to work ok!

The rows of wooden cages of live chickens were a little startling, in smell as well as sight, someone bought one, carried it away by its feet still flapping and squawking, distinctly unimpressed and soon to be tasty brochettes or maybe a celebration stew.  The tables of dried fish laid out between the egg stall and the veggies had a particularly pungent aroma too, and a pretty good swarm of flies, so I very happily decided to go vegetarian for the week, and moved away, seeking refuge in the pleasingly unscented stacks of earth-covered Irish potatoes, and pumpkins, mostly imported I think from Uganda. 

The fresh produce was very good and cheap, certainly much better than the supermarket, but the real treat was on the other side of the market – past the stacks of hardware and shops of second-hand clothes and shoes, out though the main entrance where young men hustle to carry your bags and find you whatever you want in the market – ‘erm I mostly want to find a little peace from you, please!’ – past the little white butchers shops with names like ‘Very Clean Meat’, and then on the side by the bus station, there’s another entrance into an Aladdin’s cave chock full of beautiful colourful fabrics. 

There are dozens of little square shops, each with yards of colourful fabric hung up high all around the sides, lots of overlap in styles, but each had enough of their own unique designs to make wandering through the different stalls worthwhile.  There was a power cut that shut down all the lights while I was wondering, maybe because of the very heavy rain earlier that morning, but stall holders were holding up their mobile phone lights so I could still see the cloths.  Not entirely effective, but pretty entertaining.  They were very lovely ladies, giggling and pulling down fabrics so I could look closer, holding up different colours of cloth offering to sew it into whatever I wanted, showing me jackets and skirts they had made for examples.

In every stall the fabric was arranged by type, and everyone told me that there was fabric from Nigeria, Congo and Rwanda.  The Nigerian fabric was 100% cotton Kitenge, or patterned waxed cotton with small, dense patterns, the Congolese similar but with generally bigger patterns, and a lighter weight, very smooth cloth.  The Rwandan fabric was a man-made fibre, polyester maybe, and slightly cheaper than the others, though still with some lovely patterns.  

Interestingly I read later that a proportion of the fabric sold as African is actually imported from Asia, sometimes as hard-to-spot counterfeits of the originals, even going so far as copying specific patterns and makers’s labels. I read that the copyright issues have put many of the African factories under pressure and even out of business over the years. There does still seem to be significant production in Ghana today, I can’t find the names of any factories actually making cloth in the Congo still.

Even before these modern copyright issues, the origins aren’t quite as simple as they seem.  Resist dying techniques such as Batik, where wax or another barrier is applied to fabric before dying, and then removed leaving an inverted pattern originated in Indonesia. Dutch merchants, presumably travelling by sailing ship, found ways to automate this painstaking and skilful process, and found a new market for this much cheaper bright, patterned fabric in West Africa.  Production moved from Europe to Africa over the years, and a taste for the cloth spread East all across the continent, becoming ubiquitous, with complex social, even political information hidden in the different patterns.  I’m looking forward to finding out more!

I was very restrained on this visit and only bought a total of 6 meters, should be enough to have made into a dress and a couple of skirts, anyway…

Sunday 3rd Feb -2019

This weekend I decided to get out of the city and go on a mini adventure.  Remember that photo from Rubengera with the amazing view and the vast expanse of Lake Kivu gleaming away in the distance? I find large bodies of water more or less irresistible, so Lake Kivu become my intended destination for the weekend, specifically the town of Gisenyi at its northern tip.

Gisenyi is known as a laid back resort town in the district of Rubavi, about a three hour drive from Kigali, and bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo.  In fact, the town of Goma in the DRC is the other half of Gisenyi, with the country border going right through the middle of the town. With my passport still off with my work permit application, I didn’t try to get across the border!

I’d picked Gisenyi because I’d heard it was nice to visit, but also because I’d read that it was a very easy place to travel to by bus – turn up at the bus station, buy a ticket for about 3,000 Rwandan Francs, (£3 or so), and then just wait for the next bus to go, roughly every half hour.  And it really was that easy.  I had to ask a few people to find the right ticket office – there are heaps, all selling tickets to different places, but everyone spoke enough English to help me (lucky because I can’t get much past ‘hello’ in Kinyarwanda!) I let myself be helped by an enthusiastic young man, who led me right to the right ticket office and then to the bus, all for the cost of a Fanta….suspect I could have figured it out alone, but this seemed like the path of least resistance! 

The bus was perfectly comfortable – no goats or chickens in sight, and I was lucky to sit next to a kind and interesting man en route to Gisenyi for his nephew’s wedding. David teaches English at the University of Rwanda, and told me lots of interesting things about the country and people as we drove through the beautiful, steep countryside – you can tell this country was formed by volcanoes. We talked a bit about music, and I discovered that a favourite Belgian artist Stromae actually has Rwandan roots – his father was killed here during the genocide, which adds a whole other layer of poignancy to his single ‘Papaoutai’.

Compare all that to hiring a car for maybe $100, with no conversation, no new friends and hardly any people watching! Public transport is great.

I had a lovely, relaxing time at Gisenyi, wandering about admiring people’s holiday outfits – a much wider range of clothing styles than I had noticed in the city, from waxed cotton traditional African prints complete with complicated head tie, to sparkly, floaty saris, or long dresses and headscarfs in the Muslim style – I saw a couple of mosques too. Some women were wearing their skirts just as a long strip of fabric wrapped sarong-style with a T-shirt on top, and the men mostly looked dapper, if not so interesting, in western-style suits.  At the beach bar in the evening the outfits were more European, but just as fabulous – beautifully cut sundresses, or off-the-shoulder tops with skinny jeans, and fabulous earrings, men in polos and blue jeans, everyone eating, drinking Coke or Heineken, dancing and having a good time.  I was getting quite an American vibe, though I suspect it’s a bit more complicated than that, with cultural ideas flowing in both directions?

The most entertaining outfits of the day though, went to two small boys who leapt aboard the bus as soon as we parked up, searching for discarded plastic bottles, presumably to claim back the few cents of deposit money.  They had each adapted their T-shirts with a row of holes along the front, each just big enough to hang a single empty bottle from! Sadly I wasn’t quick enough to ask for a photograph.

On Friday night I went out with another friend I’d met walking to work, together with a very lovely colleague from One Acre Fund.  Macky had seen me walking past her house earlier in the week, and worried that I might be lonely as a visitor to the city had walked along with me.  Imagine that happening in London?  I think there’s something really interesting there – Europeans are perhaps quick to see and solve material needs – food, water, transport, medicine, but maybe we tend to neglect social and emotional needs as not quite as valid? Here, as in some islands I’ve been lucky enough to visit, there seems to be a slightly different emphasis towards the social, and I rather like it.  

Sunday 27th January 2100

Today is not my typical overexcited tourist post about pretty views, frangipani flowers and smoothies.  Today I’m going to write about genocide.  It is Holocaust memorial day, and being in Rwanda it seemed fitting to visit the Genocide Memorial here in Kigali to pay respects and learn a little more about how something so awful could happen here, and to try to understand something of the lasting impact on the people.   

The genocide in Rwanda in spring 1994 killed nearly a million people in the most unspeakably violent and inhumane ways over the course of 100 days.  A million people.  The international community did not intervene. 

I suspect the genocide is one of the only things many people in Europe know about this beautiful country.  For most adults here in Rwanda it’s still a living memory, and it’s hard as a foreigner to really understand the impact that trauma must have had on individuals and the wider culture.  That 25 years later this country is so functional and optimistic, is a testament to the enormous reconciliation and reconstruction efforts, and the incredible resilience, forgiveness and hope of a generation of people. 

The memorial at Kigali was very well done. Built by the Aegis Trust at the request of the Rwandan government, it seeks to honour the victims and offer a place of dignified mourning to their families, to explain how and why such large-scale, organised violence could possibly happen, and importantly, to educate a new generation on how to prevent it happening again. 

The early history of social tensions, starting with misguided but no doubt well-intentioned anthropologists seeking to classify and explain all sorts of characteristics in terms of arbitrary racial classifications, through to colonialists pursuing a ‘divide and rule’ policy for ease of governance and economic gain, I hope and expect would be completely unacceptable today.  

The later phases where the country’s own leaders sought to blame ‘the other’ for all ills including their own failures of leadership, to dehumanise a group of people based on some arbitrary characteristic – that’s the bit I find really terrifying.  As humans, we seem to be wired to accept this kind of brainwashing too often.  

Witch hunts, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur, Myanmar. Mass persecution has happened before, and it will happen again unless we all take our responsibility to see the warning signs, and in the words of the inimitable Captain Moreland, to be intolerant of intolerance.