Ruairí

Retirement

2012-01-19T20:57:00.002+02:00

And so I am back. As soon as I returned from Rwanda, and more to the point, as soon as I started working in Rathdown again, it became obvious that maintaining a blog wasn't really going to be feasible, given the nature of my day-to-day work. Alfred did make occasional efforts but even he found it tough going.

But today I announced my impending retirement after 29 years in Rathdown School. I will probably finish on the 29th of February (though I may stay on for a few weeks if a handover is needed) and then ... well, I suppose the world is my oyster (Alfred: Within reason - and you are allergic to oysters).

Anyway, blogging will be resumed on a more regular basis with occasional interjections from Alfred whose comments, I gather, are occasionally even more highly regarded than my own (Alfred: 'occasionally'. If only you knew ........).

Hello again!!

2012-01-18T00:42:00.003+02:00

Alfred: Well, hello fans!! After a prolonged hibernation I have emerged again to annoy and entertain and confuse you. Ruairí is mostly occupied with work and his website (which, I reluctantly have to admit, does have some interesting and amusing stuff on it: the stuff on tardigrades is AWESOME! Imagine an organism even more amazing than me!!) so I have decided I need to get my sh*t together and get this blog back up and running. Look out for more very soon!

Harbourne Hall revisited!!

2010-11-24T01:14:00.002+02:00

Alfred: And would you believe it, he brought ME!! OMG, so much to tell, life is SO exciting at the moment. Will try and find time but am flying to see Alphonsine in Edinburgh on Saturday and I am SO EXCITED!!!!! Hope she will forgive all the Alfred groupies I met in Harbourne but can it be my fault that I am so popular???

Ursine greetings from wintry Ireland!!!

2010-11-18T23:28:00.001+02:00

(Alfred: And greetings to you all from your ursine correspondent here in windy wintry Ireland. Just as well the Rathdown School girls designed me with a nice thick furry outer coat to keep out the chill, given that my lord and master will only turn on the central heating if he can see his breath in front of his face indoors. Maybe he thinks I am a polar bear?

And what have I been up to, I hear you cry, you legion of my followers who have been no doubt grief-stricken at my long silence? Well, it turns out that from my point of view, life in Ireland and life in Rwanda are remarkably similar. Sitting in Ruairí’s bedroom in Gisagara for weeks on end staring at the back of the closed bedroom door wasn’t the most thrill-a-minute experience in the world but there was always the distraction of occasional visitors – Gustav the mouse, Jeremy the bat, various anonymous flying and crawling things that never introduced themselves properly, Alexandré to make the bed and collect and return laundry and, at night, the festive sounds of all-night partying from the wildlife in the attic. I still find it hard to sleep at night without the soothing chittering of bats just above my head.

Whereas sitting on the kitchen table does offer a wider range of things to look at during the day and more activity in the evening, once his nibs eventually decides he has had enough of the office. During the day I can gaze at the cooker and wonder at Ruairí’s continuing belief that dragging a slightly damp cloth across an oily and greasy surface somehow constitutes an act of ‘cleaning’. Glancing to my right I behold the grandeur of the ‘garden’ whose unchecked growth has only been restrained by the wintry weather as opposed to any action on Ruairí’s part. Occasionally, the fat long-haired white tomcat will walk through, wandering slowly through the grass as if in an LSD-induced trance and leaving an erratic wake, rather like a warship frantically zigzagging to avoid a U-boat. If I am very lucky indeed, I may get to see him empty his bowels, producing a dropping so immense that for a long time they were blamed on some errant dog that had somehow managed to enter the garden and leave again.

The fun begins in the evening when he gets home. First, there is the ‘what are we going to eat tonight?’ flurry of activity as fridge, freezer and cupboards are thrown open and the choice made more often on the basis of what needs to be eaten soon as opposed to what one might actually FEEL like eating. Then (out of my eye line but easily deduced by the sound) is the watching of whatever Star Trek episodes that have been downloaded in the past few days. And then to bed (that’s a quote from someone, isn’t it?)

The newest wrinkle is doing housework in the morning. One thing that has definitely persisted since Rwanda is his habit of getting up at ridiculously early hours of the morning when there is no need to. I mean, what was the point of buying a house so near the school if you still get up at 0600? Well, the answer seems to be, to do housework!! Dishwashing, laundry, sweeping, tidying, recycling, everything except hoovering (too noisy). No cooking, at least not so far. I swear, if he starts getting up at five-thirty to peel carrots, make soup, chop onions or the likes, I am heading back to Gisagara.

But I think he is gradually settling back in to life here. He does find the national mood here difficult to take – not that things aren’t desperately bad (they are, even if it hard to convince all those Rwandans sending emails looking for scholarships/funding/donations etc of this fact). It’s that Rwanda was so POSITIVE, even unreasonably so. This is a country with little or no national resources, recovering from one of the most gigantic (if, admittedly, self-inflicted) disasters any country has ever experienced, with a demographic avalanche hovering over its head ... and everyone is upbeat, positive, working for the country’s future (on the surface anyway). Here, the country is also trying to recover from an (again, admittedly, self-inflicted) disaster but no-one seems to have any confidence or hope or esprit left in them. Contrast Rwanda’s determination – rightly or wrongly – not to allow itself to be dictated to by outside forces, countries or organisations with the situation in Ireland where (and I don’t think this is an exaggeration) most people seem to feel that the IMF or the EU or whoever would be preferable to letting the gang of incompetents and self-serving chancers in Dáíl Éireann do it. Listening to the radio the other night, I thought Ruairí was going to put his fist through the wall listening to either Lenihan or Cowen explaining why it was important not to get a bail-out at the moment because we had enough money for the next 6-12 months. And then what? Well, THEN we can go to the IMF because it’ll be the other shower who will be in power and we can maintain it is all their fault!!! Of course, by then the country will be even deeper in what our long-haired tomcat is so liberal with in the back garden but, hey, as long as FF are off the hook!

Hard to imagine that happening in Rwanda. Admittedly, there is no opposition and only one person who can make any kind of decisions but you did at least feel that some people, some politicians did care about the country as a whole and about its future. Very little sign of that here. If he does head back to Rwanda in the near future, that’ll probably be the main reason.

Hmmm, must be getting at least some of this right, he’s interrupting me with any sarcastic comments like he usually does.

As for me, I will of course go where my master goes. Though I must admit I would prefer a little while longer to get more settled back here (like, a few years) before heading off again. Though a little trip to Edinburgh to see the beautiful Alphonsine wouldn’t go amiss, must get working on that. Hope the cold, bleak Edinburgh weather hasn’t paled the golden lustre of her skin (What? You don’t know who Alphonsine is? Well, you are going to have to trawl back through the blog then, aren’t you!!!)

Thought I might get a word in here. Life has been good recently – work is much, much more under control, went to the UCD Symphony Orchestra the other night with three former pupils participating (good Shostakovitch apart from the first bit where the brass was a bit woeful, nice Elgar ‘Sea Changes’ with a wonderful singer, and a very very dodgy Brahms 2^nd Symphony), off to Birmingham tomorrow morning for a Returned Volunteers’ Weekend, will catch the new Harry Potter en route, Lidl’s are stocking ostrich and springbok steaks, had a sort of day off today – brought six students into the Four Courts for the day – impeccably behaved, looked after by a parent while I made myself unpopular by taking the only table in the Four Courts canteen that has a socket by it, plugging in my laptop and working there for five hours flat!

And so it goes......

2010-10-19T15:28:00.004+02:00

It has been two months since my last substantial entry (Alfred: Obviously mine doesn't count as 'substantial'. Luckily my skin has toughened up over the last two years) and people have been wondering whether I was continuing or not. Well, to start with, settling back has been really hard, much much harder than I expected. I had - to a certain extent - allow for the change in climate, pace of life, missing friends and all the other things VSO warn you about when you are leaving (and their predictions were, for the most part, bang on the money). But all of them were more intense than I realised and are taking longer to resolve than I had hoped.

Add to that the fact that the job I am returning to has changed quite a lot as there have been so many things that have happened and changed here in Ireland since I left. The cutbacks mean that there are fewer resources in schools, fee-paying or otherwise, so many areas of school life that used to be covered by specific members of staff are now an extra area to be covered by ... somebody. Parents are struggling with fees, students can sense that the job market they are going to be heading out into is going to be a much more competitive and demanding one than previously, the pressure in general is a palpable thing you can sense every day.

So, as many people ask me, what is the most difficult thing about being back? I used to give rather glib, superficial answers (Alfred: Glib? Toi? Quelle surprise, mon cheri) - the shortness of skirts, the sight of people eating on the streets, the climate and the change in the length of daylight and so on. But now that I have been back for almost four months, there are more fundamental things that I realise are the real source of the difficulties I have fitting in.

One is the sheer frantic pace of life, so frantic that it often stops things getting done properly and efficiently because there are always so many other things waiting in the queue. And, to be frank, some of them seem so petty compared to what I was used to dealing with. I had hoped to get away from being in at 7.30 every morning, now I often find myself in at 7.00.

Having said that, my actual work day is probably much the same as it was in Rwanda but, second point, in Rwanda I had almost complete control over my work, within the very broad parameters laid down in my contract and by my superiors in the District (Alfred: Superiors? Can you remember ANY occasion on which they tried to lay down specifications on what you were supposed to do? Remember the first time you tried to convince either Francois or Alexis that they were actually your boss?). So I planned my days the way I wanted - inspections, visits, research, workshops, visits to the ministry in Kigali - whatever seemed most appropriate. If I felt it was suitable, I could spend an entire week or two on just one thing. Here, my life is completely spent responding to outside pressure, satisfying departmental regulations on statistics and returns and about 70% of each day is spent doing things I had no idea I was going to do when I came into school that morning!

And, to be honest, there is a status issue. In Gisagara, I was extremely well-known, the first ever muzungu to live in the district, friendly with the mayor, the executive secretary, the chief of police and army commander. For good or ill, I felt important. And, in another aspect to the same issue, the work I was doing felt important, it was work that, had I not been there, would not have happened. I could feel I was adding a definite extra something-or-other to the existing system. It is hard to convince myself that what I am back doing now carries anything like the same weight or importance.

And I miss my friends so, so much. I arrive home here in Glenageary from work and slump down on the sofa to watch reruns of Stargate and Star Trek (which is about all my brain can cope with at that stage of the day) (Alfred: You can tell it was a better day than most if he feels up to Law & Order). But in Gisagara I would be down in the new bar with Enock and Claude, maybe Joseph and Elie or some of the others, drinking chilled Mutzig (Alfred: He has switched to drinking cider here, of all things - claims that all the beers here are just inferior copies of the Rwandan beers) and discussing what is going on in the village. I miss Abraham in the craft shop in Kigali and his beautiful wife Alice and son Isaac (Alfred: Ruairí has never actually seen Isaac but we are assured he is beautiful), the crazy map-seller outside the UTC centre, the girls in the Sotra bus office in Kigali and Butare and their incessant questions as to when I am going to get married and which one of them I would choose, I miss being called 'Joe Cole' on the streets of Butare by people who have a vague idea of who I am but don't know my name and go by what was printed on the back of my Chelsea shirt (Alfred: If he does go back, they will be calling him 'Zola') .......... and so the list goes on.

But there are things I really really enjoy about being back. Above all the rest, by a mile, is actually being back in school and teaching teenagers again. In Rwanda I had no contact with students and, after all, that is what I became a teacher for. I only have a handful of actual class contact hours per week but those plus the general interaction with the girls is a wonderful experience which I hadn't realised I was missing so much.

And friends and family - this, actually, has been more difficult. Looking back over recent months, I realised that I made little or no effort to meet up again with friends or even, in some cases, family. Indeed, there are good, close friends, many of whom stayed in touch with me while I was in Rwanda whom I have not even contacted let alone met since I came back. At first, I think it was a kind of refusal to admit that I actually was back but I am not sure what it is now. But it is definitely still there. And, at the same time, I am someone who usually isn't the best at keeping in touch and I figure that whenever I run into people again will be time enough, so I was quite surprised at just how good it was to see my family again, especially my nieces and nephews in Dublin, Bristol and Munich. They say you don't realise how much you need something until you are missing it - in my case it was when I had it again I realised it!

The creature comforts are nice but, after the first few weeks, that wore off. I do still feel a childlike wonder every morning when I press a button and hot water pours down on me and I have to confess that I still spend considerably longer than is strictly necessary rinsing myself off! (Alfred: And, in case he doesn't mention it - because he won't - he is really loving immersing himself in old episodes of Star Trek and Stargate, to an extent an objective person might describe as obsessive!).

So today is Friday and we are beginning half term. Never in my entire professional life have I been so glad to see a holiday come. I spent three hours on a phone today to an IT support person trying to figure out why the statistical returns to the department kept generating error messages that meant they couldn't be sent. One reason turned out to be (Alfred: wait for it) because my keyboard was configured for US instead of UK it was inserting the 'wrong kind of apostrophes'. I mean. Really.

But my friends, especially my VSO/Rwanda friends, keep me going. Nidhi is visiting at the moment, Paula and Sonya will be home soon, Eric and Becky are around, I hope to get to Holland and visit Mans and Han and Berthe in the near future - it is amazing how the continued contact and communication with my former colleagues is so important, as well as hearing from Sarah and Emma and Brigid and Pauline and Steve and Pickles and Enock and everyone else back in Rwanda. So, onwards and upwards.

Don't expect too many posts, unless Alfred takes an executive decision to mount a coup d'état.

Oh dear

2010-09-13T22:59:00.002+02:00

This is not easy. I figured (as I said before) the difficulty would come at the beginning and then I would gradually reacclimatize. NO. Life here is so hectic, so much more complicated than in Rwanda. And not just work, just ordinary life. So many choices to be made, so many things pulling at you from every side. So many friends and family to catch up with, a job where virtually nothing is under your own control, a house stuffed full of things that I can't remember ever needing or using ... but also getting used to the nice things about being back in Ireland (still amazed at the hot water in the shower, have had about sixty showers since I arrived back and each one is still a revelation!) - and most of all, being back in class with my students. Of all the things I missed in Rwanda (and, to be honest, there weren't many) it was the lack of contact with students that was the worst. Now I am teaching CSPE (Civic, Social and Political Education) and Computers and, for the moment, Careers and it is so so wonderful being back in the classroom with students instead of just working at admin or ministry level.

So what has been happening? Well, back at work, new boss, trying to catch up with friends and relations .... well, a whole litany of things. And also the question of what to do about the blog. Well, Alfred and I had a long chat (Alfred: Well, he did most of the talking - I was trying to watch the highlights of Everton - Man Utd). Alfred doesn't think he has the time so I am going to wrap the blog up with one long last entry and then that will be it. The question is, when will I have the time!! Off to County Clare this weekend to meet my cousins so maybe the following one. Weekdays are out of the question at the moment!!!!

Just about ready ...

2010-09-13T01:51:00.002+02:00

Alfred: OK, I think I have him just about prepped. The last few weeks have been tough for him (in his sphere of reference) so it has been difficult to persuade him his public needs him!! And, to be honest, I don't fancy running this blog fulltime on my own (which is the only thing that has prevented me from launching a pre-emptive strike). So tomorrow evening has been set aside for blog update time. There is a lot to cover so it just MAY be a little incoherent. And I hope he isn't still on a rant about the short skirts issue! Oy vey!

Ça fait longtemps

2010-08-19T20:45:00.012+02:00

And thanks to Alfred's nagging, here I am again. Three weeks since the last update, so my apologies. And then again, why am I still doing this? I set up this blog just before I left for Rwanda so its purpose would seem to have expired. But then, the process of reintegrating and readjusting is, in a way, a part of the whole experience, so I will continue for as long as it seems relevant. And then ... well, I suppose Alfred could always take over. (Alfred: Ha! That's right, dump it on me just because you can't be bothered.)

Being back in Ireland was fine at first, surprisingly easy in fact. And (Alfred: Whoa! I say, whoa there! You already said all this stuff in your July 25th entry. Stick with the new stuff, OK?)

Ok - good point. I keep forgetting what I said before. At least Alfred is there to remind me. So, how about focussing on the really good stuff recently. Well, one thing is the overwhelming desire and, to be more precise, need to meet up with and keep in contact with my former VSO Rwanda colleagues. I have spent most of my time travelling to England and France to visit family and colleagues. I already mentioned France. England - England was great!! Flew to Edinburgh, met Martine, her son David and Laetitia, a former VSO Rwanda volunteer in Rwanda. Then Martine and I flew to Bristol, met my sister Maria, my nephew and niece Pat and Kate and Hayley, who had been in Rwanda with us (and has the nicest boyfriend, a Buddhist personal confidence coach who drives a Merc, how cool is that!!!). Also met Marion for breakfast, then off to Birmingham to meet up with Els who lives at the coolest address (Thimblehill Road) and brought me to the absolutely coolest, most wonderful cinema ever. The Electric in Birmingham, couches to sit on, waiter service during the film (you text your order to the waiter and she/he brings the drinks/food to your table: how cool is that. Check it out here - www.theelectric.co.uk - the oldest running cinema in the UK). And we watched 'Inception' - which I had seen five days previosuly in Dublin. It was even better the second time.

And then on to Chesterfield where I stayed with my former colleague Thom Lee and we were joined by Andy Crow. Saturday was England v. Pakistan in Nottingham, my first time at a Test match. And what a day it was. The planning involved - OMG. Preparation of food and drinks the night before - four kinds of sandwiches (crab, corned beef, ham and pickles, cheese and ham), cornish pasties, pork pies, water (the beer etc we left behind in the end on the grounds of weight), early start for the train, walk to the stadium, arrive at 1005, eventually left at 1830. It's a MAJOR operation. Does anyone actually attend all five days of a test match (Alfred: Ha! When was the last time a test match actually lasted five days, eh?). Well, at £45 per day, not that many people, I guess.

What was surprising was how, well ... yobbish it was. Maybe because it was Saturday but where we were sitting was dominated by drunken costume-dressed lads who seemed to have little or no interest in the cricket. Maybe they weren't as foul-mouthed as soccer supporters would be but that was about the only difference. Eventually we moved to a cheaper part of the ground. Otherwise a great day, marred only slightly by Eoin Morgan's early departure, run out by Prior's bad call (Alfred: yeah, blame the Englishman - it was just as much Morgan's fault). And I can honestly say I have never experienced hospitality like that at John Lee's house (Alfred: though Chesterfield itself is ... well, how to be diplomatic ... quiet. I figure Ruairí's arrival, let alone Andy's, lowered the average age of the community by a considerable amount).

Anyway, the really, really big thing that happened was the gathering of former and future VSO Rwanda in Dublin! First Marion, then Mans, then Martine, then Andy, then everyone else!! On Friday 13th August (my birthday as it so happened) Mans, Martine, Marion and I headed to Glendalough - a 5th century monastic settlement in Wicklow, just south of Dublin. A wonderful day, started cloudy but the sun came out as we arrived there. Then lunch in the Avoca Cafe (awesome, as usual) and then into town for dinner with Becky and Mammy in Wagamama - a great birthday.

And then the next day - the Rwanda reunion!! Fourteen former or prospective VSO rwanda volunteers in my house. A great night was had by all (Alfred: That's a bit of an assumption. I mean, people are hardly so rude as to say to your face they had a crap time, eh?) and it was really nice to meet the volunteers about to head out, though the sense of envy was hard to control.

So, pictures below, more updates to come (Alfred: Yeah, right - the only double positive that means a negative) and my love and best wishes to you all!

WONDERFUL DAY IN GLENDALOUGH

Martine and Mans in the car park; door of the cathedral

Round tower; Mans and me; round tower

Marion and Martine; Mans and Marion

PARTY TIME!!!

Well, it was the day after the election: I downloaded the picture, Cathryn got it printed, Andy did the info sheet and Martine framed it. That's Cathy and Marion posing in front of it.

Martine and Karen posing with the newly-elected President; Marion, Mammy and Andy

Marion, Mammy, Martine and Andy; Marion, me and Mammy watching the 'Bread & Butter' video

Food (ham terrine, chicken and lamb liver pate, hummus, potato salad, green salad, smoked mackerel pate, salmon and dill pate, and a variety of alcoholic beverages); Becky, Mans, Andy, Marion, Eric and Cathryn

Judy and Alfred and Pauline. Judy is off to Guyana in February and Pauline to Rwanda (Ngororero) in September. Judy has been a fan of Alfred for a long time, strangely enough (Alfred: excuse me? What do you mean 'strangely'? Why wouldn't a beautiful woman like that be interested in a handsome guy like me, eh?); Becky, Mans, Andy and Eric

Cathryn, Brigid and Martine. Brigid is heading to Nyamasheke to join up with my wonderful friend Libby; Mans, Mammy and Brigid.

Cathryn and Mans; and the whole group! Guy at the back is Mícheál Boland, who was working with MTN in Kigali while I was in Rwanda. If any VSO volunteer ever starts banging on about the frustrations of working in Rwanda, stand aside for Mícheál.

General group and a really sweet photo of Martine and Becky

Back row: Marion, Andy, Eric, Cathryn, Karen, Mans; Front row: Me or Becky (depending on the photo), Mammy, Martine.

Mans and Andy experience hurling for the first time. Mans had researched it on Wikipedia and was able to instruct me about various aspects of its history.

Martine learns the tin whistle under Marion's tutelage; a new use for a winnowing ... basket? What is it called?

How come my role has now changed to chief groveller?

2010-08-12T22:33:00.002+02:00

Alfred: there are moments when I just feel like throwing in the towel. I have begged, pleaded, prompted, urged, nagged, argued, beseeched, begged again, scolded, reminded and finally ordered Ruairí to do an update. I might as well have been asking .... hmmm, can't think of a simile to do justice to his obduracy. Silvio Berlusconi to be celibate? Frank Ribery to only date women his own age? Ivor Callely to throw a receipt in the bin? Helen Mirren not to take her clothes off in a film? Amy Winehouse to become a disciple of Father Matthew?

And there has been SO much going on - his trip to England, first visit to a Test Match, the wonders and glories of East Midlands Airport, returning to work, his battle with the tin of peanuts, gardening, planning his VSO Rwanda reunion party, reflections on the elections and recent grenade attack in Rwanda, his hilarious encounter with the counter staff in Argos when he brought his new camera back because the battery lid 'wouldn't open' , the quest for goat meat in Dublin ....

Anyway, maybe once the party is over and he has pictures to post, there will be a change. I am looking forward to the party because one of MY fans is coming (.i. someone who reads this blog for MY contributions); so Judith (VSO volunteer bound for Guyana), see you Saturday!!!

And so it goes as Kurt Vonnegut (I think) once said.

2010-07-25T02:56:00.002+02:00

Re-integration. Five little syllables (Alfred: Not that there are really any very large syllables to be honest). I figured the real challenge would be immediately after returning - the shock of traffic, the first visit to a supermarket, the prices, the pace at which people walk and so on. But, to the contrary, initially things were fine. It is now, after three weeks or so, that life is becoming very strange. Or even difficult.

I think part of the reason is because - unlike most volunteers - I never went home during the 22 months of my placement, so my brain decided it was home for a brief holiday before heading back to reality .i. Rwanda. So the first while was all meeting family and friends, being reunited with my beloved Martine, drinking the first pint of Guinness, eating all my favourite foods I hadn't tasted in two years (Caesar salad, breaded fish steaks, a Big Mac (Alfred: An underwhelming experience but I suppose if you spend two entire years waiting for something, the level of expectation would make almost anything an anticlimax. Except sex, probably. But then, how would I know. I'm just a teddy-bear), pickled baby beetroot, black pudding with fried eggs, paté, cheeses in all their amazing, bewildering, heartwarming profusion (I discovered a new one in France, a soft creamy cheese called Roblochon - absolutely incredible), rillettes, freshly-baked French bread ... and, above all, chilled white wine). Ireland was fine, the south of France even better, maybe a bit weird but cool.

Now I am back almost four weeks and I think my brain has realised I am not going back to Rwanda. Plus I have been receiving many emails from Rwandan friends asking me how I am getting on. So now I know - I am back. I am not going to wake up tomorrow, have a cold bucket shower, eat two hard-boiled eggs with bread and coffee and then head off for the District Office. I am stuck here in a world where I grapple with tax rebates, house insurance, plumbing problems, car tax, electricity and gas provider agencies, strict recycling protocols, where nobody knows me when I venture out of my house - so I do so less and less. I spend my hours on Facebook reading the gossip and chat of my friends back in Rwanda. When I visit the supermarkets I resist the urge to buy compulsively and try to stick to what I need.

My first day back in the office was .. interesting. The teacher who had filled in as Deputy Principal for me while I was away ran me through the changes and other things that had happened while I was away. It was only three hours but it really left me reeling - so, so different to what I have become used to. And so much of it not really practical hands-on work (.i. working direectly with children or teachers) but general administration and bureaucracy.

Monday I head to England - Edinburgh Monday (Martine), Tuesday and Wednesday Bristol (Hayley, my sister and my sister's kids), Thursday Birmingham (Els) and Friday and Saturday Nottingham (Thom, Andy and the First Test Match between England and Pakistan). Meeting all these people I was in Rwanda with is really important to me. Not that I want to endlessly relive all that happened, but I know that just being with them is a sharing of what we all did and experienced together.

But I do miss so many things. I miss my friends, I miss my office, I miss the avocados, I miss riding on the back of a motorbike, I miss (and, I swear to God I never ever ever imagined I could possibly ever say this) being stared at, I miss Mutzig, I miss wandering down the main street of Butare and people calling me 'Joe Cole', I miss being able to wear my Chelsea jersey without worrying that some Neandearthal supporter of some other team will take it for a deadly personal insult (Alfred: He hasn't worn it since he came back; he did wear it in France but things are a lot more civilised over there about things like that) , I miss brochettes, I miss the slow-motion insanity of the early Monday morning meetings in the District. I especially miss the weather and the light: I still can't get used to its being so bright so late ... and so early. So here I sit at 0300 on Saturday/Sunday because it only got properly dark a few hours ago and I am waiting to go to bed - but I need to be up in about .... hmm, five hours. OK - more tomorrow. Night all.

So, where do we go from here?

2010-07-17T00:52:00.002+02:00

Just back from a week in France, meeting my wonderful Martine's mother and family and introducing her to mine and hanging around with my brother and his wife and wonderful kids (Alfred: Em, I presume you think Brian and his wife are also pretty wonderful ... or whatever. Just wondering about the syntax). And my sister Máirín too. And I had hired a seven-seater car to drive them all around in. Picked it up in Lyon, with Máírín and Martine, and drove down to Montelimar .... the rest will have to wait. Driving an outsize seven-seater car around France for seven days when you have never driven on the right before ... interesting. (Alfred: Yeah, right - only drove for a few of the days, though the last day when he drove all over Lyon - and I mean ALL over Lyon, trying to find Brian's hotel and then, even more hilariously, trying to find the car agency , during the latter which experience he managed to cross not just one unnecessary major river but TWO (Rhone AND Saône) - now that entry is going to be worth waiting for).

Meanwhile, now that I am back in Ireland, the question arises - do I continue the blog or not? The consensus seems to be that I keep going while I am describing the reintegration process - after that, probably not. So that's the way it is going to be!! And I will be updating the last few weeks - for my sins!

READJUSTING part two

2010-07-10T19:11:00.000+02:00

CUSTOMER SERVICE

It was Martine who drew my attention to it first but since then it has been a real pleasure – customer service with a smile. It’s not that it doesn’t exist at all in Rwanda but every time you encounter it it makes an enormous impression because it is so rare. Here, maybe it was always like this but it is such a pleasure shopping or ordering stuff in bars and restaurants. No grunts, no waiters lying slumped asleep across their counters, no padded bills, genuine smiles and conversations, food being delivered exactly as ordered, hot and promptly. We went to McCloskey’s in Donnybrook one evening to watch football and have a drink and get something to eat. There were about 25 customers in the place and just one barman on duty. He managed to serve everyone their drinks, brought food for five of them/us, tidied up in general and still had time to chat to everyone for a bit, check that everyone was happy and read the newspaper. Rwanda has a distance to go yet.

BUSES

Well, Rwandan buses may be driven in a lunatic fashion and are somewhat of questionable condition but at least they leave on time and get to where they are going more or less as expected (I am talking of the inter-city buses of course). I walked down the road to catch the 1400 75 bus to Ballinteer. By 1410 it was obvious it wasn’t coming. At 1415 a 75 passed in the opposite direction – presumably it was the one coming back up at 1430. Eventually at 1445 it appeared. I asked the driver ‘What happened to the 1400 bus?’. ‘No idea ‘ he said, ‘probably just didn’t turn up.’ Thought of telling him this wouldn’t have happened in Rwanda, figured there was no point.

HORSES

Driving through Cavan, I saw horses. There are no horses in Rwanda. Not one. They looked wonderful.

THE PORTERHOUSE

One of the absolutely most fantastic, wonderful things about living in Dublin is The Porterhouse. The first Porterhouse was (and is) in Temple Bar, a pub where all the beers served are either brewed themselves on the premises or are other specialty beers from microbrewers all over the world. You cannot get Guinness, Heineken, Carlsberg, Coors or any other commercial brands. And what they do have that I really love is a range of porter and stouts that cannot be matched anywhere: plain porter, Oyster Stout, Wrasslers Stout, wheat beer, American-style lager, red beers – you name it, they have brewed it in the basement and are serving it upstairs. There is now a second Porterhouse on Nassau Street near Grafton Street, more central and accessible though the pub itself is nowhere near as nice as the original Parliament Street one, and a third one in Bray. There is also one in Covent Garden on London – check it out if you are over!!! My personal favourite is the Oyster Stout – if you like Guinness, taste this and see what real stout is supposed to taste like!

CHAT

I am a gregarious kind of person, there is nothing I like better than talking to new people in strange places. In Rwanda this has been a real problem. Normally when I travel, it is me who has to take the initiative to strike up conversations (except in the USA where people are naturally chatty and open to strangers). In Rwanda, you are lucky if you get a few minutes to yourself before someone sidles – or strides – up to your table, plonks down and immediately starts questioning you (Where are you from? Are you married? How many children do you have or Why not?) and then immediately start into what they want from you – money, books, a scholarship, school fees for their kids, university fees for themselves, a drink or whatever. Looking back over the 22 months I spent on Rwanda, this was definitely the single most negative aspect of my entire stay. All the more so in that when I visited Uganda and (briefly) Kenya I found nothing of the same attitude – no begging, no requests, no reflex ‘Give me stuff’ reaction. Maybe joining the East African Community will help Rwandans to shake off this attitude of dependency.

So it is all the more wonderful to be back where you can simply strike up conversations at will without worrying that you are involving yourself in a situation you will find it difficult to extricate yourself from. At the cash register, ordering from a barman, peeing in the loo, standing in a bus queue, I can just start a conversation and chat away! Awesome!!

ATTITUDE

Things are not good here in Ireland at the moment and are getting worse. All kinds of cuts and claw backs, cuts in disability services, tax hikes, repossessions, a general air of gloom and despondency. Under it is a feeling that things will in the long run – maybe even the medium run – get better but for the moment all is doom and gloom. Rwanda, for all its difficulties, is (forgive the phrase) a ‘happening’ country. Things may not always be planned carefully or carried out with foresight and planning (Alfred: That is phrasing it very diplomatically indeed!) but the general air is of progress and expansion and optimism and confidence in the economic future (Alfred: political and social is a little more complicated).

LITTER

People always said Rwanda was a very tidy country compared to its neighbours. To be fair, we have always known Dublin was dirty but I had forgotten just how dirty it is. My first visit to the city centre I was stunned at the litter everywhere and the casual way people added to it as they walked around.

SO, WHAT WAS IT LIKE?

How in the name of Jaysus do you answer this question in thirty seconds or less, which is the maximum time the person asking you is going to devote to any serious level of concentration on your answer?

PRICES

This was a big surprise. Things are a lot cheaper here in Ireland than in Rwanda, in real terms. A pint of Guinness in central Dublin cost me just under RWF3000. This is the same as a similar drink in Novotel or Milles Collines and three to almost four times the price of a Mutzig in a local bar. Given the relative rates of pay and salaries it makes me realise just how expensive Kigali is (Alfred: AS all your Ugandan friends kept on telling you!)

I HAVE A CAR AGAIN!

Oh man! My sainted brother Aindriú gave me a car, a silver Honda Accord in really nice condition and I cannot even begin to express the wonderful feeling of being independent transport-wise!!!!

GUINNESS

I don’t drink that much Guinness as a rule, preferring lager or cider. But Ken Goodwin had abjured me to have a pint of Guinness when I got back and to think of him as I was having it. So I did. Wow – amazing taste. Since then, it has been Guinness every time (other than in the Porterhouse where the Oyster Stout is possibly the best stout in the world).

Plus seeing my family again, having a fridge/freezer again, walking on Killiney Beach by the sea (!!), and – most amazing of all – finding Martine waiting for me when I got off the plane. La vita è bella!

READJUSTING part one

2010-07-10T13:32:00.004+02:00

Sitting in Lyon Airport at 1745 local time waiting for Martine to arrive from Heathrow, this is a good time to reflect back (Alfred: Tautology! Or maybe you were thinking of reflecting forward the next time, eh?) on the last week or so. At first, I felt there was no real problem settling back in but, as the days went by, things got stranger and stranger. There are loads of good things, loads of things I don’t like and quite a few that are under the general heading of ‘strange’.

But the biggest is that I can’t sleep normally because of the light. In Rwanda, night falls at 18.30, give or take a few minutes and it is reasonably bright around 0600 or so. The day Martine went back to Scotland, I went for a pint in the Porterhouse in Nassau Street (Alfred: or, to be more accurate, went BACK to the Porterhouse, having been there with Martine earlier). Then I noticed it was about 2000 and felt it was time to head home. When I walked out of the pub it was still broad daylight. I checked my watch (which has been giving trouble), then double-checked it against my phone and Palm pilot. Yes, 2000. And then it dawned on me that it was summer! But that doesn’t change the habits of the last two years. I go to bed about three to four hours after sunset and can’t seem to shake this. So several times I have been going to bed at 0300 or even 0400, by which time it is getting bright again. Last night I actually managed to get to bed by midnight given that I had to fly today but the lack of sleep is definitely catching up with me!!

Other than that, here are the pluses, minuses and wierdnesses about being back in Ireland, in no particular order (you can figure out which category each belongs to):

BODY ODOUR: I remember reading a report that, now smoking is banned in Irish pubs (Alfred: Em, he means pubs in Ireland), people were becoming much more conscious of the body odour issue. Well, my friends, that may be the case for your refined nostrils but for me, the freedom to inhale deeply while in crowds is a blessed relief.

BEGGING: No one is continually calling out ‘amafaranga, muzungu’ here – but there are a lot of beggars! OK, they don’t get in your face the way beggars did in Rwanda but I was really surprised how many people I saw begging around the centre of Dublin.

COMPLEXITY: OMG, I had forgotten, and I mean completely forgotten, how much more complicated life is here. Even the process of opening the mail for two years reminded me of so many things that exist here and don’t exist in Rwanda - gas, electricity and phone/broadband, cable TV, refuse collection, house insurance, health insurance, car insurance, salary protection insurance, having a garden, taxes, charity contributions, ... (Alfred: Or, to be more accurate, many things that you have to take care of yourself here are taken care of by VSO in Rwanda). And I have SO MUCH STUFF!!! Where the hell did all these things come from? When I left, all my possessions went into my attic and I have been removing them one bag at a time and discovering what I have. I seem to have a grand total of fifteen cooking utensils – pots, pans, woks, casserole dishes. Two entire sets of cutlery plus endless odds and ends. FIVE sets of table mats, only one set of which I can ever remember having used (and I brought another set back from Rwanda). Three swimming costumes??? (Alfred: the irony of this last one will not be lost on close friends and family). Clothes I don’t even remember owning and that I have never to my knowledge worn. And so on and so on. Not to mention all the things I brought back from Rwanda (Alfred: I am sure faithful readers will be pleased to know that the two DHL parcels arrived safely and pretty much intact – the frame of the framed ‘Thank You’ drum was slightly damaged but this was in the parcel Ruairí packed himself, not the one DHL packed!) What made me think I needed four psychedelically-coloured stuffed elephants? Hollow wooden fish? Not to mention the clothes I got made which looked fine in Rwanda but here...... (Alfred: Ha – YOU may think they looked fine in Rwanda but I don’t remember you venturing outdoors in most of them).

O TEMPORA, O MORES: though it should be whatever the Latin is for ‘place’ rather than ‘time’. My first trip into the city centre was quite a shock to my sensibilities. Were skirts ALWAYS this short? I remember about a month ago seeing a girl in the street Butare wearing a skirt that showed her knees: here – well, I seriously had to keep looking away, I was so embarrassed. And people eating in the streets (and messily at that). I went to a funeral in Cavan where they served chicken and sausages and sandwiches after the service – but no one washed their hands first or used a napkin to pick up the food!

Mind you, so far no one has picked their nose or coughed up half a pint of phlegm from the nether regions of their lungs while chatting to me – like everything else I mentioned, I can get used to that.

ANONYMITY: No one stares at me, no one shouts ‘Muzungu!’, no one comes up to me when I am standing somewhere, parks themselves two feet away and looks at my face with a dropped jaw and a thin line of drool slowly escaping unbeknownst to them from the corner of their mouth.

ANONYMITY: No one pays any attention to me. Instead of being unique, known to everyone in my community, someone complete strangers want to talk to, shake hands with, be seen with, I’m just me in a city of over a million others. And, curiously, this very anonymity makes me much more self-conscious of how I look. In Rwanda I could wear pretty much what I liked, the fact that I was fatter than most others was a positive thing, I could pretty much set my own rules as no-one there really expected me to follow Rwandan rules. But now .... I don’t even wear my favourite Chelsea shirt into town like I always did in Butare, because here football shirts are a sign of tribal allegiance and can spark hostility, rather than attracting friendly comments and chat from fellow football-lovers.

SCHOLARSHIPS, BLOODY SCHOLARSHIPS

I know everyone in Rwanda wants to improve their level of qualifications but the incessant requests for me to find scholarships for people to study abroad has been the single most wearing thing of the last few months. And almost every time, it is the same conversation (and almost always in French):

Random work colleague/bar customer/complete stranger: I need to travel abroad and do an MA and I need you to find me a scholarship.

Me: What do you want to study?

RWC/BC/CS: I don’t care, I just want to have an MA. Anything will do as long as I have a scholarship to do it. But I would prefer Sociology or Psychology.

Me: And where do you want to study? There are scholarships in Belgium and France ....

RWC/BC/CS: No, no, no. Not in French, I need to study in English.

Me: But you don’t speak English.

RWC/BC/CS: I will learn. I am very good at memorising stuff. I will call you tomorrow so you can tell me where I am going because my family want to know.

Me: Your family?

RWC/BC/CS: Yes, I told them yesterday I was meeting you today to arrange a scholarship and they are very excited. My mother said she is going to pray for you every day because of the wonderful thing you have done for me and she gave me this present for you.

Having said that, there is one person on whose behalf I am actively going to look. Paul (nicknamed ‘Jambazi’, which means ‘thief’ in Swahili) is currently doing an MA in Pure Mathematics in the National University of Rwanda (NUR) but really wants to do a PhD. However, there is no-one in the entire country who would be able to supervise him for something like that. It strikes me that helping the first ever Rwandan to do a PhD in Pure Mathematics might actually be something some university department might be interested in supporting. Anyone out there with any ideas, please let me know! (Alfred: As for the nickname, which I notice Ruairí was just going to leave hanging there – Paul currently has three jobs: he teaches Physics in St Philippe Neri secondary school, teaches Mathematics in the Catholic seminary in Butare and also lectures in the Mathematics department of the NUR in Butare. Because he has three jobs, people say he is stealing the jobs of two other people, hence the nickname ‘jambazi’).

TAYTO CRISPS: If you are not Irish, you have no idea what I am talking about. If you are Irish, no explanation is necessary.

AVOCADOS: The first time I visited a supermarket, it was a little bit bewildering but not quite as mind-blowing as others had said. And, after all, Nakumatt in Kigali is a supermarket, albeit a small one by our standards. But it was still interesting gauging my reaction - -part of me found it really difficult to buy anything, a little voice in my ear saying ‘Do you REALLY need that?’. The other part of me wanted to buy everything immediately in case it was all gone the next time I came back. I did succumb and buy a few treats - three ripe pears, pitta bread, a piece of Comté cheese, a nice bottle of red wine – but my first meal in Ireland was Chicken Caesar salad: chicken breasts, romaine lettuce, croutons, good parmesan and a bottle of Caesar salad dressing (the green and red one with the Italian name which I can’t remember now). Washed down with a bottle of Astrolabe Australian chardonnay, one of my favourite white wines.

The downside was when I saw a sign for avocados (possibly my single greatest food experience in Rwanda) in the supermarket: I had been steeling myself for this moment but, even so, what a massive disappointment – tiny, wizened dark green objects as hard as rocks. I couldn’t even touch them! But maybe if I hunt around the specialist greengrocers I can find something faintly resembling what I had in Rwanda.

CAVAN: On Friday last I went to a funeral in Cavan – Jennifer Anderson, who had been head of the boarding house in Rathdown School where I teach since before I started there, died suddenly and a large group of us went up on the school bus. On the journey I got a chance to speak to a lot of the staff and catch up on what was going on. Then I just sat and looked out of the window for a bit.

If you live in Rwanda, sitting on a bus staring out of the window is something you spend a LOT of time doing, so it felt really familiar in one way. And then I noticed what I was looking at and, possibly for the first time, realised that I really was not in Rwanda any more. Large herds of cows, flat landscape, wheat and barley (though there was some maize, which gave me a familiar little thrill). And, most of all, no banana trees. This had been something I had been thinking about because in Rwanda, with the exception of a few areas given totally over to tea plantations, banana trees are ubiquitous. And, sure enough, that was the strangest thing of all – miles and miles of landscape with no banana trees. And so few houses – where were all the people gone??

WEATHER: I had forgotten what real weather is like, as in having many completely different kinds of weather in on day! Hot, cold, wet, windy, calm , dry – it was great! I remember my brother Aindriú telling me about when he worked in Los Angeles and the thing that really drove him crazy was that the weather was utterly predictble. I loved the weather in Rwanda – warm but usually not too hot, predictiable rain (well, for the most part) but it is so nice to have this again!

CHILDREN: a real shock. Sitting in Brussels Airport with my friend Karen. An empty table next to us. A French/Belgian woman with two small girls, aged probably 6 and 3, comes over, plonks them down and then goes up to the counter to order. The older girl immediately starts teasing the younger one, who starts shouting across the room at her mother. The mother shouts at her to behave, whereupon the little girl gets off her chair, picks it up and hurls it at the wall. Then runs over to her mother screaming abuse. NOT what I have been used to from small children for the last two years!

High points of the last few days in rwanda

2010-07-05T00:55:00.007+02:00

Farewell party in Zaffran

This was a great evening – 60 or so friends from all over Rwanda, an excellent meal. Afterwards we went down the road to a bar whose name I still cannot remember and then I got a moto home to the Beau Sejour in Kisimenti. The moto driver was fine until we started catching up on an army pickup with eight soldiers in the back. My moto driver immediately applied the brakes and dawdled about twenty metres behind it in a manner absolutely calculated to attract attention. After a while the soldiers began nudging each other and staring at us. Then, when we came to the speed bumps outside the school in Kimihurura, the pickup slowed right down and my moto immediately accelerated and took the bumps rather like an Olympic ski-jumper and then roared off ahead of the pickup. We then covered the remaining few kilometres in about three minutes flat. An astoundingly perfect example of how to attract attention to yourself.

Presents
This is always a worry – Rwandans rarely if ever fly so getting across the idea of a limited luggage allowance is difficult. Added to this is the fact that Rwandans are extremely generous with the idea of giving farewell presents and the fact that most traditional presents are ... well, large. I accumulated the following: a large gorilla statue, a framed drum, a banana-leaf football, a giant wooden map of Rwanda, a small wooden map of Rwanda, a statue of two entwined giraffes, a large woven basket (a present for another volunteer back in England), a set of peace baskets (like Russian dolls, one within the other), a hollow wooden fish, packs of coffee, earrings, a necklace, three shirts, a dress and skirt for my mother ... em, there was probably more. Add the clothes I had made and the four imigongo paintings I ordered ... all I can say is thank God for DHL. Expensive but worth it!

Imigongo

French World Cup team

Sitting in Gasaza’s bar in Gisagara on my last night, there was a special item on TV about the French team’s latest fiasco. One of my Rwandan friends leaned over and said: ‘No offence, Ruairí, but it was probably a lot more fun for the rest of the world having France rather than Ireland in the World Cup!’ It was hard to disagree.

Rwandan videos

As Alfred previously noted, I have accumulated a great collection of Rwandan and East African videos, some of which I feel encapsulate very important aspects of Rwandan culture. For those of you living in broadband land, I will upload a few on YouTube in the near future. My personal favourite is one called ‘Aka 500’. The plot runs as follows: man has wife, pays her an allowance of RWF5000 a day (presumably for all wifely functions, including sex), comes home early one day and finds her in bed with another guy, turns out he is paying her only RWF500 for ... well, presumably sex. Husband is very angry and confronts other guy, he blames the woman, husband complains bitterly .... and then says he is cutting her allowance to RWF500 a day, the same as the other guy paid her. And that’s it. Here is the link – it’s actually a well-sung song, rap-style but sharp and crisp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whGfR8OwxA0. More video posts to follow.

And here is another one that was already on YouTube when I was trying to upload it. Akasimu with Dr Fred Sebbaale is in Luganda and is about a row between a husband and wife. Actually, it is pretty self-explanatory - the guy trying at various stages to keep them apart is the husband's father.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAha3XvLSbI

World Cup

You know, I kinda figured everyone here would be supporting the African teams no matter what but, no. Watching Brazil v. Côte d’Ivoire one night I was really surprised that most people were supporting Brazil.

Past pupils

As I spent my last few days in Rwanda, I remembered all those people who supported me through their emails, Facebook messages, contributions towards my various projects and so on. It was particularly uplifting to be contacted by so many of my former pupils: Fiona Spargo in Australia whose accounts of her fire fighting exploits during the Australian bush fires last year was riveting, and scary; Orla Keane/Goggin who kept me in touch with what was happening at home; Susan Connolly who, when things were not going too well for me, showed me how you cope with adversity in a positive manner; Anne-Marie Florence for her discussion on ... well, she knows; Beth, Justine and Ríona for their amazing fundraising; Antonia Hart for showing that it doesn’t matter how long ago you taught someone, the connection is still always there; Anne-Marie O’Rourke for all the stuff she sent me, especially the hat (which I still have despite my best efforts to lose it); Jane for her continued interest and support; Helen Regan for being number one supporter of my blog; Jane Moore for – among other things – all the cute puppy pictures; Jo Peare whose amazing work in the South African refugee camps made me so proud of her; Lydia Behan whose suggestion of using www.wordreference.com to help me with my French translations was possibly the single most useful piece of information anyone gave me in the last 22 months; both the Pfeiffers for reasons too numerous to mention; Ruth O’Mahony Brady whose recording of ‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’ I played innumerable times in Rwanda as I went to sleep; and many, many more. Thanks to you all and do keep in touch.

Airport

Got to the airport at 1600 Saturday so I could see the football. Checked in at 1700. No one was there. Perfect – just as I planned.

Oh, and the best single piece of marketing I have seen in Rwanda. Patrick, who used to be with the Ivuka Gallery, has set up a stall in the duty-free area, selling his small pictures. A perfect size to fit into carry-on luggage, $40 each, a perfect present to bring home. He sold three of them just while I was watching. Hope the airport isn’t taking too much of a commission.

Oh, and possibly the worst piece of planning ever in a duty free. Because plastic bags are banned in Rwanda, you get your duty free in a paper bag. This means that if you are changing flights later, your duty-free will be confiscated because it isn’t in a sealed plastic bag!

Shamrock Rovers in Kigali

One of the items of clothing I brought with me was my Shamrock Rovers shirt which I wore around Kigali various times. On my way to the airport my taxi driver asked me: ‘Do you still have that green and white hooped shirt I saw on you last year?’ (I use the same taxi driver in Kigali all the time).

‘Do you mean the Shamrock Rovers shirt?’.

‘Yes, Shamrock Rovers’.

‘Yes, it’s in my suitcase’.

‘Can I have it? You said you would give it to me when you were going home.’

‘What?’ Then I remembered – yes, I had said that.

‘Em, yeah. Sure – wait until we get to the airport and I’ll get it out.’

At the airport.

‘Here it is – em, do you support Shamrock Rovers?’

‘What? Of course not, don’t be stupid. The colours are the same as the team I support in Kigali. I’ve never even heard of Shamrock Rovers!’

Jean-Pierre

(Translated from the fractured French, shards of English and the few words of Kinyarwanda I could understand)

JP: I hear you are returning to Holland?

Me: Em, yes – Ireland, I am returning to Ireland.

JP: Ah yes, England. I need something.

Me: (sigh) What?

JP: I need a woman. I need you to send me a woman from England who will love me. If she is a friend of

yours that would be best, because I trust your judgement.

Me: Ah, a woman. Are you not married?

JP: No, and I don’t want to marry a Rwandan woman. I want a muzungu woman.

Me: Really? Why don’t you want to marry a Rwandan woman? Rwandan women are really beautiful.

JP: Yes, they are much more beautiful than muzungu women but all they are interested in is money. As long as you are bringing them money, they love you. If the money stops, then they leave you and start loving someone with more money. But muzungu girls love you for what you are, for the person you are. That’s what I want.

Me: OK, but how can I tell a muzungu girl back in IRELAND about you and expect her to come out here and marry you?

JP: I know things are bad in England at the moment. Surely they would like to marry a good-looking Rwandan man with a steady job who will treat them right?

Me: I’m not so sure.

JP: What? You don’t think I am good-looking?

Me: Of course you are, that’s not what I meant. I mean, how can I convince someone back in .... England, that she should come out here to Rwanda and marry someone she has never met? And how can I be sure that you will like her?

JP: I trust you. I know that if you tell a woman back in England about me she will trust you and come out here to me. And I trust you to pick a good woman for me.

Me: OK. Em, have you any ... requirements? Age, shape, religion?

JP: No. As long as she is beautiful and believes in God, that’s fine.

Me: OK, I’ll see what I can do.

JP: I told my family I will be getting married this year, so email me soon – and send me a picture please!

Progress Report

2010-07-04T02:53:00.003+02:00

Three days into being back in Ireland and I thought to myself: 'This reintegration business is a piece of cake'. It is now six days and ... well, this is not going to be as simple as I thought it would be. Some things are good, some are not so good. I'm keeping a list which I will share with you in the near future. But here I am back in my house which has about thirty times more stuff in it than my house in Rwanda and it took me an hour to decide what to have for dinner tonight. I head to France next Wednesday for nine days - maybe that will give me time to get my head straight. (Alfred: That could have been a bit more upbeat - no mention of Guinness, free range chicken, driving a car again, hot showers ..... and I love the Greta Garbo tenor of the 'I need to be alone ... in France'. Anyway, you guys have been patient enough - I'll squeeze something out of him tomorrow.)

Back in the Emerald Isle

2010-06-28T13:26:00.002+02:00

Alfred: well, well, well and sure isn't it grand being back. Though in my case, I have spent virtually my entire furry life in Rwanda, so 'back' is a lot less applicable to me than it is to His Nibs. But we got here all in one piece, a little late leaving both Kigali and Brussels but nothing startling. I think he is working on a proper entry in Word but I thought you all might like to know that we actually got here safe and sound and so far all seems OK, though it is a lot cooler and showery here. Things not as expensive as I thought, which is more a reflection on how expensive Rwanda is than Dublin's being remarkably cheap! So a big thank you on Ruairí's behalf to all of you who phoned, wrote, emailed, Facebooked and so on - I'll TRY and make sure he does update soon, but you know what he's like ........

And so it ends ..... for now.

2010-06-25T12:37:00.002+02:00

In thirty one hours I will board Brussels Airways to Entebbe-Brussels and then on to Dublin. The last week or so have been really hectic so my apologies to all for the lack of communication. Much of my time has been taken up with the gorilla statue the district presented me with as a going-away present (see photo in previous blog entry) - eventually I had to DHL it at enormous expense (along with a bunch of other stuff). Now I have said goodbye to pretty much everyone, packed my things, given away the stuff I can't fit in (Alfred: Hmmm, tomorrow morning he does the final packing so I suspect there may be some more items being 'donated' to people whether they want them or not), am going this afternoon to collect my police clearance which they assured me would be signed and ready for collection by 1300 (Alfred: any comment here by me would be superfluous).

So, how am I feeling? Actually, OK to be honest. Earlier in the week and a lot of last week I was feeling a bit emotional and stressed but a lot of that was the hassle of packing and all the other arrangements that had to be made. Now that the decks are cleared, the baggage stowed and the sails ready to be raised (Alfred: Oh pleeeeeze! And nautical metaphors are so unRwandan!) I have time to sit back and think about things and what I am mostly thinking is how nice it is going to be to see people again. Email and Facebook are all very well - brilliant, actually, when you are living thousands of miles from almost everyone you know - but I am only now beginning to realise how much I have been missing people (Alfred: with any luck, some of them may even have reciprocated the feeling).

People keep on asking me what I will miss about Rwanda. It's a long list - avocados, moto rides, brochettes, the beer, accompanying people on the road home, wandering down the main street of Butare in my Chelsea shirt and being greeted as 'Joe Cole', the cheesy pop music videos (Alfred: he has loaded 3.7GB of Rwandan music and videos on his laptop so that one is OK), the tranquil calm atmosphere of Gisagara village and so on. But above all else I will miss my friends, both Rwandan and muzungu. My colleagues at work who were so supportive and friendly, the VSO Program Office staff and all the volunteers I have met, worked with and with whom I have become such close friends. Of course many of them have already left and, if I were to stay, they would all eventually leave as well but the time we have spent and worked together has been amazing.

And most of all I will miss my friend Enock, who I think of as a brother rather than a friend. Enock was the first friend I made in Gisagara - he translated for me, advised me, drank beers with me every week, was there every time I needed someone. Without him it is hard to imagine my time here would have been anything as positive and enjoyable as it turned out to be. Goodbye, my brother, until we meet again.

My Last Evening in Gisagara

2010-06-21T18:20:00.002+02:00

Just got back down to the village after spending the night in Butare. Went around Butare this morning saying goodbye to various people - Pascal and Chantal in the Africana Lodge, Hamed in the Casablanca internet cafe, the waiters in the Faucon, Olivier in the phone shop and so on. Now, here in Gisagara, for some strange reason everything looks the same way it was the first day I arrived - the landscape strange and exotic, the little shops strange and mysterious, the view from the back of my house fresher and even more beautiful than ever. The kids greet me with their usual cries of 'Good morning' and 'komera' and, if I am lucky, 'good evening'! I run into a bunch of men clambering down off the back of a lorry, obviously not from around here. Unlike the locals, they freeze, then stare and then start up the usual cries of ‘amafaranga, muzungu’. But that’s just like it was at the beginning too!

Even coming into my house seems a different experience. All my stuff is up in Kigali, I feel like I am staying over with a friend with that slightly intrusive feeling you always have when you let yourself into a friend’s house with their key and they aren’t there. And shortly I will head down to the bar to meet my moto driver Alexis and my best friend Enock – hopefully Sarah will join us later when she gets back from her workshop in Save – for my official goodbye. Strange days indeed.

Alfred's Leaving Do

2010-06-20T01:36:00.012+02:00

Alfred: As you may have noticed, whatisname has been too 'busy' reecently to write up the blog, so I decided to have a big going-away party with all my friends to cheer me up (I did invite Ruairí as otherwise there would have been no-one left for him to see that night). And we had a great time in Zaffran Indian Restaurant in Kiovu, Kigali: great company and awesome food (well, of course awesome food, that's why I picked Zaffran!). In fact, other than Kerry Carrington's constant efforts to sexually interfere with my person, it went off just about perfectly!!

Anyway, here are a few pics for now to give a flavour - more details to come. Also: Ruairí's ride home on the moto afterwards and what happened when they met the army patrol pickup, Ruairí's encounter with a drunken Rwandan in the Kisimenti branch of BCR, hilarious anecdotes from the Leavers' Conference and much much more if he ever bloody gets around to writing about it!!

Day 647 in Rwanda - eleven days left

2010-06-16T08:48:00.002+02:00

As Carol Bayer Sager once said (more tunefully than I could) 'You're moving out today.' Just finished packing and, while I will be back here on Monday night, it'll be more as a guest than a resident. I moved into this house 568 days ago and have beeen very happy here but, wow, I do seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff!!! Anyway, one way or the other, it is all packed in suitcases, boxes, rucksacks and backpacks and I am splashing out and taking a taxi from my house to Kigali as I just cannot bear the thought of lugging all this stuff onto and off buses (but a big 'Thank You' to Christine Mack for offering to help!!). All that remains here is to unplug and turn off the laptop and wait for the taxi driver. Mind you, there's a lot of work still to be done in the last eleven days!!! Will keep you posted!

CÉAD SLÁN LE RUANDA!

2010-06-12T13:46:00.007+02:00

OK, that’s a bit premature, I’m not quite saying ‘Slán’ yet but having had my first big official going way party it certainly has dawned on me that I am definitely leaving. (Alfred: Hmmm, ‘dawned’ – if one can compare sunrise to being hit on the back of the head with a cosh I suppose the idiom is reasonably accurate). Alfred has a point: sitting there beside the new swimming pool that President Kagame recently opened and looking at the 82 school directors for the District assembling to bid me farewell, it really did hit me for the first time that in two weeks I am heading off into the unknown.

Yep, the unknown, because that is what it really seems like. It is hard to cast one’s mind back accurately a whole two years but I definitely think I feel (Alfred: ‘definitely think’ – for goodness’ sake!) more nervous about returning to Ireland than I did about coming back to Rwanda in the first place. It would help if I didn’t actually like this place so much (Alfred: Duh? You think?) and if there weren’t so many people I am going to miss (Alfred:Yeah, but most of them are also VSO volunteers and they will be leaving eventually even if you stayed, so, same difference. Think of all the people you already miss who have headed home before you...). But, in the most commonly used French phrase in English ‘c’est la vie’.

The farewell ceremony went well apart from a rather dreadful speech by me. At the last directors’ meeting I had made a brief speech because it was the last time I would be attending such a meeting and I basically gave the same one all over again and only realised half way through. Ah well, nta kibazo, as we say here. Below are some photos and commentary in between.

The day started with going late to the office (an unofficial farewell at the bar the previous night turned into a four-Mutzig session and I wasn’t the best when I arose). Then, while there, I tried to find out if anyone knew exactly when or where the thing was going to take place. At 11:30 someone came in and handed me the following (really sweet) invitation:

INVITATION
GISAGARA DISTRICT EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

Due to his contribution in the quality of Education promotion, Educators in GISAGARA District wish to invite you in the party celebrations prepared for “Good Bye & Providence” Allowed to “Mr RUIRI”.

The party will he held at 11th June 02pm in GSO BUTARE (piscine) at Huye District.

Your Presence will be highly appreciated

Two o’clock?? And being held in a swimming-pool? There is only one bus an hour from the village so I would need to be on the 1300 one to be on time. So rushed home to change, grab overnight thingies and head for the bus. As it happened the 1200 bus was so late I got it at 1235 into Butare and had plenty of time to go to the Ineza and find a room (Alfred: Number 8 of course – see all blog entries for September, October and part of November 2008 if you don’t know why Room 8 is significant) and then get a moto to the new swimming pool near Groupe Scolaire Butare.

I had never been there before and it is really nice but, despite the invitation saying the event would be held in the swimming pool, it was in the garden with lots of little tables and big umbrellas against the scorching sun. And it was great! All the directors were there, some more punctually than others. We had beer, some speeches, then food and more beer, and then more speeches, then my (forgettable) speech, then presents being ... presented, then a final beer while most scattered to their homes. There were all the schoold directors there, some sector officials and both my bosses – Alexis the District Education Officer and Sukuma Simeon who is the Co-ordinator of social affairs.

Then it was off to the Faucon to watch Uruguay – France (via some beef burritos in Matar), more beer, hoping Uruguay would score so I could leap around and cheer and annoy all the Rwandans who were furiously shouting for the French as if they were still best friends (Alfred: Actually, consciously or subconsciously, Ruairí was hoping someone would come over and ask him WHY he was cheering for Uruguay so he would get the chance to do the whole Thierry Henry whining thing again. Get over it!!). And then to bed!!

The setting - nice and peaceful. The swimming pool is behind the hedge at the back. And me sitting beside Bigira Alexis, District Education Officer and my boss

Beer is good; beer with chicken and roast potatoes, awesome! And it was good chicken too. There must have been almost 100 people there and everyone got half a chicken - what did that cost??

Sukuma Simeon, the Social Affairs Co-ordinator, my presents waiting for me, and me with my friend Antoine, the Gisagara District Labour Inspector and someone I am going to miss a lot.

The hat was one of my many presents: this is Alexis modelling it and on the right, Aimable, the Director of Mugombwa Groupe Scolaire

Me speechifying - enough said.

Coolest shirt at the party, and me receiving my presents.

Alfred: OK, he's not getting away with this. One of the two boxes showed a kettle and tea-pot on the outside and Ruairí spent ages telling everyone how well-timed it was because his kettle had burned out that very morning. Everyone laughed and then Ruairí said he would just open the other box, which had the gorilla in it. It was only much later that Enock pointed out to Ruairí that the other box probably did not contain a kettle and teapot but was merely being used to transport other items he had been bought (.i. see photos below). This meant that by the time he actually opened the box, most people had left. Igicucu!)

Me holding gorilla aloft; later, at home, all the presents laid out (bar the hat which I left in town and will collect tomorrow): gorilla, minature drum in frame with 'Thank You' message, table mats, bamboo decorative hanging and banana-leaf football.

Close-up of gorilla: the box in the shape of Africa is mounted on his ... well, arse to be blunt. Then you remove the lid and it is a box to hold things in. BUT - and this is the awesome bit - when you remove the rest of Africa, the East African Community countries DO NOT MOVE! Love it!

GITFEST 2010!!!!!

2010-06-06T16:45:00.008+02:00

And so Gitfest has rolled around again! If I needed a reminder of how long I have been here, it is the fact that I was attending Rwanda’s only pop festival-themed party for the second time. And what a party it was too, as you can see from the pictures below. Everyone was supposed to come as something to do with a festival – performer, security, roadie, whatever. (Alfred: there are no pics of Ruairí here but he wore the same as last year so just check out the blog entry for Gifest 2009 or else his Facebook page! No imagination.....And he forgot his sandals and went around barefoot rather than wear his runners, which gave him the opportunity to whinge about how cold his feet were all the time). Karen, Ken and April did an amazing job of organizing and preparing everything, including laying on all the food and drink for a measly RWF1500 a head (€2). And a great night was had by all – high point probably being Ken Goodwin’s rendition of ‘I Got Hammered in Huye’ (Alfred: not to mention his costume) – while the availability of vodka, gin, dark and light rum, banana liqueur and various other beverages, plus every fruit juice under the sun, led to the creation of some pretty special cocktails (Alfred: those who took the precaution of getting Nathan to prepare their drinks came off best: some of the mixtures ... well, let’s just say that ‘Christmas in a Cup’ is unlikely to feature on many cocktail bar menus in the future – check with party animal Ms Wragg if further clarification is required). Having not got to bed until 0400 the previous night, I was feeling a little fragile the next morning and unable to join our hostess April for her early morning calisthenics and jogging.

(Alfred: please note that - due to the fact that after almost two years, Ruairí STILL hasn't figured out how this uploader works - the pictures are in reverse chronological order. For the proper effect, you might like to scroll down to the bottom and work up. Or not. Doesn't really matter)

April and Nathan; Leonie, Christine and April

Sing-song in progress (Paula, Vanessa and Dorothy in foreground, Paul and Stephen in armchairs); Tom having a flashback and wondering where his beard has gone - see pics from Gitfest 2009 for comparison

Christi (Alfred: Hmm, are you sure she spells it that way) and Tom; general sing-song group.

Ana singing 'La Bamba'; Jeremy, guitarist extraordinaire

General sing-song group again; Kelti and Paul

Audience for (on right) Ken Goodwin's rendering of 'I was Hammered in Huye' with backing vocals from April and Karen and accompanied by Jeremy

The VIPs!!!! Amy, Christine and Anna; early on outside before it got COLD - Amy, Anna, Kelti, Sarah and Kerrie

Christine and Anna; Nic (costume of the day, specially made for the occasion), Ken and Jeremy)

Melanie and Karen dressed as portaloos (Alfred: makes a change from Mel's previous incarnation as 'Phlegmgirl'); April

Ana and Paul; Nathan

Gorillas in the ... well, mist, actually.

2010-05-30T21:24:00.009+02:00

So I finally went to see the gorillas. I had been debating this with myself for a long time – I had no burning desire to go but at the same time it is what Rwanda is best known for (in a positive sense, anyway). In the end, it was Karen and Melanie sending around an email wondering if anyone else wanted to accompany them that finally got me going.

We headed up to Musanze on Friday (I thought we would continue on to Ruhengeri where the ORTPN – Rwandan tourist centre – is located, until Melanie or Karen gently informed me that Musanze IS Ruhengeri, yet another of the confusing name changes of recent years – c.f. Rusizi/Cyangugu, Gitarama/Muhanga, Gikongoro/Nyamagabe, Butare/Huye and many, many more). We stayed in the Bamboo Inn, whose rooms were amazingly good value at RWF6000 per night for one, RWF10,000 for two but everything else was pretty much to be avoided (Alfred: When Ruairí was sorting out the drinks bill the first night, the two fair maidens having taken to their beds as a sensible hour, he was a bit shocked to be told a Mutzig was RWF1500, which is what you would pay in a pretty fancy bar in Kigali. Apollinaire’s (the manager) response – ‘Mais oui, monsieur, nous sommes un hôtel’ – really tested Ruairí’s powers of self-restraint to the maximum). Good cheap place to stay for seeing the gorillas but go elsewhere for your food and drink.

Anyway, our driver picked us up the next day and off we headed. It was all pretty straightforward – up to the centre, form into groups of eight and we were going to see group 13, one of the middle-distance groups so a reasonable walk but not too far. Our groups was composed of one Swede, one Brazilian, one Uruguayan, two South Africans, one Englishwoman and two Irish – pretty eclectic all told. Melanie did ask me if I had brought Alfred along as well but I explained that he didn’t do family reunions very well (Alfred: Huh? It’s not like I’m not used to not being brought along on anything interesting that is going on ... but what the hell does he mean by ‘family’? I’m a BEAR!! You gotta go pretty far back the evolutionary tree before that becomes true, way way beyond where Ruairí was sitting in a marshy clearing picking his fur clean, scratching his hairy behind and munching on bamboo shoots!)

Anyway, long story short, we drove a short way and then walked a surprisingly short way again until we got to the group. We spent most of our time watching the silverback and the babies/juveniles who were together – the females were off feeding individually apart from one who was nearby with a baby on her back and all the little ones had been left with the silverback (whose name is Agashya, though I am not sure he is aware of this fact himself). Other juveniles, slightly bigger, were playing in the vines hanging down the cliff-face behind the group.

We had been told to stay seven metres away from the gorillas at all times but, what with them wandering around and, I think, once the guides could see they were settled and calm, we ended up a lot closer than that quite a lot of the time!!

Anyway, you can see the photos below. It was a great experience but, hand on heart, I can’t say it completely blew my mind the way so many other people had told me it did. I am absolutely glad I did it (even if the entire experience – park fee, driver, travel and accommodation – came to over $300 or one month’s allowance) but ... I don’t know, thought it would be a little more magical somehow (Alfred: Can’t say I am surprised – look back at the very early blog entries in late 2008 to see how early on Ruairí manages, with a flick of his baguette magique, to turn the magical into the mundane. I mean, look at the photos for goodness’ sake – how much more bloody magical can you get!! OK, I admit the photos aren’t exactly professional standard – trying to be kind here and it WAS very overcast to be fair – but you can still see how amazing the experience SHOULD have been!)

I thought time was a constant - how come it seems to be running faster all of a sudden??

2010-05-27T19:02:00.002+02:00

Oh boy - lost another day today when I had to attend the local secondary school's annual celebration of their patron saint St Philippe Neri. A lovely day, some great photos, some of which I will get posted soon-ish (Alfred: you gotta see the acrobatic team's attempt to dive through a burning hoop - awesome!), interesting food and so on. But that's another round of meetings cancelled until next week and I only have nine working days left before I am supposed to officially finish. Have a nasty feeling June 14th is not going to be my last working day after all!!

But got to see one of my favourite people in the world last night - Jane Keenan, former VSO volunteer who lived in Butare when I arrived and was basically my guardian angel during the first few difficult months. She is in the middle of the selection process to become an Army nurse in England, which was fascinating in itself! Jean, her boyfriend, was also there for a bit which was also great as I haven't seen him in ages.

I managed to get my June article for COMHAR sent off just about in time (I hope)- I may translate this one for the blog: it was about the meanings of the names for the different months in Kinyarwanda (Alfred: my favourite is 'the month of the burned lion', closely followed by 'the month that hates old cows' and 'the month of nakedness'). Those of you with Irish can read my articles on my other blog http://www.agashinguracumu.blogspot.com/ - the June one will not be posted until the magazine is published.

What else? Anyone out there know how to teach basic data analysis (exam results etc) to a group of people when some of them do not understand what an average is?

Monday 24th May - so sorry!

2010-05-24T23:19:00.004+02:00

I went to my local bar tonight with my best friend Enock (new local - it just opened two weeks ago but is much nearer my house than the othe 'local' bar). We are sitting there sipping our bottles of Mutzig when this guy walks up to the table and introduces himself. Jean-Pierre, works at the local Caisse Sociale office. This happens often enough. Then he says: 'You haven't updated your blog in AGES! What is the problem? Can't Alfred even get to a computer in the last three weeks?'

Oh boy. I knew an occasional colleague at work looked at the blog from time to time but here is a guy who has nothing to do with me and not only does he read the blog, he actually seems to get the whole Alfred thing as well. (Alfred: Hmmm - trying to figure out how I should interpret that last remark. Am I in the the process of being ditched? Denying the existence of something, Ruairí, doesn't mean it automatically doesn't exist. c.f. God and Dawkins)

Anyway, it has been an insane last three weeks and so much has happened I won't even try to cover it all. The visit to the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in Bugesera was probably the highpoint - a project funded by an American Jewish charity, housing and educating 250 Rwandan orphans and 500 by 2012. Also a great visit to Nyakirambi/Rusumo in the extreme south-east (the policeman let us cross the border and get our photos in Tanzania!!), and wierd and wonderful stuff at work. I hope I will get time to write about at least some of all this but, seriously, work is SO bloody intense at the moment!!! And today (Monday) I arrived at work to be told that all my appointments for the week had to be cancelled because the government was doing a major inspection of the district. Not great at the best of times but when you only have three working weeks left .....!

Anyway, at the moment I am trying to hold 13 sector meetings (the district I am assigned to has 13 sectors) with the school directors and the Social Affairs officer (responsible for education) to draw up a list of aims and objectives for the coming 12-18 months (Alfred: total number of sectors covered as of today - four) plus run three training sessions on data analysis for school directors and Social Affairs Officers (responsible for ... Alfred: you already said that) and all before Monday 14th June which is (Alfred: supposed to be) my last day at work. Even if Alfred was on my side it is going to be a tough call. (Alfred: Of COURSE I am on your side!! How could I not be given the ... circumstances. But at least one of us has to be the voice of realism and practicality!).

Anyway, home is looming. 'Looming' is not a particularly positive verb but it fits here. There are loads of things (Alfred: and people, don't forget the people also) yes, and people I am really looking forward to seeing again, but you do get used to and settled in a place and I really have loved it here so it is not going to be easy leaving here for ANYWHERE! The only thing that makes it bearable is what Alfred said - the people. My family, my friends, my Martine and my students. I have missed few things about Ireland to be honest (Alfred: Hmm ... given what has been happening here the last while, few would argue with you) but my students in Rathdown ...... going to be seriously great to see you guys again!

Anyway, if I get a free space you faithful readers will get a proper update. If not, you may have to wait a while. To finish I will say congratulations to Nic and Amy for their performance in the Kigali half-marathon (Amy was running on behalf of this really good Rwanda charity - here is the link if you would like to support, http://www.justgiving.com/peacemarathon she is SO near the target!!!), thanks to Sonya for a wonderful weekend in Nyakirambi, thanks to the Rwandan security authorities for dealing with the situation at the APR - TE Mazembe match http://www.nation.co.ke/sports/football/DRC%20players%20arrested%20as%20club%20expelled/-/1102/924322/-/wckk45z/-/index.html soccer match, thanks to ... well, everybody, really. As Frank Sinatra said:

So now
The end is near
And so I face
The final curtain

But I have SO much to do: gorillas next weekend with Karen and Mel/Morena/Jorge (Alfred: Don't ask but that is only two people he is talking about), GITFEST the following weekend (see pics on my Facebook page from last year but this year starring the incomparable April Lyons!!), then farewell party in Butare on 12th and farewell party on 19th in Kigali, then flight home on 26th!! WHERE HAS ALL THE TIME GONE?!!! I'm not joking guys - where did it go??????

Momentum flagging

2010-05-03T22:46:00.003+02:00

It has been over two weeks since the last update - apologies. I don't know whether it is the fact that I am leaving soon, or the sequence of genocide memorial ceremonies I have been attending or the fact that work has come to a grinding halt (largely due to the previous factor) or ..... anyway, that's just the way it is! There have been a lot of interesting things happening (as Alfred mentioned in the last entry) and I will get around to them, I promise! One of the best was this amazing party my friend John Harris threw in his house in Gikongoro, so here are a few pictures of the event just to fill up some space!!!

Today at work I realised I have exactly six weeks left until my last day in the District Office. Unbelievable. Where have the last 20 months gone?

(Alfred: yadda, yadda, yadda. Meanwhile, to add to the list of catching up - great party in Gikongoro, three more genocide memorial ceremonies, visit to Cyangugu, watching Chelsea beat Liverpool (bloody Steven Gerrard!!), absent friends, volcanos, Nick Clegg (who is amazingly with Rwandans!), insane bus journeys, feeling lovesick,

In the meanwhile ....

2010-04-18T14:07:00.001+02:00

Alfred: Well, after his last entry, Ruairí seems to be finding it difficult to restart his more usual, light-hearted and what he considers to be humourous entries (isn’t there a proper English equivalent for ‘quotidienne’?). So I guess it’s up to me to get the ball rolling again with a more general update. Since Genocide Memorial Day he has been at work, then down to Bujumbura for the weekend (that definitely needs an entry all to itself, if only to describe the night-club and the astonishing, unbelievable fact that Ruairí actually wore togs and got into a swimming pool – amazing what can happen when two stunningly beautiful girls in bikinis are in there calling you, eh?), then up to Kigali to do In-Country Training for the new volunteers. Meanwhile we have volunteers stuck abroad waiting to return and family visiting here who can’t get home because some Icelandic volcano farted and apparently planes have a very sensitive sense of smell. Makes you wonder what the Icelanders will do next to mess us around!

Genocide Memorial Day

2010-04-07T22:48:00.001+02:00

This is a long one, but do read it through!

The usual confusion attended the preparations for today – yesterday at work I was asking where was everyone going or which ceremony would they be attending and no-one seemed sure. So I figured I would either be told where to go or I would go to the local one in my sector. One of my good friends at work, Sylver Chris, was going to the ceremony at Kabuye where I had been last year and there was one outside my local church where 2,500 people were massacred and are buried in a mass grave opposite the church’s main door. This last would have been the most local and where the people I live amidst would mostly be going but I have to admit I was a bit nervous of being there with no-one I knew well (all the friends I have made are work colleagues and they virtually all live in Butare, not the village).

Anyway, I heard that the official District ceremony was being held in Save sector beside a lake. The government had announced that all official District ceremonies were to commemorate those killed and dumped into lakes and rivers, many of whose bodies were never found. I rang my faithful moto driver Alexis – he hadn’t been going to work that day but agreed to take me in to Butare to meet my colleagues if we could go really early in the morning: he said he’d pick me up at 0640. I felt a bit bad as he obviously wasn’t comfortable about working on that day but …

Today morning I woke up even before my 0520 alarm went off – NOT a day to be late! I boiled TWO kettles to have a thorough hot shower and had a big breakfast – you never know at the best of times when you will get a chance to eat again and today promised to be even more unpredictable than usual. It was an absolutely stunningly beautiful morning, clear already at 0600, all the peaks visible as far away to the north as Nyanza but all the valleys in between them still swimming in mist. At 0615 Alexis rang to see if I was ready. Panic – I had one sock on and my dressing gown! Luckily, he was just leaving his house and wanted to be sure I was going to be ready for him!

Threw on my suit (dry-cleaned the previous weekend in Kigali, then stuffed into my rucksack and then hung up here hoping the creases would fall out) and put my tie in my pocket – Rwandans really dress up for these occasions and you do not want to be seen to be showing disrespect. Threw an umbrella, poncho, Palm Pilot (reading material) and notebook into my small backpack and wandered outside to wait for Alexis.

It was still only 0630 and everything was really quiet – which is not usual, things kick off here around 0530 and by 0630 the street would be quite busy. I stood among the coffee bushes beside our house looking again at that beautiful view, the mist now burning away and the mountain peaks becoming clearer. The only people about were an elderly man who came wandering up through the coffee bushes from the valley below and greeted me with the usual ‘Amahoro’ that older people use in preference to ‘Muraho’ or ‘Mwaramutse’ (‘Amahoro’ means ‘peace’). Up the road one of my elderly neighbours was sweeping the area in front of the house and waved to me. I wondered what they were thinking – the older people here in this area were almost all living here during the genocide and some of them came here as refugees from Burundi in 1972 when 200,000 – 300,000 Hutus were killed following an attempted coup against the Tutsi government there.

A little further up the road, a dog was playing with her puppy in the middle of the road. Dogs are common in my village and I rarely notice them anymore, though my visitors always remark on them – elsewhere in Rwanda, dogs are scarce and distrusted. Virtually every dog in the country was killed after the Genocide as they were feeding on the dead bodies and people feared they had developed a taste for human flesh. But this morning, with memories of all I had read and seen running through my head (and, to be frank, feeling more than a little nervous about what lay ahead), they didn’t seem as playful and innocent as usual.

Alexis turned up at 0640 on the dot and, apart from one or two pleasantries at the beginning, was silent throughout the trip. However, as I paid him, he told me to be sure to ring him if I found myself stranded in Butare after the ceremony, there being no public transport today and few or no moto drivers working.

So, here I was in Butare at 0700. I wandered up the town and ran into my chargé, Alexis, and two other co-workers. A few places were still open and buses running but everything was due to shut down completely at 0800, which it did. And so we stood around, silently, no-one knowing exactly how we were supposed to get to the site. I glanced through a copy of the Guardian Weekly and wandered up and down the pavement, too wound up to sit down in the bus office like the rest. Then I heard shouting in the distance. Further up the road, near the Matar Supermarket, a thin middle-aged man, barefoot and in ragged, filthy clothes, was shouting incoherently at no-one, stopping after every three or four minutes to catch his breath before launching into another passionate diatribe against whatever. I wasn’t the only one feeling nervous about him, as I could see from the faces and demeanour of other passers-by but he stayed up the far end of the street.

Around 0830 a bus appeared and we got on. And sat there. As we sat, I noticed over the roof of the Hotel Faucon, where I had been standing, a massive black cloud had appeared and was bearing down on us quite quickly. Within two minutes, we were in the middle of a torrential downpour, it was dark and a river was pouring down the main street, while the few people caught in the open scattered under awnings and doorways. One bicycle shot down the main street, a man pedalling frantically and swerving madly, his little son hanging onto the back for dear life and laughing hysterically! Away to the north, where we were headed, the clouds were wispier but I could see their beefier, angry cousins muscling up behind them. Not a good omen.

And so we sit there, the rain hammering on the roof like a machine-gun, most of us wearing our purple scarves (symbol of commemorating the genocide) and arguing as to whether we should head off or wait longer. I’ve now been in Butare two hours and have succeeded in boarding a stationary bus. It is a measure, it occurs to me, of how well I have acclimatized to Rwanda that this doesn’t really bother me at all, even knowing it may be another two hours before we actually ever get anywhere.

Half an hour later we are parked in a different part of town where some other district workers may be coming to join us. And eventually they do and we actually set off for the site at 0950! It is very near Butare but accessible by a small muddy track on which a bus has got stuck while trying to come up. Our driver gets out with a real no-nonsense expression on his face and, within two minutes, the unfortunate driver of the other vehicle is reversing all the way back down while our guy drives down within about three feet of the other car’s front bumper! Eventually we pass him and drive/slide the rest of the way down with a sheer drop on our right hand side. Certainly took my mind off the other things that were worrying me!

So, here we are. Now what? Well, apparently the large tent that had been set up that morning was in the wrong place, too far from the room that would be used for those who needed medical attention during the day. So about thirty men picked the whole thing up bodily and intact and marched it about 100 metres and re-erected it. Quite impressive actually. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how to put my triangle of purple material around my neck – it seemed a lot smaller than everyone else’s and I have a large neck! Managed it eventually but was convinced I looked stupid (I did try to take some pics of myself with my phone and then prayed that I didn’t actually look like that). There were still surprisingly few people around, a fact that worried the colleagues with me, but there were three other abazungu that I had never seen before (turned out later that two of them were trauma counsellors, never found out who the third one was).

By about 1100 people began to stream in. The town of Save is over the hill from the lake and a procession of people ran along each of them, many of them carrying brightly coloured umbrellas against the blazing sun (yes, blazing sun – that’s Rwanda for you; by now it was stiflingly hot), four multicoloured snakes slowly winding their way towards us. Police took up positions beside the lake to intercept anyone who might try and throw themselves in, including one tiny little policewoman carrying an enormous automatic rifle, the only armed police officer I could see.

As we waited, Alexis told me more about what had happened here. The lake (‘reservoir’ would be a better word) had been created years before the genocide by a missionary (called ‘Disha’ I think) to irrigate the nearby rice fields. In 1994, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women and children were herded here and killed. Most of them were tied up or tied to each other and then thrown into the water. Others were held while their children were tied together and thrown in and then allowed to jump in after them and try to save them. The few who crawled out were butchered and their bodies thrown back in. Unlike other massacres, such as at Kabuye, there were no known survivors others than those that had managed to escape on the way: in other cases, where people were hacked or bludgeoned to death, some survived because they were not actually dead or were simply buried so far under the bodies they were missed. But it’s quite a big lake, there was plenty of space for everyone to drown.

Later, some bodies were recovered but, given the nature of the chaos and the length of time it took for recovery efforts to start, many of the bodies had sunk to the bottom of the lake and were never recovered. There is always talk of draining the entire lake and recovering the remains but it would be a mammoth task and no-one seems to believe it will ever happen. I spoke to one woman who was introduced to me as the head of an organisation called (I think) ‘Les Escapes’, representing those who had lost their families or their parents in this massacre – her husband and all her children are somewhere at the bottom of this lake.

When the procession arrived (all four snakes having amalgamated into one giant snake) singing a hymn, we all stood and then the actual ceremony began. First there was a throwing of bunches of flowers and flower petals into the lake which, I was slowly beginning to realise, was one huge tomb. The Executive Secretary, Eugène, beckoned me over and told me I was to take part in this too. As I went over to the lakeside, a small, pretty but blank-faced girl in a traditional Rwandan outfit held out a peace-basket full of wonderfully-scented flower petals. It smelled just like a woman’s perfume and, after I had sprinkled them over the lake and was walking back to my seat, I could still smell the perfume on my hand as if I had just caressed someone’s cheek.

Last year I attended the ceremony at Kabuye where 40,000 perished in appalling circumstances but, for some reason the underground mass tomb on the hillside didn’t have a huge effect on me. Looking at the beautiful lake, lying between the sweeping hills on a beautiful sunny day, sitting with my friends and colleagues, smelling the faint traces of perfume on my hand, looking at the crowd of men, women and children gathered round me and realising just what lay below the surface of the calm, green waters – it was the first time I really felt the full horror of it all. For a while, every woman or child I looked at I could see tied up, ready to be tossed or rolled into the lake’s waters until the entire surface became covered in struggling or still bodies.

And then the screaming started. The first speaker was a young man, the only survivor of his family. He told (I think as it wasn’t the kind of account that Alexis could translate literally) of how he watched from a hiding place as the rest of his family were tied up and thrown in, and he named those who he saw doing it. As he was halfway through, a woman on my right started screaming and threw herself on the ground – this is a common occurrence at these ceremonies – and was carried by four people over to the nearby tin hut that had been set up especially for people needing attention. As I looked around, I realised that it wasn’t just me that was feeling jittery: so were a large proportion of the people around me. I figured they would be used to this kind of thing by now, but I realised that inside everyone around me the same feelings of loss, hurt, anger and grief were struggling to get out and were barely being kept under control. And, of course, for years upon years, this ceremony had been held at Kabuye, in a relatively familiar setting with a proper grave and with a strong religious component. Here, there was no escaping the raw immediacy of what lay in front of you and, for the first time, I noticed how many people in the crowd had contrived to sit so that they weren’t looking directly at the lake.

Over on my left, one of my colleagues from work (one of only three survivors of his family) was wiping tears from his eyes with his purple neck-scarf. In front of me a nun was sitting, plump, aged about thirty-five, blue habit and white head-dress. Her fists were clenched hard, the nails biting so hard into her palms I expected to see blood running down. Every few minutes she would jerk her head up as if she were going to scream and then, with an effort of will so strong you could actually feel it, she would force her feelings, and her head, back down. On each side of her, her sisters kept an eye as unobtrusively as possible, ready to jump in and help, or else try and stop her in case she bring embarrassment on the order by a public show of grief.

All through the ceremony, a steady stream of people are carried to the hut, some sobbing quietly, some screaming, some stupefied or unconscious. Being a tin hut, the screams of those who continue after they have been brought in reverberate, sometimes almost drowning out the voices of those speaking outside. Strangely, when we stand for a minute’s silence at midday, they fall quiet, only some quiet sobbing and one woman talking to herself breaking the silence.

Then we switch over to a radio broadcast – it is supposed to be the president but the radio, or whatever, like everything else in Rwanda, is running late. We are treated to a choir, a folk group and various other strange musical offerings, none of which sound particularly Rwandan and all of them delivered through a poorly-tuned radio placed next to a defective microphone hooked up to an antiquated speaker system set at ultra-loud. People were getting bored now, checking on their mobile phones, trying to fight off sleep (as I was myself, it was incredibly hot). And then I heard the most appalling noise, far different from the screams earlier – like someone’s throat being ripped out, a howl of sheer and utter desperation that didn’t sound even remotely human. Everyone froze and, as I looked around, I could see a wave of that same unspeakable sorrow wash over everyone around me, a mini-tsunami of anguish and pain. Some people winced, some wept, some jumped to their feet, some buried their faces in their hands, others just looked grim and sat there impassively. The inhuman screams continue, without a break, fading gradually as the woman is carried away, not to the recovery hut but towards the main road as someone has already called an ambulance.

The master of ceremonies had had the presence of mind to switch off the radio when this happened; now he switched it back on but realised we were still quite a way off the president’s speech, so decided it was time for the ‘religious bit’. This turned out to be two quite brief prayers (well, brief by Rwandan standards) – one by an elderly pastor, delivered with verve and gusto and much waving of a battered black bible, the other by a Catholic priest which was a succession of prayers with a sung response which was rather nice and helped to calm down the atmosphere.

The it was back to the radio – apparently the President’s speech was near but we had some more music, ballads about the genocide which I can only describe as a Rwandan version of a cross between Clannad and Enya. Through this all, more women being carried through, wailing and screaming, a few emerging later, drained, subdued, often embarrassed. A woman in the front of the crowd directly opposite me suddenly collapsed, moaning and thrashing her arms about. I noticed how efficiently the people around her dealt with her – one woman wrapped a loose piece of material around the lower parts of her legs so she would not be exposed while being carried while two men gripped her arms, pinned them to her body and lifted her off the ground. As they did so a fourth woman quickly removed her shoes so they wouldn’t fall off and be lost, then turned around to pick up the woman’s other possessions and followed her into the hut.

And then it was time for the President’s speech, a large part of which was in English, to my surprise. It was a good speech – Alexis translated the Kinyarwanda parts virtually verbatim (and I have to stop here and say how impressed I am by Alexis’ English, which was virtually non-existent when I came and now he is doing simultaneous translation from Kinyarwandan into comprehensible English - outstanding!) and it was good stuff, typical Kagame. He spoke of remembrance and of forgiveness…. For those that wanted to be forgiven. He spoke of being ready to co-operate and work with those who wanted to help, but if anyone wanted a fight, the Rwandans would give them a fight they would never forget. “We use our anger to give us the strength to build our future, to build the Rwanda our people deserve.” Some fairly blunt comments about criticisms of freedom of speech and a few shots at the putative opposition presidential candidate, Victoire Ingabire. Finished with a phrase that had me thinking – ‘my commitment to Rwanda is a life-long one’.

And that was it. I went down to the edge of the lake for a last look, standing among the eight girls in the traditional costumes, each of them (I now knew) a survivor of a family most of whom had died here. There is something deeply upsetting about a beautiful setting where something terrible has happened – you look at the calm water, with ripples where fish are moving about, the wooded shores, the steep terraced hillsides covered in yellow flowers, sorghum, avocado trees and winding red paths and to your right the long valley of rice fields stretching into the distance until the valley curves to the right and vanishes. And you try and imagine what it was like on that evening in April sixteen years ago, and equally hard try not to imagine it.

And now it is 2236 and I am sitting at my laptop trying to put this into words and I am crying, crying for the first time that I can remember in I don’t know how long. And I am crying because for the first time I could feel, feel within me the hurt and loss and pain and anguish of my friends, the people I have come to know and love since I came here.

And I am crying because I still don’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand what happened here, no more than the Rwandans themselves understand.

And I am crying because I can still see the blank expression in that girl’s eyes when she handed me the flowers to throw on her family’s grave.

And most of all I am crying because I can still smell the perfume on my hand. And I don’t know why that makes me cry, but it does.

Massive March/April blog update Part One

2010-04-05T22:00:00.004+02:00

It is now April 6th and I haven’t written a blog of any serious sort since March 16th!! Sorry all round but it does mean you are in for a bit of a marathon this time round! Feel free to skim (Alfred: Emm, I don’t think they need, or have ever needed your permission for that). Oh, and I can’t absolutely vouch for the chronological order of events at this stage – I know various things happened at weekends, but not exactly which weekends they were!

‘L’ and ‘R’
I wrote on Facebook recently about this. I visited a Science class a few weeks ago and written on the board was the following that the class were busily (Alfred: ‘busily’ is a bit of an exaggeration) writing down as part of their module on human reproduction: ‘Every man has two testicules shaped like uggs ….. The penis must be elected before intercourse can take place.’ My cousin in the USA said this latter must be a Bill Clinton reference. It reminded me of another incident involving the same confusion of ‘R’ and ‘L’ when a VSO staff member was informed by the students that they couldn’t come to school the next day because they all had erections.

St Patrick's Day in Gisagara
No St Patrick’s Day is complete without a drink so I met up with Enock and Claude in Vestine’s bar (which now has a fridge! Cold beer!). Poor Enock was wrecked so we only had the one drink. I did manage to ring most of my family to wish them a happy Paddy’s Day which was great! I also tried to explain to my friend and other customers the significance of St Patrick’s Day. I tried to explain about the snakes but that caused enormous confusion (Alfred: Might have helped if you told them Ireland was an island). However, I was wearing my Shamrock Rovers shirt so I told them about how he used the shamrock to explain the Trinity – that they got immediately and liked the idea very much!! (Alfred: sad to relate, Vestine’s has now disconnected the fridge – it was using too much electricity for the amount of cold beer they were selling)

St Patrick’s Day in Kigali
I headed up to Kigali on Thursday afternoon – was going to go after work but we had another of these power cuts and there was nothing to do so I bailed out early. Stayed with Sonya and Paula in their lovely (but probably temporary) new residence – their employer hasn’t got around to finding them a house yet so he has put them in one of the two he owns himself. Friday we headed in to the Serena Hotel to start setting up for the party. We had been a bit worried about ticket sales but sold 390 of the 400 in the end and raised all the money we had hoped for and more for the Kibagabaga Hospital Nutrition Education Project which gives advice to the mothers of HIV/AIDs-positive children on the best diet within their limited resources (Alfred: and a huge 'Thank You' again to the four friends who sponsored tickets for the Ball!!)

It was a great night, though not IMHO up to last year’s. But the Serena certainly had their act together better than last year, though their decision to move some of the seats around and set up an extra table came as a bit of a shock when Pamela had completed the extremely elaborate seating plan! There was also some weird business with the wine which poor Paul Stewart got to sort out with the management!! But it was a great night. My main contribution was to dress up in a leprechaun outfit and behave like a lunatic on the dance floor. Nic had also put on a red beard and giant green hat so it was like twins being reunited!

However, just like last year, as soon as the Irish music started the Rwandans pretty much all left. Another slight problem was that, unlike last year, the band didn’t adapt their set to where they were, so there were a lot of ballads when people actually wanted to dance which led to rather amusing sequences of people swaying like kelp in a current to ‘The Fields of Athenry’ or whatever.

So we actually wrapped up earlier than expected and a bunch of us headed to KBC night club. Various people begged me to go in my leprechaun outfit but I politely declined (Alfred: just to explain – there are photos out there somewhere of Ruairí in this outfit and he assures me he has been doing his best to track them down and destroy, sorry ... get copies of them to post here. There is even a video clip that Steve Vaid has on his phone – now THAT is really worth seeing!). But it wasn’t very interesting to be honest and we headed off pretty soon. John Harris did stay behind however – I think he eventually got to bed at seven! I also managed to lose my wallet at KBC but luckily and for no reason I can think of, when I was leaving Paula & Sonya’s house I decided to take absolutely everything out of it – credit card, business cards, ID and so on – only leaving a relatively small amount of money in it, so no real loss there.

So, home to bed … well, not exactly. We got to the house and remembered that someone had to ring Amy at 0500 – she had been at the Ball and had gone home earlier because she had to be up by 0500 to catch a bus to Kampala or Nairobi or somewhere, so someone had to remain awake until then to ring her, and I was volunteered. So bed at last at 0502.

Saturday Morning, Afternoon and Evening
At 0900 my phone rings – it’s Jörg from the Dutch NGO, SNV, asking if I was still OK for breakfast at 1100! I had forgotten about this. I drag myself out of bed, shower, breakfast and then wander off down the road to meet him as he comes to fetch me. He has the most amazing house, next door to Jane Baxter, the Deputy British Ambassador (Alfred: No, no, no – Deputy High Commissioner. Rwanda is in the Commonwealth now! Wonder how much it cost to change all the headed notepaper …..), really beautifully designed and with fabulous furniture. Another VSO volunteer, Dorothy, had met Jörg in Kibungo in the south-east and he had mentioned he was going to be working in my district next so she said we should meet. He had visited my district and met with my chargé, Alexis, the previous week (Alexis had told me someone from MINEDUC had been to see him so I thought nothing of it). While there he had seen my statistical analysis of the examination results and, this being one of his areas, was intrigued.

Anyway, we had an amazing breakfast, almost Central European style, cold meats, cheese and so on – his Rwandan wife, Gaudence, cures her own pork! – and chatted away. Then Dorothy said she needed to head for the bus soon. So Jörg goes into the house (this is around 1230) and comes back with …. a bottle of Chivas Regal and three glasses so we can toast our new friendship. Sweet Lord. Anyway, I figured a) I had never tasted Chivas Regal and b) it was a good opportunity to put the ‘hair of the dog’ theory to the test. And I don’t know whether it is the excellence of the Chivas Regal or the validity of the theory but two glasses of that had me feeling pretty chipper all over again!!

I agreed to come over Sunday with all my data so we could have a proper business meeting and then headed for Nyarutarama – my friends Graham and Sarah McFadden, the two British Council representatives in Rwanda, were leaving the following week and had basically invited anyone who wanted to to come to their house and take stuff. So I did – a coffee machine for Paula & Sonya’s house (Alfred: yeah – those of you who know Ruairí and coffee will appreciate that when he first stayed with P&S, they only have one tiny little percolator – a really beautiful metal one but it makes one small cup and then, being metal, is boiling hot, making cleaning and refilling it a bit tricky!), some thrillers … and a printer! They had a really old Canon printer but they said it was really good but you need a cable to convert the parallel port connection to USB. Hope I can find one!!

And then, having delivered the stuff back to Sonya and Paula’s I …. Em, what did I do? Saturday 20th March – football? Dinner? I actually have no idea (Alfred: Who cares?? It obviously wasn’t interesting, or else the alcoholic overload finally caught up with you. Didn’t you meet John in the MTN Centre in Nyarutarama, and met the guy from Manchester who is opening Rwanda’s first Irish pub? And then you and John got something to eat …… exciting stuff!!!! Actually, the Irish pub bit actually IS exciting).

Ok – Alfred as raison as the French say. Met Jörg Sunday for about four hours and then headed back to Butare. A really good meeting (Alfred: I love the moment where, Ruairí having transferred all his statistics onto Jörg’s computer, he opens the files and says, after a few minutes, in that wonderfully laconic way the Germans have: ‘Ah! I can see you have never had any training whatsoever in statistics!’) It was funny but, interestingly, he pointed out that had he been doing it, as a trained statistician he would have done it very differently but the chances are the Rwandan directors and district officials would have been completely unable to understand it!

The length of the meeting meant I didn’t get to Butare until 1900 which meant a moto-ride in the pitch dark back to Gisagara with an enormous rucksack (including Canon printer) on my back. Luckily I had rung the faithful Alexis and he had waited for me.

Yvonne – stalker extraordinaire
A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. Now, in Rwanda, this often happens and usually I don’t answer. But recently a lot of people I know have changed their SIM cards and I have missed a few important calls, so I decided to answer this time. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hello?
Voice: Hi there – how are you? Long time!!
Me: Emm, who is this?
Voice: It’s Yvonne!!
Me: Oh. Hi! Em, when exactly did we meet?
Yvonne: Don’t you remember?? (Instant pangs of guilt) We had coffee together in the UTC Centre. (Guilt dissapates - I have almost never had coffee in the UTC Centre and certainly never with an Yvonne. And I am pretty sure I have NEVER met a Rwandan called Yvonne, or any Rwandan woman with English as good as this) (Alfred: Hey, what’s with the italics? Those are MINE!!)
Me: I think you are wrong – I don’t remember ever having coffee in the UTC Centre.
Yvonne: No, no – it was in Butare!! (Out of the question – other than Matar, it is impossible to get decent coffee in Butare)
Me: Hmmm … I don’t think so.
Yvonne: Anyway, I just wanted to ring and say ‘Hi’ and ask how you were doing.
Me: Oh. I’m doing fine but …
Yvonne: I am sending you my Facebook address – have a look and see if you remember me. Maybe we can meet sometime if you are up in Kigali.
Me: Emm, can I just ask where did you get my num….
Yvonne: (hangs up)

OK – I definitely never met any Yvonne anywhere, never had coffee with anyone other than VSOs in UTC and don’t drink coffee in Butare except in Matar. But she had my number, knew that Butare was the obvious alternative to Kigali and, most interestingly, wanted me to check her out on Facebook. So I did. Lovely looking girl (Yvonne Mutesi if you want to look for yourself) but definitely not anyone I had ever met.

Over the next few weeks I get the occasional message or call – always brief, never pushy, not asking to meet but saying ‘Hi’ and generally inquiring after my well-being and amazingly adept – I mean amazingly – at side-stepping the issue of where she got my number. ‘Subtle’ I thought to myself – the usual Rwandan ploy is to rub their rear end against your crotch, say after five minutes ‘I love you’ and ask to get married immediately (Alfred: That is a tad harsh. But only a tad ...)

Eventually, when I was coming up to Kigali one weekend, I decided I really wanted to know where had she got my number and rang her and offered to meet up. She said rather than coming into town I could drive out to her place in my car. ‘I don’t have a car’ I said, wondering if this was suddenly going to end the whole thing. ‘No problem’ she said, ‘just get on a moto and if you ring me I will give him directions.’

‘But Yvonne’, I said, ‘we’ve never even met (an assertion I noted she didn’t dispute) and I don’t think it is appropriate to meet you for the first time in your house.’ ‘Oh there’s no problem’ she said, ‘my parents and all my brothers and sisters and cousins and everyone else are here to see you’.

So what could I do? I hung up is what I did. And she rang and rang and rang and eventually I turned my phone off. Passing an Internet café, I hopped online and checked my Facebook status. She had answered my Friend request seven minutes ago! Click of a button, friend deleted, end of story.

And this is the problem. I would love to make/to have made more Rwandan friends but the guys eventually (with a few exceptions) start looking for money, sponsorship, scholarships etc, the women pretty much the same though the mechanics of getting you to agree to it are a little different. Ah well!

Nicknames
Two interesting nicknames I came across recently. One is a friend of Enock’s called ‘Jambazi’ which means ‘thief’ in Swahili. Interesting name to have and one he seemed to take great pleasure in. Eventually, Enock and Jambazi together explained it to me. Jambazi (I have no idea what his real name is) is a Mathematics teacher in the local secondary school, but also teaches in a seminary school in Butare and also in the university, where he is finishing his Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics (he will have to go abroad to do a doctorate as there is no one to supervise him here; he was the only person to graduate in Pure Mathematics the year he did his BA). Anyway, that means he had the equivalent of three jobs, so that is why he is called ‘Jambazi’, as he is stealing the jobs of two other people.

The other one was a bit weirder. I was driving in Butare with Joseph, the guy organising the catering for our training (that will be in the next entry) and he waved at another driver. ‘Who is that?’ I said (in French). ‘C’est l’animal’ he replied. OK, one could think of various reasons for a nickname like that but I decided to ask why. Apparently, after the genocide he was accused of having decapitated a lot of people with a sword. He was put on trial and found not guilty, but the name stuck. Apparently everyone calls him that (I can’t be sure if they do it to his face or not). Weird!

RWANDAN HAIKUS

2010-04-02T08:13:00.002+02:00

RWANDAN HAIKUS
(Alfred eat your heart out!)

Ripe avocado
Melts in your mouth like ice cream
One thing I will miss.

Amafaranga!
Cent francs à manger monsieur,
Amafaranga!

Mwaramutseho!
Warashatse muzungu?
Kubera iki?

Before intelcourse
Please elect the penis first
And use a lubber.

Où est le cachet?
Sans cachet vous ne pouvez
Rien faire ici.

Leaving Rwanda -
Never thought this day would come,
It’s time to go home.

I'm opening this up (here and on Facebook) for any present or past volunteers in Rwanda to contribute their haikus. Or, indeed, anyone else who wants to! If you post them here as a comment, please tell me if you don't want them copied to my Facebook page!

Interlude with Alfred

2010-04-01T21:04:00.000+02:00

It’s Alfred – I apologise,
The poor guy’s right up to his eyes.
Two weeks since he last updated
By all his fans he’ll be berated.
Translating handouts into French
While thinking of his absent wench…

Hmm … there might be trouble about that (sorry M. – don’t tell Alphonsine!). Let’s start again.

Ruairí’s blog’s still unupdated,
By his fan(s) he’ll be berated,
Funny stories long-awaited,
Rwandan poems he’s translated.
Reading entries annotated
(By myself, it should be stated)
And read by fans with breath most bated.

When the blog was first created
Ruairí would be quite elated;
Oft his office he vacated
While his entries he dictated.
How the taxi-bus he hated,
Rwandan verbs he conjugated,
How the rain was unabated,
And other matters unrelated.

But then his loyal fans, they waited
A little fragment, oft undated,
And usually quite belated
Left their appetites unsated
And expectations most deflated.
Maybe his skill was overrated?

But soon it will be reinstated;
So, if your interest’s unabated
Your pupils soon will be dilated
As the flow is recreated;
Current news will be debated,
The laws of poetry desecrated,
The wonders of the country fêted,
And Portsmouth will be relegated.

And if by then you feel sedated
Thinking blogs are overrated,
All these anecdotes collated
And none of them interrelated,
If Alfred on your nerves has grated
As Ruairí’s taste he once more slated,
Well, here’s my answer – silver-plated:

TOUGH! NOBODY ASKED YOU TO READ THIS ANYWAY!!!

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie

2010-03-16T00:08:00.007+02:00

Monday 15th March
(Alfred: Hold onto your hats, guys - it's a LONG one!)

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

(Especially for Ken Goodwin!)

I had come back from the pub rather later on Sunday night than I had intended. Sarah was still up and mentioned casually that, as she was in the kitchen, she thought she had seen ‘something’ running into my bedroom … but she wasn’t sure. Maybe a spider, maybe a mouse, maybe nothing. I figured ‘nothing’ sounded good to me, brushed my teeth and propped myself up in bed with the laptop to do some essential Facebooking before bed. And then out he trotted, small brown mouse from under my bed and across to hide behind my rucksack. (Alfred: Ruairí is using ‘he’ in the generally accepted neutral literary sense; as you will find out – predictably – he never got remotely near enough to find out if this is the technically correct pronoun for this particular mouse, even if he knew what he was looking for). ‘Oh crap’ I thought and pondered the possibility of pretending it wasn’t there and dealing with it in the morning. Then I remembered exactly what my morning schedule was like!!

So, out of bed. First – stay quiet and don’t panic the bugger until you have figured out what you are going to do. We want him out of my room into the kitchen and then out the back door, not through or under the door into the rest of the house. So we put on a dressing gown, (Alfred: Ruairí is currently wearing only a rather short t-shirt in bed which doesn’t really …. Never mind), grab a towel from the laundry bag and block the bottom of the door to the sitting room, open the back door, turn off the light in the kitchen (figuring he will run away from light and towards darkness and then gave the rucksack an almighty whack with my walking stick (which I had had the presence of mind to fetch from the sitting room).

Out he shot, straight into the kitchen (Stage One completed – close bedroom door and block bottom with second towel). He shot straight for the back door (Stage Two completed – almost) and missed it by about two inches, slamming straight into the closed half of the double door. He sat there for a minute as I hurtled towards him with a bucket (Alfred: ‘Hurtled’? Really?) Then he ran straight up the wall for a bit as I ran round in circles after him, waving my stick for some reason, even though I wasn’t actually trying to hit him. Then he shot straight into the towel that was blocking the bottom of the door. I must have packed it in well because he rebounded back off it like a trampoline artist, flew past me and landed – unfortunately – under the low shelf that runs along one side of the kitchen.

I flailed around under the shelf for a while with the stick but he wasn’t budging (Alfred: Ruairí did locate two knives and a fork though, so that was a plus!) so I gave up and went to bed, only pausing to move the towel around to my side of the door. In the morning – no sign. I think (Alfred: Emm, ‘hope’ is the word you want here, sunshine) he crawled out under the back door during the night and into the garden so that’s OK (Alfred: Wishful thinking – this is a mouse for goodness’ sake. And even a Kate Moss mouse would have had a job getting through THAT gap).

I had had very weird dreams that night and it was really hot (Alfred: yeah, hermetically sealing yourself into a room can have that effect, I’ve heard). I had to visit a very remote school that day but having missed the previous Monday morning meeting I figured I needed to come in this time, plus I needed to photocopy some additional school inspection forms and copies of the individual sector reports I had prepared. So, meeting over by 0900, a quick 30 minutes printing and copying and on the road by 1000.

Experienced Rwandan hands are already either howling with laughter or crying in disbelief that I ever really thought such a thing could be possible (Alfred: ‘Experienced’ meaning anyone who has been here more than a week). First the meeting – OMG. Even my experienced hardened Rwandan colleagues were drooping like unwatered tulips after only one hour of the three – two hours and a bit to read the minutes, each line of which was followed by a detailed discussion of … whatever. Alexis gave up translating after a while and I can’t say I blame him. The irony of it was (Alfred: this is actually even more ironic than most of you will realise and in a variety of different ways and definitely not in an Alanis Morrisette way) that he was reading a book in French entitled (I think) Comment utiliser votre temps plus efficacement. Occasionally he would read a pearl of wisdom from it to me in hushed, reverent tones, to which I would reply Oui, à la recherche du temps perdu, eh! Which actually means nothing when you think about it.

The only interesting that happened was that Denyse came in late and sat down at the farthest extremity of the hall from me. Now every Monday I always look out for Denyse – she is very attractive as it happens but she wears the most insane outfits from time to time and this time I could see flashes of vivid green, the same shade you get with lime-flavoured Angel’s Delight. I tried to get a better look and of course she caught me staring at here and immediately nudged her girlfriends on each side, causing such an outburst of giggles that the Executive threatened to move them all down to the front row if they didn’t keep quiet (Alfred: Yes, he actually does that from time to time. HE once confiscated someone’s phone because they were using it too much in a meeting and not paying attention.)

So when the meeting eventually finished (Alfred: when it did, everyone just sat there, lacking the energy to stir, for about five seconds) I chatted to Alexis and then wandered over to the office where I work. All I wanted was five minutes on a printer and then fifteen or twenty on the photocopier. But our IT guy Tema Jean has gone to Japan for IT training (see previous blogs for details – we are NOT going into that saga again) so nobody else there has any IT knowledge to speak of and when the internet goes down that’s that. So Alexis has to print off stuff from his new computer for a meeting with the mayor in 30 minutes but of course the driver for the printer isn’t installed on his machine. So I am trying to copy the driver from my computer (Alfred: One day when Ruairí was VERY bored, he made a list of all the printers in the office and then downloaded and stored all the relevant drivers. How bored was HE that day, eh?) onto Alexis when Denyse turns up, a vision in lime green strappy dress and a black gauze shawl-thingy over her shoulders, her hair newly braided in a variety of interesting colours, grins at me … searching for an adjective here … anyway, grins at me and asks me why the internet is not working. I explain about Tema (it astonishes me that when one of their colleagues is one of only two people in all of Rwanda chosen to go abroad to JAPAN for goodness’ sake for training, almost no-one seems to know about it!!) and she asks if I have my modem with me.

So I say ‘Yes’ but she has to use it on my computer and I will be around for about an hour (already the awful truth about my optimistic schedule was beginning to dawn on me). Anyway, I finish installing Alexis’ printer driver, print off a few sheets of my own (including my entire work schedule down to June 14th, my last day in the District), grab the other stuff I want to photocopy and head off to find a photocopier.

The photocopier lives in Tema’s room and is therefore locked. I get the key from Françoise the secretary and let myself in and try to lock the door behind me so no-one else can get in. No such luck, the door doesn’t close from the inside. Anyway, I switch on the copier and check for paper – two sheets. Crap! Out again, lock the door behind me so no-one else can get in (I now have the only key) and start searching for anyone who will give me paper. I won’t bore you with the details but eventually between three different offices I manage to scrounge the 100 or so pages I need. Back to the door and there are two people waiting outside it carrying loads of documents. So I stroll by as if just passing and wander up and down until they get fed up and walk off. Then I shoot back in and load up the machine and get started. Once I am on the machine, only the Mayor or his secretary can budge me!!

In comes the Mayor’s secretary wanting to copy. The key question: how many copies? It is quite common for someone to ask if they can do a quick copy (Alfred: the word ‘quick’ is a bit of a misnomer – it takes the machine eight seconds to make each copy) and then use up all of the paper you have so painfully amassed for your job. Luckily Gaudence did only want one.

So I continued – five copies of the sector reports and then as many copies of the seven-page school inspection report as I could manage. To my pleasant surprise, it turned out to be more than I expected. By now it was 1200 and my moto driver called to say if we didn’t go soon we wouldn’t be back before dark. So I went to get my computer. Of course Denyse still hadn’t sent this vitally important email and suggested I leave the computer with her! As if! She looked at me in tragic, stunned disbelief, rather like a lime-green braided Ophelia with her jaw bouncing off the desktop, as I packed it up and headed off.

Got home and quickly sorted through the photocopies to staple the ones I needed for the day. Then I found out why I had got more copies than I had expected – the photocopier had omitted pages 3, 5 and 7 on every copy! Bloody hell! Well, nothing I could do but at least I could use the original. Grabbed a bite to eat and then the moto arrived.

Alexis said we had to hurry, especially if we got rain later. I told him to get me to Mugombwa as fast as he could. He looked at me quizzically. ‘Vraiment?’ he said. ‘Oui, oui’ I replied. The trip usually takes almost an hour. We got there in 27 minutes. Alexis is an excellent driver so I wasn’t actually terrified at any stage – well, not quite. On the way we did come across a new species I hadn’t seen before – a VTOL chicken or, to be more precise, a VTO chicken.

Most of you may be familiar with chickens. Not the greatest fliers in the world, indeed I was never sure they could fly until I came here and saw them fluttering madly out of the way of bicycles, motorbikes, cars and whatever. But this chicken was different, or maybe it was the circumstances. Maybe any chicken can be a VTO chicken given the right encouragement. And that is to have a ruddy big moto with two guys on it hurtling down a goat track towards you with thick bushes on each side and therefore nowhere to go. So this chicken performed … I swear … a vertical take-off, just like a Harrier Jump Jet, only faster and then flew away to one side quite quickly. We were going too fast for me to see how and if it landed so I can’t swear that the landing was also vertical but it was pretty impressive all the same.

The inspection went well (photos below) – the director is a new guy, recent graduate of the Kigali Institute of Education and full of new ideas which he is actually implementing: all textbooks are in the classrooms being used and not locked in storage, group work in all classes, seating rearranged in as efficient and pupil-friendly a fashion as possible and so on. I particularly noted the relaxed and good atmosphere between students and teachers, though there were still children kneeling at the back of classes as punishment, one of them with a placard around his neck with something in Kinyarwandan written on it.

More on that and school visits in general later. I zoomed back home with Alexis after four hours there and got there before dark. Quick stir-fry dinner and then off to meet Enock for drink. HE had rung me to say that the last time we met, someone had ‘borrowed’ his laptop while he was away and now it wouldn’t work. Well … (Alfred: I edited this bit out, a long, self-congratulatory rant about how Ruairí followed instructions he downloaded from the internet and fixed Enock’s computer. Ruairí with computers is like Neanderthals with fire, they are perpetually astonished with their own brilliance that they are able to do ANYTHING with it!) …. Amazing eh!!!

My friend Tema arriving in Okinawa!

The following pictures are from my school inspection on Monday. Note all the pictures of group work - I so seldom see it I took LOADS!! However the first one you see that looks like groupwork isn't - it is four students in Senior One sharing one textbook because that is all they have. In Geography it was one between NINE!

These following pictures are from Thursday 11th March with Sarah and Lynley Mannell, a Canadian VSO volunteer working in the Program Office who was doing some interviews with groups of teachers. On the way back we found these people who were cutting up a tree on the road, as one does. Otherwise, you crush the crops.

St Patrick's Day Fundraising Ball, Kigali

2010-03-14T10:05:00.001+02:00

Hi there friends, especially outside Rwanda. We are organising a St Patrick’s Day ball here in Kigali for Friday 19th March, a fundraising event in support of setting up a paediatric palliative care centre in Kibagabaga Hospital in Kigali. This will provide education to the mothers of children born with HIV/AIDS on simple and cost-effective ways of ensuring their children receive the kind of diet that is essential to maintaining their health. In a country where the malnutrition rate among chlidren aged 0-5 is 45% and the rate of anaemia 56% this type of education is vital.

We still have tickets left for this event: if you would like to sponsor a seat or a table, the ticket will be given to a member of one of the many voluntary organisations that work hard in the area of disability and HIV/AIDS, thus supporting our fundraising efforts and rewarding someone who is already contributing much to combatting HIV/AIDS and supporting les vulnerables, as we say in Rwanda.

So if you or anyone you know think you might be interested this is how it works: individual tickets are €45, a table of ten for €450. Please contact me ASAP at roheithir@gmail.com or ring me on +250 783 808130 and I'll explain how to go about it.

Oh, and I will be on the Pat Kenny Show on St Patrick’s Day – listen out for me!!!

2010-03-10T18:29:00.003+02:00

A DAY ON THE ROAD

Today I was to visit two schools in Mugombwa sector, down on the Rwanda-Burundi border and about as far from my house as it is possible to travel in this district. I had booked the moto driver to come at 0800 but he said 0730 would be better as it would take us a long time to get there. I got up at 0600 (I had set the alarm for 0530 but somehow managed to fall asleep again!), had a very cold wash in a bucket of water, then breakfasted on tea, bread and two hard-boiled eggs which I had cooked a few days ago. Wasn’t too sure about the smell of the second one but thought ‘What the hell’ and ate it anyway (Alfred: to avoid the suspense, it was fine – you don’t have to worry about later and unnecessarily detailed accounts of dashing behind bushes in the Rwandan countryside. That is always an interesting experience as there is no such thing as a deserted spot here and you get used to people standing close by watching you pee .. or whatever). The weather was lovely when I got up but by 0700 it was very cloudy and at 0715 the heavens opened. I rang Alexis and told him to hold off for the moment and we would go if the rain stopped and if he thought the roads would be OK.

By 0730 the house was enveloped in cloud, through which it was still relentlessly raining but it cleared around 0815 and I rang Alexis to come. Packed my bag – inspection forms (only one), copies of my recent analysis of the examination results, poncho, clipboard, pens … and a wodge of toilet paper just in case. On with my wellies and then off we went around 0830. It was still raining but not too heavily. Alexis said that it had not been raining at all in the adjoining sector where he had come from so he hoped the roads would be OK.

It was a nice wish but unfortunately didn’t come true. We ploughed on for about an hour, stopping to ask directions as we went. The school is called Mushongi but the final ‘gi’ is pronounced in a very peculiar way, so Alexis was usually greeted with blank stares when he asked, until he tried every possible combination of sounds that might approximate to ‘gi’. All of them sounded exactly the same to me but eventually one of them clicked and the people all said ‘Ah, Mushongi!’ It never fails to amaze me the way in which people here cannot recognise a word unless you pronounce it exactly correctly. After all, we were only about ten kilometres from the school at this stage!

As we got near, the road got really bad – I got off and walked while Alexis paddled the moto up or down slopes with his legs – but eventually it got so bad we abandoned the moto and set off on foot. I presumed that this meant we were really close to the school (Alfred: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER use the words ‘presume’ or ‘assume’ in this country … NEVER). Forty-five minutes later of tramping through mud the consistency of regurgitated superglue in wellington boots one size too small for me (Alfred: just as well or they would have been sucked right off his feet), in drizzle strong enough to make me keep my poncho on beneath which I was sweating probably harder than it was raining, we finally reached the school.

This Groupe Scolaire has about 850 students, six classes of primary and two of senior level. They are building eight new classrooms but work has stopped completely as they have run out of materials and have no money to buy more. Three of the semi-built classrooms have students in them – typically, they have put the 1st and 2nd Year primary in here and the senior students are in the older, intact classrooms. They also have not had any new latrines built – the last time I visited the school the latrines were the main issue – six horrible decrepit crumbling …. I can’t say ‘rooms’, whatever, for (at the time) seven hundred or so students. They are planning to build 20 new ones and have got as far as digging out the holes for the foundations but that’s it.

So I spent the next three and a half hours working with the director and visiting the classes (brief visits, just to say ‘Hello’ and not to actually inspect the classes). The director is a young, enthusiastic man who is in his second year as director and keen to change and improve the school. It is the best school in the sector, but the sector is the worst in the district so there is still enormous scope for improvement.

Anyway, we worked through my checklist and focussed on a few main areas: timetabling, teacher attendance (one class we visited had no teacher there and no-one seemed to have any idea where he was), strategic planning (there is no strategic plan but he had put together a project proposal on equipping the school with solar panels so all the classrooms would be able to use electrical equipment – more on that anon), peer evaluation and training, data collection and analysis and a few other things.

In the middle we toured the classrooms as he wanted me to visit all the teachers and students before the morning shift broke up at 1140. The school is clean and reasonably well equipped with furniture etc – I did see some desks with five or six pupils crammed into them but there were usually desks with only one or two in the same room, so it is more a question of classroom management for the teacher than lack of resources. One or two classes were around fifty but most were in the 30-40 range. Quite a few of the classes had some basic teaching aids or posters to be seen and the kids were bright and alert, even at the end of their school day.

However, the level of English was abysmal. Not one class could answer even the simplest question I asked them (‘What subject are you doing?’, ‘Do you like English?’ and so on). Only two of the teachers could talk to me in English – and neither of them were among the three who actually teach English in the school. And a lot of the material written on the boards was so inaccurate you wondered where it had been copied down from. I did learn in P4 Science that the ‘testicules’ are shaped like ‘two uggs’ and the penis need to be ‘elected’ before intercourse can take place. I had a vivid of images of all these penises standing to attention and hoping to garner enough votes to be elected and get their chance at continuing their genetic inheritance into the next generation. (Alfred: Interesting – the phrase ‘electing penises’ brought to my mind vivid images of most of the leading politicians of the last twenty years……)

Later, as I worked through the analysis of the school’s 2009 results with the director to see what they could tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the school (I don’t go with this coy ‘areas for improvement’ business I’m afraid), it became clear that there was one, single, overriding problem – English. They have no Science textbooks at all for P5 or P6 and no Mathematics textbooks for P6 – just one teacher’s book in each subject. The teachers seemed well-prepared, in good spirits and (as far as I could tell on a brief visit) hard-working but teaching in a completely foreign language. Every class I visited had textbooks in it and in half the classes the students were actually using them as part of the class – if that seems like a really obvious thing to you, it isn’t!!! In most schools the books are locked up and from the layers of dust on them have been so since they arrived – but not here. He commented when I said this that he has a horror of books lying unused and has endlessly nagged/encouraged his teachers to use them. He even lets the children bring them home from time to time to read and use for homework – only the second time I have come across this and something you are really not supposed to do but I wish directors would do more often!

Since my last visit the school had built twenty rabbit hutches and I was introduced to their occupants, munching away on a haphazard collection of plants and weeds. When they are mature, they are given to the poorer students to take home and sell so they can buy pens, copybooks etc. When I asked him how they decide who will get the rabbits, he told me the children decide. They know very well who is in the most need so they draw up a list of who should get them. Other than a quick check by the director to ensure no obvious unworthy candidates are there, all the input comes from the pupils.

The same applies to the Parents’ Committee which has two teacher and two pupil representatives. The students first of all vote for a President, then a Vice-President. The first vote is completely open; then, if a boy is elected President, only girls can stand for Vice-President and vice versa.

One thing I always check is what clubs the school has: they usually have antiHIV/AIDS (ü), sports (X), antigenocide (X - but starting later this year for the seniors), and sometimes environment (ü) and dance (X). (Alfred: Maybe not the most suitable topic for a joke but when Ruairí ran the spellcheck, it wanted to replace ‘antigenocide’ with ‘ant genocide’!). When I asked him if there were any others, he said they had a School Attendance Club. ‘A what?’ I asked, wondering if I had heard correctly. He explained that every month all the students meet in geographical groups depending on where in the sector they live. They then pool their knowledge to draw up lists of children they know in their area who are not attending school. These lists, with parents’ names and as specific a geographical location as they can manage, are given to the Director. The schoolchildren then speak to the non-attending children to encourage them to come while the director, along with the Executive Secretary of the cell (the smallest local government unit) speak directly to the parents. Amazing idea!!!

I then asked him how come they had no sports club. Easy one – no equipment whatsoever and no space. He showed me the football ‘field’ – a smallish piece of ground covered in long grass, far too small for anything except a disorganised kickabout, which is what eight boys were doing with a punctured football that may well have been used in the original 1930 World Cup final in Uruguay. They do have a boys and a girls football team but have to play all their matches away. If they could raise RWF300,000 – 400,000 they could buy the adjoining field but with half-completed classrooms, no proper latrines and all the other current problems, extra land for sports is not a priority for anyone! The volleyball area was a piece of ground – the director explained that the net and posts had been stored away as they had no ball to play with! So I promised him that the next time I saw him I would have a football and a volleyball for him (and thanks to all of you back at home who have been sending me various sums, small and large, with which to do this kind of thing!).

There were a few specific areas where there was ‘room for improvement’. This school has the largest disparity between girls’ and boys’ performance of any in the sector and in Kinyarwanda, where girls usually perform as well as boys or close to it, it has the largest gender performance gap in the entire District. I also counselled him to get on to the sector directly about providing additional support for English training for the teachers (Alfred: given that this is the best school in the sector, Ruairí is going to be saying this to ALL the schools in the sector – the Sector Executive Secretary is going to LOVE him by this time next week!). I also agreed to look over his project proposal for installing solar panels in the school – a good idea but the actual document was a shambles. The budget had been drawn up by a friend who knew about electrical things – maybe so but he sure had no concept of either Mathematics or common sense. One item had been costed at RWF2,400,000 (€3,000) instead of RWF240,000, there was an estimate of 50 plugs and 180 lights for a school of nineteen rooms and so on and so on. But, and this is very important, the director had done this on his own initiative and was going to approach a range of NGOs and foreign government agencies like DfID, SNV and VVOB to seek funding himself, rather than doing what most people seem to – draw up wildly optimistic documents with grandiose plans and then think that somehow that is enough in itself!

Alexis and I headed off around 1500 – I would have waited longer but the director said he thought rain was approaching. Sure enough, when I left the office and looked over the roof towards Burundi, there were big black thunderclouds coming towards us, growling, like a small pack of black mastiffs that hadn’t actually seen me yet but were definitely feeling out of sorts with the world in general. So I hopped on the bike and was going to tell Alexis to get us home ASAP but that proved completely unnecessary as we zoomed off down the hill which, luckily, had pretty thoroughly dried out in the afternoon sun.

The thunderclouds, rather than coming straight at us, seemed to think they needed some kind of visa to enter Rwanda and moved along parallel to us just on the Burundi side of the border, so we were able to get back to the villagedry and in one piece by 1600 or so, about half the time it had taken us to make the morning trip. A quick lunch of roasted corn on the cob (it is market day and the gaurd always buys extra corn and roasts it for us (Alfred: no he doesn’t! Sarah told you he buys it already roasted from the little old ladies who roast it across the road!)) and cheese and crackers and coffee (a new brand called MIG Highland coffee, not as nice as my favourite brand Kinunu but pretty good all the same).

This evening ( once I have finished this and making and eating dinner – lentil, tomato and carrot curry with rice) I write up my report on the visit and then get ready for Lynley’s visit tomorrow. She is coming down from the Program Office to interview focus groups of teachers in a primary and a secondary school in my district for a report VSO are doing on teachers’ working conditions. Then it is off to Kigali for the Friday Education Management meeting and, hopefully, to Gikongoro for weekend rugby!

The existing classrooms in Mushongi school. The steep slope makes any effective use of the ground in the middle very difficult.

The volleyball court and the ruins of the latrines that were built in 2004 and almost immediately fell down due to shoddy workmanship.

One of the three girls' latrines (there are over 400 girls in the school)

Girls on one side, boys on the other.

The intrepid Alexis, my moto driver (NOT taken today as you can see from the sun shining!)

When is news not news?

2010-03-09T22:04:00.002+02:00

RUMOURS, RUMOURS
Hmm ... the attacks I spoke about in my last blog all turned out to be rumours: the bus near the US Embassy and the one in Remera. But there was an attack on the Eden Restaurant in Gikongoro in which three Sri Lankans were injured, one seriously enough to be taken to Butare Hospital to have shrapnel removed. I know the Eden Restaurant, though I have never eaten there. The one time we did attempt to eat there (I think it was with Amalia and Bujingo) they said they had neither brochettes nor fries available, so we went elsewhere. I remember saying rather sarcastically to the waitress 'If Rwanda has run out of goats and potatoes, the country is obviously in deep, deep trouble!'.

Interestingly, though that was Friday night, I still haven't found any mention of it on the news even though all the other attacks were covered quite extensively. Is this because stuff outside Kigali doesn't get noticed or is it embarrassment because muzungus were injured? Meanwhile, Afrique en Ligne announced that Rwandan authorities had warned about attacks on 'jam-packed train stations and cafes'. This is the kind of detail that makes you realise some websites are crap - there are no trains in Rwanda.

CORRECTION
(Alfred: Sorry folks - gave you the wrong link in the last blog but one for Ruairí's photos. Forgot that Flickr is spelled with a 'c' in it. So the correct address is www.flickr.com/photos/ruairioheithir)

Ode to the Brochette

2010-03-07T10:17:00.002+02:00

NDASHAKA BROCHETTE ….

Goats you can find everywhere,
Fleet of foot and brown of hair
(Or white or black or grey or blue -
They come in every single hue).
The kids are cute – they bounce and play
And run about throughout the day.
They munch on grass and herbs and leaves
And generally seem quite pleased.

And they are easy on the eye
As on the road we pass them by
And to our lips they bring a smile
And even tempt us bide awhile.
But as we’re watching these chevrettes
The word were thinking of? – brochette!

So don’t run fast – that’s quick enough
Or else your meat will get too tough.
And we ignore your plaintive bleating
Because we know you make good eating.
To no avail your plaintive cries -
Tomorrow you’ll be served with fries!

Your destiny is all that matters
Served up on a shiny platter.
Slightly pink or half-cremated
(And usually long-awaited)
Drenched with salt and piri-piri
(You want some ketchup? Don’t be silly!
That would spoil the taste of goat -
The best Rwandan cuisine haute!)

Served up neatly on a skewer
Six bits of goat – or maybe fewer.
Bits of onion and green pepper
Means that they don’t stick together.
Or maybe you got zingalo
Which I have had three times or so,
Goat’s intestines neatly twined
(Though most of us are disinclined).

So now at last it’s time to eat
(and while the food retains some heat)
We choose a skewer and then try
With all our might and main to pry
A piece of meat from where it lies -
And therein lies the next surprise.

A fact that’s little understood
Is - goat meat glues itself to wood.
Like limpets fastened to a rock
Or pointy ears on Mr Spock,
Superglue, wallpaper paste –
None of these takes pride of place.
But goat on wood – once well attached –
In this respect remains unmatched.

Some groan and weep, some rant and rave,
And generally misbehave.
Some pull it off by dint of force,
Some try and use their knife and fork.
Some chew the meat off from the side
Some just give up and eat their fries.

While omelette-eaters munch with ease
And gulp their beer and eat their peas
And chips and beans and rice and cheese
And peppers, pasta – all of these
Part of an omelette rwandese.
(And in their minds the question burns –
When will these people ever learn?)

And when the battle’s won at last
And all have finished their repast,
One task remains still incomplete -
Remove the goat meat from your teeth!
Select a toothpick from the holder
(Remove false teeth if you are older),
Extract the lumps if you are able
And flick them high across the table.
Or take them out and reassess
Before deciding to ingest!

Brochettes are good, brochettes are fun,
Brochettes are always overdone.
Brochettes are fun, brochettes are cheap,
(Don’t eat them walking down the street).
Sometimes tough and rarely tender -
Maybe they should use a blender?

2010-03-06T14:10:00.006+02:00

PHOTOGRAPHS AND GRENADES
Sitting in an Internet café in Kigali typing this while uploading about a hundred photos onto my Flikr account (Alfred: www.flickr.com and search for Ruairí if you are interested: if you are reading this IN Rwanda make sure you are NOT working off your modem when you do this - many of the photos are high resolution!). Also trying to get clear information on the latest series of grenade attacks over the last two days which are now escalating beyond what we had previously been used to. One last night was on a bus near the American Embassy, or at least that is 'the word on the street' - nothing on the Internet so far about those ones, only the previous night's two attacks. The other attack was somewhere in Remera where I am staying at the moment but that's all I know.

Some guy, former head of the Rwanda Journalists' Association, has been arrested in Burundi and extradited here - the government claim he is the mastermind but are also blaming a number of former high-ranking members of the RPF and RDF (Rwandan Defence Forces) - these would be very senior former associates of Kagame now living in exile. A much more serious proposition than random ex-Interahamwe members trying to destabilise on a small scale. Best updates are from the BBC news website and also the New Times newspaper which is pretty much the official Rwandan government line on what is happening.

WORK
Work is proceeding as normal. I finished off and printed all 15 of my reports and then trieed to email copies to each of the 13 sector executive secretaries and/or Social Affairs officers (the latter being responsible for education in the sectors). This took the guts of two days! First of all even trying to get a list of email addresses was a challenge. Then the list only had ten of thirteen executive secretaries and no Soc. Aff. So I texted all the Social Affairs officers and asked them to text me their and the Exec Sec's email addresses. After one day three of thirteen had replied. But that's the way it goes here. I am also organising the training that Peter, Cathy and I will be giving on March 24th and 25th to all the directors on Leadership and Management, Quality of Education in the classroom and Data Gathering and Analysis. At the moment this consists of trying to ensure no-one else will be using the room when we want it and the tricky business of negotiating the price for lunch and what exactly will be in each of the lunch-boxes! At the moment it looks like two pieces of meat (goat), one egg, potatoes and I am not sure what else! More anon.

Another problem is the one I wrote about last time - the unrepaired damage to Rwamiko secondary school which has left them with doubled-up classes of up to 120. It turns out that the school is owned by the Catholic Diocese who are - in theory - responsible for the buildings etc. Surprise, surprise, that is not how they see it and they want the District to share the cost. The District seem to have agreed in principle but the argument over how much it will be and who pays what looks like going on forever. The estimate is RWF3m (about €4,000) which seems very high - I suspect the real cost is half that and each side is hoping that if they can persuade the other side to pay 50% they will end up paying nothing!

Meanwhile, my ASTI project of building a staffroom and director's office for Nyarunyinya Primary School has fallen foul of local bureaucracy. The money the ASTI was donating would pay for part but not all of the project. Initially the District said they would match the funding but now say they cannot spend money on anything except classroom construction - staffrooms are not a priority item! They said they can apply again in May but a) there is unlikely to be any more money then and b) that is too close to my departure date. So I am trying to come up with a new project and submit it in time to Standing Committee and then get it implemented before I leave!

NEWS FROM HOME
WTF? Every time I look at the news from Ireland things seem to be getting madder and madder! George Lee? Willie O'Dea? Trevor Sargent? And then the bishops decide that parishioners must pay the bills for the compensation for the sex abuse cases? It makes the revelation of a gay sex ring in the Vatican almost paltry by comparison. I suspect my readjustment to Irish society when I get back is going to be trickier than I thought!!

Alfred: in the next instalment: more on what the hell is going on with all these grenade attacks, creative writing (and the lack of it) in Rwanda, a new poem (currently in preparation) on the wonders of brochettes, and other engaging snippets of Rwandan life (I've told him to ease off on the work stuff, no-one is really interested, though I did phrase it more gently than that).

Ruairí Has A Bath

2010-03-01T20:56:00.004+02:00

So, back on the road today. I spent the weekend having some blissful R&R with my friends John and Mukesh in Gikongoro, a weekend that unusually combined the attributes of being relaxing and very productive. As they have satellite TV, I also got to see Chelsea’s debacle against Manchester City (ouch!) but, more importantly, Ireland’s stunning win over England in the rugby. Happy days. And, Sunday morning ……………… I had a hot bath. Yes – a HOT ….. BATH! First one in two years. Awesome. Felt very wrinkly afterwards but I am sure that was my imagination.

John and Mukesh live near the main prison in Gikongoro – on Saturday morning it was umuganda (voluntary communal labour) and the area around the house was covered with pink-clad prisoners digging, tidying or whatever (Alfred: The word ‘voluntary’ mightn’t be the most appropriate in this specific context). I still get a slight shock when I see the pink uniforms – I am used to the idea of seeing prisoners out and about working, I am used to the fact that they are all convicted genocidaires – it’s the PINK! It is SO pink! If you were going to design a pair of (admittedly slightly butch) women’s pyjamas, this is the shade you would pick. And when you see them from afar, sprinkled lavishly across the landscape, it is as if someone had scattered a load of Remembrance Day poppies across the Rwandan hills last November and then left them to bleach in the sun until you got this soft pink.

Then, when I left Sunday to head for the bus back to Butare, as I got near the prison, I heard this immense roaring sound coming from inside the walls – people shouting and chanting like crazy. ‘Oh-oh’ I said to myself (Alfred: 'arsa mise i m’aigne féin' as we used to teach the students to write in Irish class) ‘sounds like a riot.’ I wondered whether to take a detour but had no idea where to go. Moreover the other passers-by didn’t seem too concerned. Then when I listened more closely I could distinguish the words Imana and Yezu – ah ha, Sunday Mass. I should have guessed, if you hear a lot of people getting excited here, it is usually religion (Alfred: Em, methinks the fact that it was Sunday should have given our erstwhile scribe a clue, n’est pas?).

When I got to Butare (the Sotra and Volcano men having had a barging and pushing match over which of their buses I was getting on!) I met up with Christine Mack, a new VSO volunteer who I had always thought was Australian but turns out to be French. (Alfred: Eh, France, Australia, two countries with so much in common they are easy to confuse. A special prize for the first reader who can actually suggest ANYTHING those two countries have in common!) She came out to Gisagara with me as we were planning to head out together today to do school inspections and (Alfred: for some strange reason) she thought she might learn something from watching me work.

However, getting from Butare to Gisagara on Sunday night was the tricky bit. Christine caught the 1430 from Kigali which, in theory, should have got her in before 1700 when there was a bus to Gisagara but I figured it was more prudent to get tickets for the last bus at 1800 just in case. So she arrived at 1645, her bus from Kigali having broken the Rwandan land speed record en route, and we went for a beer. Then my friend Jean de la Croix rang – I had completely forgotten I was also supposed to be meeting him so lucky I didn’t get the earlier tickets, eh? I won’t go into all of Jean’s stories at this stage (Alfred: They will certainly serve to liven up the blog the next time it gets too serious) but suffice to say I had to more or less prise him from my person with a metaphorical crowbar to get on the bus!

The bus. Anyone who has been in Rwanda even a few weeks, let alone eighteen months, will have their quota of dodgy, funny, terrifying, boring, smelly, boring bus stories. But this was the worst bus journey I have had so far in Rwanda. OK, we didn’t break down, the passengers didn’t have to get out in the mud and push the bus that had gotten stuck in it, it didn’t crash, it didn’t puncture, it didn’t turn out to be going in the opposite direction to the one were told for an hour before we realised, no one urinated on us, no one was carrying a pig or a chicken or a sack of fermenting cassava (Alfred: cassava, that’s the worst, no question), no one was spitting constantly on the ground near or on our feet, no one got sick out of a window further up the bus only for it to fly back in through a window open beside us, the back door didn’t fall off and deposit all the contents of the boot (Alfred: that’s ‘trunk’ for those of you reading this in the US of A) on the road, no one was begging for money or lecturing us on how as ex-colonialists or just plain peau blancs everything that was wrong with Rwanda, Africa and the world was our fault, no one asked us for a dictionary or the money to buy one, no one spent the entire trip asking us to marry them, convert to their religion or take their baby away to Europe/USA with us, no one beside us was carrying a large rolled up ancient-and-never-washed-despite-the-incontinence-of-previous-users mattress that filled the entire width of the bus where we were sitting, no one asked us for our phone numbers, and no one tried to hold a conversation with us in English for the entire trip using only the alternating phrases ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’.

So, by Rwandan standards it wasn’t anything as bad as it could have been. But the bus was ancient, it had no suspension to speak of, it was absolutely packed, some of the windows were being held in by having the black runner lining that should have been between the windows and the frame of the bus tied across them to stop them falling into the bus, it was bucketing rain and the windscreen wipers weren’t working properly necessitating the driver to drive incredibly slowly, the engine was pumping a steady stream of carbon monoxide into the bus, all of whose functioning windows were tightly closed (only the broken ones saved us from asphyxiation). The roof above the back seats was cracked, admitting a steady heavy trickle of cold water down the backs of those of us unlucky enough to be sitting on the back seats, the rear door was not closed so every time we hit a bump it flew up and then whacked against the back of our seats.

Once we set off, we first had to negotiate the steep hill down out of Butare which is a good road but VERY slippery in wet weather. Then we hit the wet muddy bits – because we had no suspension the bus driver had to negotiate these spots very slowly in case he hit something unexpected. However, this either led to the bus getting stuck and frantically trying to reverse out of the mud or else stalling. Every time the driver tried to restart, you could hear the absence of people breathing as everyone held their breath wondering if it was going to start. Each time, after ten to fifteen seconds of what sounded like an aged asthmatic horse being dragged unwillingly into an abattoir, the bus would start up and lurch forward and off we would set again.

Anyway, what usually takes twenty minutes took almost an hour and, when we pulled up in the centre of Gisagara, everyone just stayed in their seats for a couple of seconds as if unaware, or in disbelief, that we had actually arrived successfully at our destination.

The next day, after a hearty breakfast, Christine and I set off on our visits. It was a good but (as usual) frustrating day. In both the schools we visited the directors had received phone calls that morning calling them away to meetings in the sector office. We were able to do the inspections after a fashion but hurriedly and without anything like enough time to go through all the stuff we wanted to. In particular, I had wanted to go through the new statistical analysis I had prepared for each school to see how much they could grasp, how interested they were and so on to give me an idea of how I need to tailor them to people’s level of understanding and interest. Anyway, it was OK if rather shorter than I had planned it to be. I did think of visiting a third school en route but figured the director would probably also be away and anyway my moto driver said rain was coming and the road back was very treacherous in parts.

Before we did the visits, however, we stopped at Groupe Scolaire Rwamiko. This is the school that was hit by a tornado some months ago which ripped the roof off a three-room classroom block. To my surprise there had been no repair work done yet so I called in. I also found (not to my surprise) that the six new classrooms for the Senior Two Year were also not ready but was flabbergasted when the teachers (the director was also at the sector office) told me that all the students were in school, distributed among the other classes. I then visited … wait for this one … a First Year Maths class with 120 students in it (Alfred: is this a record?). They were using a big room that had been used for storing building materials – they had filled it with desks and stuck two blackboards up at one end. And the class seemed to be going fine – all the students were attentive and focussed when we called in – but 120?!! The other rooms all had classes of 70 or 80 each.

Once we returned to the house we had lunch, debriefed a bit and exchanged ideas and observations on how the visits had gone and then I accompanied Christine into Butare to do a few chores. First I went to the Post Office to collect a parcel for a friend in Gisagara who uses my post-box. They wouldn’t let me collect it because it had his name on it and it was a registered parcel. Fair enough I suppose except they have never done that before! Then to the bank to take out RWF200,000 because I am going to have a lot of travelling and photocopying expense coming up. Again fine, except they had run out of RWF5,000 bills and gave it all to me in RWF2,000 and RWF1,000 bills: 95 banknotes in total. And finally some shopping, mostly for luxury items: olive oil and vinegar (for the avocados, our single most important food item along with cabbage), Nido (milk powder), coffee, sardines, cheese, tomato paste and bread. That last went without a hitch.

Then, it being 1557, I dashed for the 1600 bus. Got my ticket in the Sotra office and was told it was a big bus, not one of the little ones. I came out to see the bus heading off. I figured, heck I would just wait for the 1700 but the girl who had sold me the ticket ran out of the office onto the street, stopped a moto and told him to catch that bus! Which he did! So, the bus stops unexpectedly, the door opens and this muzungu gets on. Now, we are all used to various reactions when we get on buses – cries of welcome in three different languages, excited comments, children screaming or whatever, though in Butare, where there are lots of abazungu (to use the correct plural form) it rarely excited much comment. But when I got on this bus there was a stunned silence, which continued for the ten seconds or so it took me to get to one of the flip-down seats in the aisle. Then people began muttering under their breaths to each other and darting quick looks at me.

It took a while before I realised – this was not the ordinary Gisagara bus. This bus was heading for a much more remote part of the District called Mugombwa but would be passing through Gisagara on the way back. There is one bus out of Mugombwa in the morning at 0700 and then it comes back at 1600, so all these people had come in to Butare for the day. People in Gisagara are used to me and Sarah by now (I’ve been there for eighteen months after all) but there has never ever, to the best of my knowledge, been a muzungu working or living in Mugombwa, hence the surprise.

It was a real throwback to when I first arrived. After so long, I rarely experience this reaction any more so it was actually kind of nice in a way, especially when the little boy sitting on his father’s lap eventually plucked up the courage to shake my outstretched hand and then examined it carefully all over for any white marks that might have come off – it’s been AGES since that happened to me!

So, big meeting tomorrow with all the District heads and then working with Cathy and Peter to start fleshing out or training days for the directors which will take place on March 24th and 25th. I’ll keep you informed!!

On the left, part of the Maths class with 120 students in it. On the right (I had forgotten about this picture) a tribute to lovers of Casablanca (the film, not the famous chess-player). I took this picture in a director's office. Parents who send their children to the maternelle (nursery school) have to pay RWF300 a month but they can also pay in beans which, at this time of year - it being just after the bean harvest - they often choose to do. The little bowl in front represents RWF300 worth of beans. This is one reason why maternelles start off well and then drop off - once the beans are gone and parents have to come upo with actual cash for the teachers, most of the maternelles end up closing down because parents can't/won't pay. It also means that the teachers get paid in a mixture of cash and beans, depending on the mix of parents' payments that month!

Massive Blog Update 3: Everything since Christmas!

2010-02-27T12:13:00.005+02:00

I have just had a bath. Yes, a bath, a hot bath. Deep hot bath. My first in two years (Alfred: I hasten to reassure readers of delicate sensibilities that he has had a cold shower every day). I am staying with my friend John for the weekend in Gikongoro (the guy building the dam I wrote about in the last entry) – he has gone off to work and I am chilling out in the house, supposed to be working on my statistical reports and preparing the presentation for next Tuesday’s meeting of all the district school directors but, hey, there is plenty of time. (Alfred: Yeah, and Chelsea are playing Man City at 1445 and England playing Ireland in rugby at 1800 and John has satellite TV and Supersports and , oh look – Days of Our Lives is on!!!!) And Alfred has been nagging me about updating the blog so carpe diem as the Romans (and my Latin teacher in school, Seán Ó Laidhin), used to say.

Life has been quite frantic since January – finally, after eighteen months, I feel I am actually doing loads of things. In fact (and I suspect this may be a common feature with longer-term volunteers) now that the end of my placement here is coming ever nearer, I seem to be coming up with loads of new ideas and proposals for things I could and would like to do but there is less than four months left in which to do them. It would be really great to be able to start my time here over again knowing what I do now but, c’est la vie.

Apologies in advance for the length of this posting – ten pages on my computer and that doesn’t include the photographs!

WORK: STATISTICS, STATISTICS, BEAUTIFUL STATISTICS
(Alfred: for those not particularly interested in educational statistics and the gender equality issues therein, you can skip on until you see my next contribution which is when we get back to more interesting, general Rwandan stuff!)

So, quick work update before I get on to the more general stuff. I spent a chunk of January analysing the exam results for National Primary and O-Level Exams and the Executive Secretary asked me in particular to break down the results more thoroughly in terms of gender. This coincided with a visit from one of the new volunteers, Evelyn Nyakoojo, who came to my district to talk with the official responsible for gender equity issues. Evelyn is working at the VSO Program Office researching issues to do with gender equity among other things. As the official had little English and Evelyn no French, I was interpreting and listening to the two of them discussing the issues made me much more aware of a lot of things I had maybe not been focussing on hitherto.

The results that emerged from my initial research were a bit alarming so I decided to pursue the matter a bit more thoroughly. The result is (to keep it brief) (Alfred: please!) I have now completed fourteen reports, each about ten to twelve pages, analysing the results and making recommendations for addressing the issue – one general report for the district and one each for the thirteen sectors. Next week I start a series of meetings with the Executive Secretary and Chargé des Affaires Sociales of each sector to go through the report and decide together what can be done to address the issues raised. Along with each meeting I hope to visit the schools with the worst problems so that is going to take up most of the working time I have left (though I can hold the meetings themselves outside of term time as well which helps).

(There is also a separate issue that often arises with VSO Education Management volunteers: you can get absorbed in the statistics to an extent which far outstrips any use that can be made of them by the Rwandan directors and district staff. This has happened a few times before so I am very very conscious that this needs to be converted into something that can be used and , more importantly, replicated, by the directors and sector/district staff I work with or else there will be no sustainability whatsoever).

The issues are twofold: one is simply to make sure the sectors know which schools are underperforming because they don’t seem to have much information about what is happening in their schools. The second issue is the gender one: there are more girls than boys in schools here at primary and lower secondary level but their average performance is significantly below that of boys. However, because the government has set a lower threshold for girls to continue to the next level than for boys, the actual qualifying percentage rates don’t reflect this. One quick example: in our District 5.7% of boys and 6.0% of girls qualified to go to secondary school with government assistance for fees. However, if girls were judged on the same basis as boys, only 3.6% of girls would qualify. At O-level it is even worse (and more critical, as at Primary level all students who scrape a bare pass can continue with their education, albeit in the more basic and less resourced Nine Years’ Basic Education schools) – 63% of students qualify for upper secondary, 57% of boys and 68% of girls. Again, if girls were assessed on the same basis, only 38% would be eligible to continue.

The purpose of this policy is to redress the perceived inequality in the system whereby girls, attending the same classes with the same teachers and using (where available) the same textbooks, still regularly underperform. However, nothing much (if anything) is being done to find out exactly why this is happening and address the problem at its roots. Girls do continue on through the system but at a lower level and therefore struggle all the more as they proceed up through the system.

Not all schools have this problem and it also varies from subject to subject. Some schools show equal levels for both boys and girls, others massive inequalities. When I see a school where 30% of boys and 85% of girls are failing to even reach the basic pass (which is VERY basic) there is something seriously wrong in that school. Mind you there are schools where 70% of ALL students are failing to reach even that basic level and many, many schools where not one single student is qualifying for secondary school.

There are also huge disparities within subjects. At primary level, all students do English, Kinyarwanda, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. The gap between boys and girls is smallest in English but very very high in Social Studies. And, in some schools, there are much higher disparities in Mathematics and Science than the other subjects, something explained to me by some teachers in the time-honoured phrase ‘Girls can’t do Maths/Science’! The majority of primary teachers are female but the male teachers tend to be concentrated disproportionately in Mathematics and Science. Not that I am drawing any definite conclusions at this stage, you understand! And I do enjoy pointing out that the only all-girls school in my District is easily the best for Mathematics and Physics, way ahead of all the others!

Anyway, I could go on like this for a long long time but Alfred has warned me not to. My mission over the next few months is

a) to bring this to the attention of every school director, sector official responsible for education and district chargé of education and make sure the issue of gender inequality in education becomes a priority

b) visit as many of the schools with serious problems as possible to discuss individual strategies for addressing general poor performance as well as unequal performance by boys and girls

c) gather as much research as possible as to why this is happening.

That last is possibly the most interesting of all: part of the problem at lower secondary is obviously that a large proportion of the girls coming through are already lagging behind but that is not the whole story. Others say that girls when they go home are expected to carry out a lot of domestic work that boys aren’t, so they do poorly in subjects like Social Studies and Geography that require a lot of memory work. Possibly so, but then why does the same pattern show itself in residential secondary schools? And so on and so on.

There is also the issue of training the school directors and Affaires Sociales officials in how to do the basic statistical analysis needed to monitor the situation. It is a relatively easy thing to do and does not need a computer or Excel, at least not for each school – a piece of paper and the calculator on their phone will do. So the idea at the moment is to do a brief presentation next Tuesday to all the directors, visit all the Executive Secretaries and Affaires Sociales during March, hold two one-day training sessions on March 24th and 25th on Leadership and Management (which is mostly going to be Peter and Cathy, the two school directors from the UK currently working in my District on short-term placements but also me on a basic introduction on the importance and use of data collection and statistical analysis for leading and managing a school) and then whatever other kind of training I can fit in between then and the end of June when I leave!

SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION PROGRAMME (9 YEARS’ BASIC EDUCATION)
This is not going as well as hoped though it is going better than I had expected. Given that the decision was only taken relatively late last year (September I think) to proceed with the construction of over 3000 classrooms and 10,000 toilets all over Rwanda, it is amazing IMHO that they have made as much progress as they have. The total cost of such a project – if built by ‘normal’means – would have been RWF36bn (€44m) which is the equivalent of Rwanda’s entire health budget for a year. However, the labour is all being supplied free by the local community (with some help from prisoners and work camp inmates) with the government supplying cement, bricks, iron rods and so on.

All of this I told you before (I think) but now, with money inevitably running short and the school year having already (albeit belatedly) started and most of the new classrooms not ready, it is panic stations. A worrying development has been requests to school directors from the sector executive secretaries to hand over part of their capitation grants for the year to help complete building classrooms in other schools. This would seriously compromise the existing schools’ ability to function during 2010 as this money is used for basic necessities like paper, chalk, teacher diaries, attendance books and so on. At the same time, the rumour is the sector executives have been told they will be fired if the classrooms don’t get finished pretty quickly so one can understand their urgency!!!

The rooms in my district are almost completed – roofs on, doors and windows fitted, furniture arrived or arriving. However, the purchase of the doors and windows was a problem and some of these are still awaited. But remember – all of these are kids who otherwise would have had to drop out of the school system altogether so better late than never was never so appropriate a phrase as in this case!

(Alfred: OK, that seems to be it on the purely work-related stuff though I can’t guarantee he won’t slip in little bits and pieces here and there)

OTHER STUFF
So, less than four months left (or seventeen weekends as Amy put it, which is a better measure as the weekends are when we actually do things). I was supposed to be going to Zanzibar with John for a week but the delay in the dam project has probably put the kibosh on that. I might go anyway just to see the place – everyone says it is awesome (Alfred: that has become his favourite new word since he arrived in Rwanda, picked up from John and reinforced by Sarah). I am also going to Kabale in Southern Uganda sometime in April to visit Enock’s family (Enock is my best friend here, a teacher from the local secondary school) and was hoping to visit the gorillas at some stage also. But I only have two weeks’ leave due so it will be a job squeezing all that in. (Alfred: And will I get to see the gorillas? Don’t hold your breath ……).

So, a quick tour of the highlights since I last wrote. Those of you who read this on a semi-regular basis will have seen my pictures from Christmas. (Alfred: As he writes this, John’s domestiques, Maureen and Betty, are playing Christmas carols in the kitchen – in February – happens a lot here!) It was a really great time – a big bunch of us went up to Kibuye on the shores of Lake Kivu and stayed in Home St Jean, a reasonably-priced guesthouse with amazing views, quite good food, OK rooms and the slowest service in Rwanda. I know that is quite a claim to make but that’s my opinion. You can swim as well though the steep climb down and back again to and from the water’s edge makes climbing the Eiger seem like a stroll in Stephen’s Green.

We had a great time and on Christmas Day we hired a boat to take us out to Amahoro Island on the lake. (Alfred: One of the crew members was fast asleep in the front of the boat in a manner Rip Van Winkle would have envied and didn’t even wake up when kicked or stepped on, both of which we did, accidentally I hasten to add. We christened him Sleeping Beauty). The main fun there was trying to get some food – any food! A lot of people had turned up apart from ourselves and they had basically run out of everything, so they wanted our orders and would then phone the mainland to ferry out the food to cook for us! It was a great day though I got seriously sunburned – I still haven’t been here long enough to realise that December can be just as hot as any other month! We also met Marion and Bruce’s friend, the resident monkey on the island who bit both of them quite badly when they visited. I don’t know what they did to piss it off but it was in good form when we were there and Mukesh even petted it.

Christmas Eve was also nice – Sarah and Libby had made really cute Christmas stockings for everyone with little goodies inside which must have taken a LONG time – (see picture in Christmas update). Other highlights included a hilarious night of Texas Hold ‘Em with Karangwa, Libby, Sarah, Melanie, John, Mukesh, me and Martine, sitting around chatting to people in the way you don’t often get a chance to do here, riding home one night in the back of John’s pick-up truck which was seriously scary, and general lazing around, reading and relaxing.

The service in Home St Jean is truly hilarious. One evening we had stayed up quite late and when we wanted to pay, Cornell (Alfred: that’s the rather dour, unsmiling manager – who has since been let go!) said all the staff were gone and he didn’t have a record of what we had eaten and drunk, so could me make up our own bill please! But the surroundings are beautiful – there is a wonderful selection of plants there which I would have photographed if I hadn’t left my camera behind me in La Fine Bouche in Kigali when we were leaving! (Alfred: it is worth pointing out that when Ruairí rang Christiane in Kigali and asked her to call to the restaurant, the manager had found the camera and had it in safe keeping for the absent-minded muzungu).

Before I left Kigali I went to again try and track down the Liliane Fonds office – this is a Dutch charity that provides medical and educational assistance to children with disabilities. Three of my students back in Ireland – Beth, Justine and Ríona – had sent me $2,000 to give them. When I found the place I asked for Sr. Donatilla who is the main organiser. She was in a meeting but came out to see me. I explained the situation and asked if it was OK to write her a cheque. She laughed and said the meeting she had just come out of had decided to cancel the Christmas party planned for the children because they just didn’t have enough money for it. Talk about good timing!! So the kids got their Christmas party thanks to Ríona, Beth and Justine and there will be plenty left over for their regular work which is paying for medical tests and assessments and supplying the basic necessities – like crutches, spectacles, callipers and whatever to enable these kids to attend school. (Alfred: If you are interested, check out their website – www.lilianefonds.org/english).

Other Christmas-time highlights were a couple of gorgeous dinners with Martine – fillet steaks and a bottle of Rioja I got for my birthday back in August one night, wine, Kenyan camembert and nice bread another night (the Kenyan camembert was really good!), Enock sitting his Cambridge International Diploma exam in Business, Commerce and Economics which I was invigilating (Alfred: OMG – the best part of this was the preamble. Enock has been doing this diploma with the Cambridge International College which is based in Jersey and Ruairí was invigilator, so they sent Ruairí a form to be filled out and stamped by his employer to verify his status which had to be posted with the completed exam. Now an official stamp is a BIG DEAL here, so the staff in the District Office reacted as if Ruairí was handing them a very irritated green mamba rather than a piece of paper. Nobody but nobody was going to stamp it and his attempts in both French and English to explain what it was all about were to no avail. This went on for two whole days until eventually the Executive Secretary turned up and, after two minutes explanation, stamped it himself!).

New Year's Eve Martine and I spent with Christiane and Baj in Kigali where they unleashed the thunderbolt of telling me they were married and had been since July! We had a really nice evening and drank far far too much (I got through almost two bottles of red wine and then helped Martine finish the bottle of brandy – oh, next day was not a happy occasion).

We also went to Gisenyi for a brief visit and stayed in a place with the awesome name of Paradis Malahide. It is possibly the nicest place I have ever been in Rwanda (or maybe anywhere, certain parts of Tuscany and San Gimignano in particular apart). Odette , the owner, was formerly married to an Irishman, Gerry McCarthy and when she came back to Rwanda built this stunning guesthouse on the shores of Lake Kivu. The setting, the rooms, the flowers in particular are just fabulous. The food is lacklustre to say the least and they had no fish the night we were there (I munched through the toughest piece of beef I have ever encountered in my life) but everything else about the place is first rate – if you ever get the chance to go, do! And Odette is one of the most beautiful – and beautifully-dressed - Rwandan women I have ever met and a charming and interesting hostess. See a load of photos of Gisenyi and paradis malahide at the end of this blog. (Alfred: please note that this advertisment was given voluntarily and was not sponsored by the owner or proprietor).

ELECTRICITY
We are now connected up to the mains!! Two cheers, well three really but I never thought I would have said that having electricity has its drawbacks! It is great being able to use the laptop and charge the MP3 players, iPods, Palm Pilot etc without worrying about it all, but the lights are a bit of a shock. We are used to candlelight at this stage (having abandoned the smelly smoky kerosene lamps a long long time ago) so the electric lights are – to our eyes – very harsh and bright. So we use the lights only on the veranda so we can see what we are cooking and the security light on the front of the house to illuminate the road and the steps down from it (Alfred: you kind of have to do that as a community service – every house that has connected itself has a bright light on the front to illuminate the road for whoever is going by, seems to be an expected thing). But the big issue is insects – we have a fair few mosquitoes but not too many but using the electric lights attracts swarms of everything under the sun – mozzies, moths, flies, and lots of what some people call sausage bugs but others (including me) call stupid bugs – like a big furry caterpillar with an inadequate pair of wings attached to its shoulders, rather like you see on representations of Cupid or cherubs, which are completely inadequate to the aerodynamics demands of supporting quite a large insect, so they fly very erratically and crash into stuff all the time, over and over again. There were three of them on the veranda one night and it was like watching some sort of insect version of the Three Stooges.

But it is nice to actually be able to watch films on the laptop from time to time (would have been a lot better months ago when I actually had time on my hands, it has to be said). Rwanda seems to be the haven for pirated films so I have actually got to see a lot of quite recent stuff, including Invictus, the new Morgan Freeman film about Nelson Mandela and the Rugby World Cup (good), The Other Boleyn Girl (a little disappointing), Watchmen (really good if you are into that kind of thing), There Will Be Blood (got better as it went along), the three Bourne films and others. I also got to see the new Star Trek film for a second time and boy did the plot holes stand out this time! Still enjoyed it though!

But it has changed the character of the village a lot. It is strange to be coming back from the bar with Enock and Claude at night and seeing all the lights everywhere. But I now see children through windows studying and doing homework which was well-nigh impossible before (Alfred: that would be the tiny percentage of children who live in houses that can afford to be connected to the mains, yes? Excuse the cynicism) and for people in general things like recharging their mobile phones (absolutely vital here) is now much much easier.

BUSES
The other huge change – and I mean huge – is that there is now a regular bus service from my village to Butare, on the hour every hour (Alfred: well, in theory anyway). for RWF500 Before the only way to go was either on the workers’ buses which meant going in at 0700 or 1700 and then getting a motorcycle back or just get a moto there and back. That’s RWF2000 each way (€2.50) and our daily allowance for all subsistence is just under RWF6,000. Now we can pop into Butare and shop and meet people and still get home for RWF1,000 (and not try and balance large quantities of shopping on the back of a motorbike which is NOT fun, especially big packs of 24 toilet rolls or 5kg of rice!

WEATHER
The downside of the recent improvements is that the traffic from Butare to Gisagara has increased enormously and the road, especially near Butare, is in an awful condition with so many more trucks, buses and cars going in and out. Added to this the weather has been really weird recently (Alfred: don’t try telling people in the UK and Ireland about how the weather has been weird!!) – there is supposed to be a dry season around Dec-Feb in between the two rainy seasons but there hasn’t been much sign of it so far!

Last Thursday I was in Butare for a meeting with Cathy and Peter (more about them anon) to plan a management training session for the District heads. Then, instead of getting a bus or moto straight home, I went to meet a friend of mine, Jean de la Croix, who wanted to get some English language learning software from me. This took ages so I had to get a moto home as the buses had stopped. It was raining softly but not too badly but, just as we left Butare, the heavens opened. I was just wearing my shirt but it wouldn’t have made any bloody difference if I had been wearing an all-body condom (more about them anon too). The road became really slippery (Alfred: Ça glisse, Alice!) and other parts were flooded so we went really, really slowly in the dark. I couldn’t see a thing because of the rain on my visor (Alfred: not to mention the fact that rain was leaking into his hair through the crash helmet which kind of made Ruairí wonder … well, you can figure it out) and I was just praying that Alexis had some sort of superpower that would enable him to see (Alfred: times like that you are better off as a passenger not being able to see, IMHO). Anyway, a trip that takes maybe 20-25 minutes took an hour and I was so wet – I remember way back when I was thirteen being in Science class in Coláiste Eoin learning about supersaturated solution and it all came back to me in a flash.

The consequences of the weather are a little bit more serious than my getting soaked – a lot of crops, especially newly-planted sorghum and rice – have been damaged or destroyed by the rain, this in an area with existing high rates of chronic malnutrition. The recent bean harvest was good, at least here (the eastern province was another story) so hopefully that will help but it could be a tough couple of months in the near future.

BEANS
Speaking of beans, I found a really interesting article in the East African newspaper, a Ugandan-based publication, about developments in bean-growing in Rwanda with amazing statistics on bean consumption – in Africa the average person consumes 17kg a year of beans, in Rwanda the average is 50-60kg!! I have stuck the article at the end of this blog entry for anyone who is interested in that sort of thing (Alfred: in other words, he lost the link).

FAREWELLS
Saying good-bye is part of the experience here but it gets weirder when you are saying good-bye to people who arrived after you did. Becky Young left this month – she is a Canadian volunteer who was based in Gitarama who I was very friendly with. But Sonya and Paula, who have finished as VSO volunteers, have stayed on in Kigali which is really great. Amalia, Julie, Els, Eric, Thom, Charlotte Shaw, Tina Hewing, and goodness knows how many else have all gone in the last few months (Alfred: and Martine, don’t forget Martine!)

SECURITY ISSUES
Some of you may have heard on the news about the recent grenade attacks in Kigali which killed one person and injured many more, four seriously. This kind of thing does happen … well, not very often but frequently enough. We had three such attacks in and around Butare leading up to Christmas. This is election year, not just for the Presidency but for all kinds of local councils and other bodies, so we kind of expect things to actually get a little more tense than usual. And there is a lot of stuff lying around the country – a friend of mine in the Rwandan Army told me that when the government forces were retreating in 1994, they fled so fast large amounts of armaments were simply dumped en route. So grenades are not hard to come by, easily concealed and easy to use.

A few months ago I was heading to a remote sector to inspect the English training centre there so I told my driver, Alexis, to come early and collect me. We headed off around 0630 and, because we were running a little late, Alexis said we were taking a short-cut down through a valley. That was fairly hairy in itself as there was quite heavy mist swirling around but then we came over the crest of a small hill and straight into a nine-man army patrol. It was the usual thing you see everywhere in these country areas near the frontier – one radio guy, one machine gun, one commanding officer (lieutenant in this case I think) and six other guys with Kalashnikovs. They stopped us and asked us, in English and Kinyarwanda, what we were doing there. I was feeling a bit irritated and then realised that their job was to patrol and look for anything suspicious. And what could be more suspicious than a random muzungu with a backpack (and a camera in his hand) in the middle of nowhere who didn’t have an order de mission (an official document you are supposed to carry anytime you leave your place of work and which gives you official permission to be places like this but which I couldn’t get because neither the Executive nor the mayor had been available).

To be fair they were absolutely fine and after checking my backpack, shook hands and waved us on with a smile (Alfred: It should be said, having read accounts from present and past volunteers in other African countries, Ruairí has never had anything but courtesy and smiles from any soldiers or police here. And that is often not the case in other places, Africa or elsewhere).

Later that day, on our way back, we ran into the same patrol again. This time it was all waves and smiles (one of them had even remembered my name!!). As we drove slowly past, also skirting a large crowd of people that had gathered, I realised that one of the soldiers waving at me was holding three old, rusty hand grenades in his other hand. The patrol had been sent to this village because a farmer working in his field had dug them up and they had called the army to take care of them.

PLANNING LAWS
A few weeks ago, Sarah and I were walking to the District Office with Peter Loach and Cathy Byrne, two short-term VSO volunteers from the UK who are working in our district for three months (Alfred: Small world interlude: Cathy’s daughter Emily was in Senegal with Heloise Allan, a VSO volunteer in my intake who was working here on the PHARE antiHIV/AIDS project). We stopped to look at the scenery a few times (which is AMAZING!) and Cathy remarked that it reminded her of Switzerland a bit (Alfred: Em, actually Ruairí is not exactly sure who said this or even when. Attributing it to Cathy and on this occasion is a guess and if anyone else wants to lay claim to the credit, just let us know). I haven’t visited Switzerland much and the parts I have seen have been urban – well, Zurich to be honest, which is pretty poor for someone who is actually a Swiss citizen but it reminded me of other ways in which Rwanda reminds me of Switzerland. I remember one of my uncles who lives in Switzerland telling me about regulations in his block of flats (Alfred: I am sure you mean apartments) about the colour of plastic bags people were allowed to use to put out their rubbish. Apparently someone had been using cheaper brown ones instead of the proper black ones and this was a BIG deal.

Well here there are laws and regulations about the weirdest things and they bring them in really suddenly and without warning. A few days ago on my way to work I noticed that people were dismantling the fences around their houses. These are usually made of bamboo and everyone has them – virtually every single house here is enclosed in some way – a brick wall and huge iron gate if you can afford it, down to a ramshackle and aged brittle bamboo fence at the other extreme. Well, someone somewhere has decided that this is not on and looks bad. ‘La propriété’ I think is the French word and I haven’t been able to find a good English word for the way they use it here – I think it is just the general ‘look’ of the place. Houses with good-quality fences or walls were allowed to keep them but 90% of places have taken them down, all in the space of three days (Alfred: the same is true in Butare so maybe this is a nationwide thing). And it has completely transformed the look of the place and in a rather disorientating way too! Everything is now open to view, people who sat in privacy outside their houses are now essentially sitting on the road and are obviously not very comfortable with this, especially the elderly.

And this is a regular occurrence. Some businesses in the village remain closed because they have not been able to afford to upgrade the front of their businesses as laid down by the new regulations. And all the businesses in the village had to paint their fronts the same colour, a colour personally chosen by the mayor. In Butare, EVERY single in the town centre has been told it has to have a second, functioning story on their business or it will be closed down. It is not a question of height – for some reason the council has decided that it is necessary to have functioning two-story buildings everywhere, which is going to be incredibly expensive and serve no obvious propose. Sometimes I really feel I don’t understand this place at all. (Alfred: I would respectfully submit that the word ‘sometimes’ in that last comment is superfluous).

FULL-BODY CONDOMS
There is a story going round here that if you boil a condom for long enough – no one knows how long – you can then stretch it over your entire body. So far I don’t know anyone who has actually tried to do this, not that there is any shortage of condoms around here. Anyone out there have any ideas? (Alfred: Including how you are supposed to breathe while doing this – that would be useful to know)

GOODBYE FOR NOW!
Wow – if you made it this far you deserve a medal. I leave you with the bean article from the East African, my love and best wishes to all my friends and family

Climbing bean becomes Rwanda’s new super crop
Jacqueline Mujawamariya, 31, has spent many years growing, eating and selling beans. She prefers climbing beans to bush beans, which not only make up a large proportion of her diet, but are also the main source of her livelihood.

The CAB-Bureruka, CAB2-Gasirinda and RWV 1892-Ngwirurare are her favourite varieties. They are among 15 varieties redeveloped by scientists from the Institut de Sciences Agronomiques du Rwanda (ISAR) in collaboration with the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

The scientists, led by Augustine Musoni, have in the past decade been experimenting with different bean varieties to find out those that are adaptable to Rwanda and the surrounding regions. They say the 15 varieties will ensure food security in East and Central Africa. “Climbing beans take three months to mature, yield three to four tonnes per hectare, with the possibility of growing two to three crops per year. They also fetch good prices, making them a steady source of food and income,” said Daphrose Gahakwa, the director of ISAR.

Bush beans in contrast, mature within four to five months and yield just a third of that of climbing beans. While both types are grown in Africa, the climbing beans are steadily gaining popularity in Eastern and Central Africa, with high adoption levels in southwest Uganda, Burundi, eastern DR Congo and eastern and western Kenya.
Scientists attribute it to their ability to provide small-scale farmers with good yields on small pieces of land, and that both the seeds and leaves are useful for food and income. Robin Buruchara, the regional coordinator of CIAT- Africa, said the research has also led to soil fertility improvements through organic enrichment, better soil conservation and more sustainable agro-ecosystems for different areas.“The release of these varieties in Rwanda also allows other countries to share materials and responsibilities as well as reduce the overall cost of research,” said Dr Buruchara.

Studies have shown that Rwanda, where 65 per cent of farmers grow climbing beans, has the highest consumers of the pulse per capita in the world, at 50-60kg per person per year, compared with an average of 17 kg for the rest of Africa.Beans are thus a major source of second class proteins for Rwandans. Children grow healthy with none or very limited need for first class animal protein. With the country’s high population, climbing beans also allow for maximum use of the limited land.

PARADIS MALAHIDE, GISENYI

Odette, the owner with Martine. Odette built the entire establishment from scratch.

Views from the bedrooms

The fisherman heading out onto the lake for the night, singing as they paddled.

Welcoming fish snack - on the house (Alfred: this may have just been for Ruairí and Martine, don't assume it is automatic!) and entertainment at dinnertime!

Breakfast at the lake!

Massive Update Number Two: Building a Dam

2010-02-15T15:38:00.008+02:00

THE RUKARURA DAM PROJECT

A lot of stuff to catch up on but the weekend before last I spent one of the most interesting days I have had so far in Rwanda. My friend John Harris from South Africa is a civil engineer and has been project manager of a dam-building project not far from Kigeme east of where I am (Alfred: Em, I think you mean west. You know west, like, on the left hand side of the map?). I headed up Friday evening and the idea was to head out to the site, spend most of the day there and then get back in time for the Ireland-Italy rugby match. I had heard John talking about the project so often and knew it was a high-profile one in that President Kagame himself had visited and had personally ordered them to work seven days a week and pretty much round the clock to try and meet the deadline of February 2010.

Anyway, I headed into Butare and got the SOTRA bus up to Gikongoro where I met up with Amy and Christine for a beer or two and a bite to eat at La Fraicheur. John joined us later which was nice inasmuch as it meant I wasn’t going to have to walk home. Actually, he dropped Amy and Christine up to Kigeme too so we all gained on that one.

Back at John’s house Maureen served us dinner and then John broke me the bad news: his DSTV subscription had just expired and we had no satellite TV, so no rugby, but he was sure he could convince the local hostelry, The Guesthouse, to put it on for us!

Next morning off we headed – up to Kigeme and then off for about 14km along the dirt roads. Now, they are far from being the worst roads I’ve been on but given that the trucks and pick-ups have to go back and forth all day I would hate to see them in bad weather. At the site there is very limited space for storage of sand, aggregate, cement or anything else so it all has to be trucked in as needed over about 11km from the storage depot, so when it rains heavily which it does regularly here, everything comes to a standstill.

The scenery around the site is absolutely amazing. The Rukarura river is quite long and no fewer (Alfred: He actually wrote ‘less’ the first time!! Tsk tsk!) than FIVE hydro-electric schemes are being built along various stretches of it at the moment. The basic project is in three parts: the dam that creates the reservoir of water needed, the head-race canal that brings the water 2.3km to the powerhouse and the powerhouse itself where the turbines will be installed and the power generated.

Anyway I spent the day wandering around the site taking over a hundred photos and movie clips: first at the dam, then the powerhouse, then the dam again. I walked along most of the canal route from the dam to the powerhouse and inspired enormous suspicion and distrust among the workers as I took pictures of them working, or not working as the case may be. I remarked to John that he should hire me as every time I showed up anywhere everyone frantically upped their work rate in case this strange muzungu was something to do with Fair Construction.

Fair Construction are the company that have the civil construction part of the contract – they are a Rwandan company and at the moment this is their only contract but Rwanda has plans for hundreds – I mean hundreds – of hydro-electric and biogas electricity-generating schemes so I expect they will be a lot busier in the future.

The most fascinating part was watching the giant cement-mixer at the dam itself – a big rusty red thing connected to a bright yellow cement pump (Alfred: with the wonderful brand name Putzmeister) that had people swarming all over and around it. Teams of people shovelled sand (2 barrows), aggregate (3 barrows) and cement (2 bags) into the hopper which then poured into the machine while a woman wearing beautiful bright-yellow plastic shoes clambered precariously around the machine pouring in water as needed.

Health and safety is an interesting concept generally here in Rwanda – I have to admit the working conditions here were probably a lot safer than I had seen in other parts of the country. But about one third of the workers had proper footwear (shoes or wellies), one third were wearing plastic flip-flops and the final third were barefoot. And the ones with flip-flops usually kicked them off when they actually had to do something so they could get a proper grip with their feet.

Around half three everything stopped for the distribution of sorghum beer – not a whole lot, just enough to give people a psychological kick and get them through the last part of the day. And what a carnival that was – the arguing, the tantrums, the pushing and shoving, the frantic drinking of one’s ration of beer in case anyone tried to argue you had been given too much and afterwards the sullen looks and petulant stances of those who felt they had been cheated or short-changed. One guy stood piteously outside the office holding an empty jerry-can for about ten minutes, obviously hoping someone somewhere would take pity on him!

In a strange way, John’s job here reminded me very much of my job back in Rathdown School (except for doling out the sorghum beer). He spent the day running around checking on things and trying to sort out the myriad problems, complaints and glitches that arose. The ongoing problem was the big blue cement mixer that had not been working for a while and had cut their cement-pouring rate in half as a result. The second (or third) technician who was looking at it said it needed a new 60amp connector (his words, not mine) and he headed off to Butare to see if he could find one (Alfred: He couldn’t and headed to Kigali instead hoping to find somewhere open on a Sunday where he could get one). I chatted to the cement mixer operator, Jacques Kizungu, a Congolese who had trained as a teacher but couldn’t find work so was working construction instead. He was there with his brother Antoine Patric – he had no English at all and was thrilled to find someone to speak French to - but Jacques had both English and French. He inveigled my phone number out of me, something I was to regret later on. (Alfred: One usually does regret that here in Rwanda – not always, but often).

Other than that it was the usual litany of problems. There is no mobile phone reception at the site as it is deep in a valley so it is a pain in the ass having to physically chase around everywhere and look for people. When you send the pick-up into town you have no real idea when it is going to get back and one of the pick-ups had faulty brakes so the other was off to get parts! People whinged about their pay, machinery was not working properly and so on and so forth. And, as we are getting towards the end of the project, no-one was actually trying to kill themselves working because who wants to hasten the end of their jobs?

It was a great day, though it did drag on a bit as John and I sat in the little hut wondering if and when the pick-up would return. By the time it did it was already half-time in Ireland-Italy and as we were both starving we decided food was more important. A bite to eat (during which a massive thunderstorm broke out and all the power went off anyway) and then back to John’s house. A few beers, a chat with Mukesh (John’s colleague who runs the powerhouse end of the project and shares the house with him) and then to bed, all the while listening to the incessant thunder of rain on the roof. The chances of John and Mukesh even getting to work the next day were looking pretty slim.

And then at 0400, one of those moments that so characterises Rwanda for me. The phone rang and when I answered it it was Jacques Kizungu, the Congolese cement-mixer operator from the dam. Now, my French was somewhat scant when I arrived here but by dint of practice, study and hanging around Martine a lot, it has improved, even at 0400. I asked him why he had rung and he chirpily replied it was to say hello (Alfred: ‘Chirpily’ at 0400 is adding insult to injury). When I pointed out that 0400 was a strange time to do such a thing, he fell silent for a minute and then said ‘Peut-être’! And then, of course, he got on to the main issue: he wanted to go back and resume his studies and wanted to know if I would pay for that or else find him someone who would. I deew a deep breath and replied as follows (as best I can remember):

Est-ce ce vous êtes fou, mon vieux? Est-ce tu crois, sérieusement, que tout nous muzungus ont de l’argent à jéter par les fenêtres comme ça? Et si j’avais de l’argent comme ça que je serais susceptible de le donner à quelqu’un assez stupide pour me sonner à quatre heures du matin? Imbécile!

OK, maybe I over-reacted but you do get SOOOO tired of this sort of thing. And it was a pretty stupid thing to do so maybe he will learn from the experience (Alfred: That's got to be the lamest attempt at self-exculpation I’ve seen in a long time.)

The dam will generate nearly 10 megawatts of power when completed, about 10% of Rwanda’s current needs. The big biogas plant they are designing in Kibuye will produce 120 megawatts when finished and between that and all the other projects on line – even allowing for significantly increased demand within Rwanda – the country hopes to become a major exporter of power within five years.

The scenery around here is awesome! Can you see the woman in the middle of the right-hand picture tilling the ground on the steep slope?

The Rukarura River as it flows towards the dam site.

The blue non-working cement mixer. John in the stripy shirt and hat has his back to us, Jacques 'Midnight Caller' Kizungu is standing between the machines.

The actual dam itself being built across the river

Cement-mixer people; note my friend with the yellow shoes perched on the right. The canal snaking its way to the powerhouse.

The first part of the canal is covered as the slope above is steep and debris might fall in.

The powerhouse in its lovely little valley. You can see the green pipes above that feed the water down to the turbines. In the first picture, John and Mukesh (middle) are talking to the site foreman.

Massive Update Number One: Work

2010-02-07T17:32:00.002+02:00

Where to start? I think I am just going to pick things up from now and refer back to various things that have happened since I last wrote an entry – which was December 19th I now realise, plus Alfred’s entry of December 29th which was mostly pictures (Alfred: He has forgotten the one on January 22nd, though to dignify it with the description ‘blog entry’ would be to violate the basic decencies of the English language). But it is – in a way – a good thing, because I have been so busy with work, life and basically having an enjoyable and fulfilling time that I haven’t had the time to keep up the blog! Alfred has also been preoccupied with Alphonsine, but more of that anon (Alfred: Oh no you don’t, you leave my private life out of this!)

UPDATE ONE: WORK
Work has been busy, tedious and fascinating all at the same time. I spent a large part of January visiting the centres in my District where the REAP (Rwanda English Action Programme) training has been taking place – every primary and secondary teacher were required to attend four weeks of English language and methodology training. I managed to get around twenty-one of the twenty-nine centres before I had to head off to Kigali for VSO training. It was good stuff and I was impressed with the quality of training and the level of interest shown by the trainers and teachers. There were problems of course – someone higher up had ordered one marker per trainer for a four-week course rather than one BOX of markers. Also, having all the teachers in one class regardless of levels made it very difficult for the weaker teachers to benefit properly from the training. Having said that, most people seemed happy with it but are obviously hoping there will be more courses to follow.

It also gave me the chance to visit some of the really far-flung parts of the district I hadn’t yet visited and grab quick meetings with the school directors I hope to visit this trimester so, all in all, a good couple of weeks’ work.

Then it was off to Kigali for a two-day education sector conference followed by the arrival of the new volunteers. They arrived in in dribs and drabs over a two-day period and it was nice to see so many familiar names and faces (I don’t know what it is like in other VSO countries but it is remarkable the number of volunteers here who either extend or re-enlist!). Antonia Eastman is back for the third time (her placement promptly fell through less than forty-eight hours after she arrived but she has already fixed herself up with a new one), Annemiek (who was Amy’s predecessor in Kigeme diocese) is back to join Moira in the College of Education in Kavumu. And Christine Mack who was here before but not as a VSO volunteer is joining Amy in Kigeme. In case anyone out there is interested in the kinds of things we do with VSO in Rwanda, here is a list of all the new intake and what they will be doing:

Melissa Hipkins from England will be in Nyanza working (like me) as an Education management Adviser for two years. Her husband Stephen is a vet specialising in dairy cattle and is travelling as an ‘accompanying partner’ (VSO’s phrase) and is hoping to find employment here as well (Alfred: As Nyanza is the centre of the Rwandan dairy industry, he should have no problem)

Rana Al-Atia from Iraq will be working with the Anglican Diocese of Huye for two years as a Primary Methodologist (it is where my great friend Tiga was based before) and she will be living in Butare, a new neighbour for Sarah and me.

Hussain Wakhule from Kenya will also be living in Butare and will be working for two years in the Butare School for the Deaf

Peter Loach and Cathy Byrne from England are on three-month placements working in two sectors in my district, each of them working with two schools. The fact that three or four weeks has been lopped off the term hasn’t made their jobs any easier! And they will also be based in Butare – it’s suddenly getting crowded down here!

Christine Mack from Australia, who used to live and work with Paula Rolston in Gahini, is now the Education Management Adviser in Kigeme Anglican Diocese (Alfred: So Amy – after a year and a half on her own – FINALLY has a colleague to work with!)

Annemiek Miller from Canada, who spent two years in Kigeme Diocese before Amy, is working in the Kavumu College of Education as an advisor to their internship programme (Alfred: that means their teaching practice programme)

Ken Goodwin is replacing Bruce Upton as Education Management Adviser in Gitarama. He is from Dumbarton and supports St Mirren, but we are trying not to hold that against him. He also seems to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the pubs of Galway and, indeed, most things Irish. I have seen many interesting t-shirts in this country but didn’t expect to meet someone wearing an ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ one!

Colette Étienne from Mauritius is going to be working in Ngororero as a Primary Methodologist. This is the first time a VSO volunteer has worked there and, interestingly, is where my Sarah was originally supposed to be going before she got diverted down to Gisagara.

Jeremy White from England, guitarist extraordinaire, will be working with Jason down in Ngoma District, based in Kibungo for six months as an Education Management Advisor

Shala Grindlay from Canada is working as a Primary Methodologist in Byumba, living in Paula Rolston’s old house. I never did to get to visit Paula there so I am glad someone else is there instead!

Antonia Eastman from Wales was originally going to work in Kibuye for six months but a flood in the school has made the placement unworkable. So, to be honest, I am not sure what she is going to be doing. I heard mention of Cyangugu, the Program Office and various other possibilities. But Antonia is an old Rwanda hand and will get it all sorted out in double-quick time, I am sure. Still, her case emphasises what they told us during VSO training – anything can happen!!

Steve Vaid from England will be working in Kigali for two years with FENAPH, the national organisation that co-ordinates all disability organisations.

Kristenne Pickles from England (often known more by her surname than her first name) will also be based in Kigali, for two years and working with UPHLS, the umbrella organisation for anti-HIV/AIDS work among people with disabilities.

Nic Clark from England – Nic has the job most people here seem to envy immediately – he will be working with the National Paralympic Committee and will be based at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali.

Vanessa Hill from England will be working with the National Volunteering programme for two years, based in Kigali

Evelyn Nyakojoo from Uganda is going to be based at the VSO program Office in Kigali for four months advising them on Gender & Equity policies

Yolanda Haarewijn from The Netherlands will be based in Kigali for two years working with the Rwanda Union for the Deaf.

So, I spent ten days in the Amani Guesthouse with them, as a kind of live-in advisor and it was a ball! I ran a few presentations and workshop thingies but most of the time it was just chatting, answering questions, bringing people in and out of town and so on. All culminating in the Family Dinner on January 23rd when all the present volunteers gather together! (Alfred: he is omitting the high point – the practicalities workshop where, in company with Portia, Ruairí demonstrated to the new volunteers how to work a kerosene lamp, kerosene stove, charcoal stove, water filter and mosquito net. Aficionados of the classic days of silent comedy films would have appreciated the way in which – effortlessly – Ruairí turned it into a workshop on how NOT to work all these things. Trying to light a kerosene stove that he had not put any kerosene in was a high point. If any of the new arrivals are keeping a blog, it would be well worth your while tracking down their accounts of what happened!)

I returned from all that to find that our house had been completely redecorated in our absence following the wiring that had been installed previously. And a fabulous job the painter had done too! Every item of furniture had been moved and painted behind, there were no splashes and the place looked a lot better.

Upon returning I had hoped to start visiting the rest of the REAP training centres during their last week but the National Primary and O-Level Examination results had come out and that took priority. Sarah and I spent a thrilling three days manually inputting the results for eighty-something schools from spreadsheets that were supposed to have been sent to us in soft copy but …. hadn’t been. Then we had to try and identify which of the candidates were boys or girls – all analysis must include differentiation by gender (correctly) but they don’t include that data on the spreadsheets!

So, apart from the day when Cathy and Peter came out to meet the District staff and get various bits and pieces sorted out, I spent the rest of the time analysing the exam results. On Friday I turned up with Sarah at the office to find that the only place we could find to work was the meeting hall. Then, around ten-thirty, they told us there was a meeting and we had to move. Sarah managed to find a place in Odette’s office but I couldn’t find anywhere at all. So I went home to work only to find there was no electricity. I worked until my laptop gave out (Alfred: Do ALL Dell computers have absolutely crap batteries??) ‘Bugger this’ I said to myself and headed into Butare and then on up to Gitarama to see Ken. Around half-past four Sarah rang me and said the chargé had just turned up in the office and wanted a full set of statistics on the exam results for a meeting the following morning! I, of course, immediately felt guilty for not being at work (though I had tried to find someone to tell I was leaving but there wasn’t anyone around at the time!) and also really annoyed because what he was asking me for was going to take at least three or four days’ work to prepare!!

What it did mean was that, when I met Ken and Annemiek in Gitarama, instead of chatting and being sociable, I marched them straight to a bar with a working electric socket and proceeded to assemble and email off whatever I had ready for Alexis. I have to say, Ken and Annemiek were remarkably good-tempered about it all!!

So that is the main work update. We also had a visit from a KPMG delegation who are considering starting a volunteer involvement in Rwanda, which went well (I think) and next week (apart from Tuesday when Charlotte Phillips my Program Manager is coming to visit) I am hoping to get back on the roads again. Busy days ahead! And only 20 weeks left before I leave!

Alfred: That was the work update. Tune in for the non-work update, which includes visiting Gisenyi, New Year’s in Kigali, Martine’s (and Alphonsine’s) departure, the saga of Ken’s computer, touring the dam construction site in Rukarara (some good pictures of that), the coming of electricity, and much much more! And he may share with those of you who are interested some of the interesting trends coming out of his analysis, especially in respect of girls' education. There will, of course, be the usual health warning on that blog entry so that those of you who find that kind of stuff insanely boring can flick over to Facebook instead.....

Amani Greetings and Farewells

2010-01-24T10:32:00.003+02:00

Welcome Melissa, Stephen, Rana, Hussain, Peter, Cathy, Christine, Annemiek, Antonia, Jeremy, Colette, Shala, Steve, Kristenne, Nic, Vanessa, Yolanda, Evelyn and Ken!!!

It is Sunday morning January and I am about to pack up my stuff and head into Kigali Centre for a meeting before getting the bus down to Butare and Gisagara. It has been quite a month and apologies to all for the failure to update but I have had other things to occupy me. Martine went home Friday 22nd and has arrived back in Edinburgh safe and sound and since Saturday 16th I have been acting as live-in adviser to the new intake of VSO Rwanda volunteers, nineteen of them in total, here in the Amani Guesthouse. That has been an extremely enjoyable but tiring experience so I am looking forward to heading home and to an established routine for a while!! Also, the landlord was having the entire house painted while Sarah and I were away and we are looking forward (with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety) to seeing what has happened in our absence.

So there is much to catch up on - the house refurbishment, the REAP inspections, the trip to Gisenyi, Kigali, the new volunteers and much, much more. But I have to be in town in less than an hour and I have at least 50% more stuff than my rucksack will hold so I am off to unload stuff on the new Butare volunteers as I can pick it up from them easily later in the week.

Talk again soon!!

Update on the way

2010-01-22T10:08:00.003+02:00

Alfred: Woops - forgot the italics when this was first posted to show it was me.

OK - no excuses this time and none necessary. The guy has been really busy over New Year until today - English training centre inspections (19 of them), New Year celebrations and now training the 19 new volunteers who arrived recently. And, of course, saying 'goodbye' to Martine, who leaves today. At 1530. I got to say my goodbyes in Kibuye (see photos in previous blog entry). And he heads back to Gisagara Sunday for an extremely hectic week of visits followed by two months of almost daily school inspdections. Wow - he IS planning on keeping himself busy ... wonder why? Anyway, he may have time post some nice pictures of his time in Gisenyi ....

Brief Christmas update

2009-12-29T12:02:00.015+02:00

Alfred: OK – it has been a while … again. Below are a bunch of pictures from Christmas in Kibuye which, as the more perceptive of you may notice, includes ME! Yes, I finally got out of the bedroom in Gisagara where I have been stuck for fifteen months and got to see a bit of Rwanda. I suspect I may have to write the Christmas update myself as his nibs is a little too preoccupied these days with work, house refitting and …. well, the ‘other thing’ that we are all pretending isn’t actually happening at the moment. Oh, and he had malaria as well, or so he claims. The doctor said he did even though the blood test was negative. He also tested negative for typhoid, giardia, amoebas – in fact anything that can be detected in blood or stool (les selles – another new word for his ever-expanding French vocabulary). The doc said he might have malaria because doxycycline (which Ruairí takes as a preventive) can mask the actual presence of malaria in the blood test. If Ruairí had had the courage to tell the doctor that he hardly ever remembers to take his doxycycline anymore and that therefore there was no way it could be masking anything and that THEREFORE he was extremely unlikely to actually have malaria …. But no. He nodded, took his prescription and swallowed the eight tablets a day, thereby making himself feel a LOT worse than he had been doing hitherto. Oh, and of course he then went around for days telling people how he didn’t think he had malaria but the doctor had said he did, hoping to create a general pseudo-martyr sympathy for himself. He forgets most people here have actually had a touch of real malaria or at least know what it is like to really have it, so he’s not fooling anyone except himself (that he is actually quite good at, must be all the practice he gets).

Copyright notice: please note that the following images were 'borrowed' from Sarah Wragg and Martine Oliver because idiot here left his camera behind in a restaurant in Kigali before heading to Kibuye. Luckily, one of the guardian angels that we know hover over small children and congenital idiots ensured that the restaurant owner found the camera, kept it safe and returned it to Ruairí via a Canadian friend.

Me with Mel and then me again having opened my Christmas present (minature elephant to keep me company when I get stuck back in that bedroom again)

Christmas stockings hung by the chimney with care (all made by Sarah and Libby); Marion and Bruce's favourite monkey (who was impeccably behaved when we were there; some people even petted him)

Ruairí and Martine (Hi Trish in Florida - any comments on the shirt????)

Me and Martine; me and Ruairí

Crossing Lake Kivu (L) and gathering on Amahoro Island for 'Christmas dinner' (R)

Ruairí doing Secret Santa

In the boat on the way back; Ruairí, Sleeping Beauty and Jason on the left, John, Mel and Julie on the right

Martine

Libby, Karangwa and Libby

Julie, Janet (her mother) and Julie

April and Amy descending on the christmas cake (or maybe April was icing it?)

General April montage: April with what should have been our Christmas dinner; April icing the Christmas cake; April looking as if the hangover is setting in early; April sleeping like an angel.

Martine and Ruairí on the way back from Amahoro island: if you look closely you can see the start of what turned out be be a massive sunburn on Ruairí's neck and shoulders

Dinner at Bethanie; Mukesh

John and April; Ruairí being an idiot (count those fillings!!)

Sarah and Martine; Sarah demonstrating the new Rwandan Sign Language for the Deaf sign for 'Primus'

Nice weekend - and it isn't even over yet!

2009-12-19T20:17:00.005+02:00

HAPPY TIMES
As we gear up for Christmas it has been a really nice few days! On Friday I popped into Butare at seven a.m. to check the post and found, not just the long-awaited examination papers for Enoch's diploma exam but TWO parcels when I wasn't expecting any! One from my god-daughter Naomi's family in Greystones (Belgian chocolates!) and the other from my friend Seosamh (wind-up torch, book of folklore from Oileán Chléire, seven-page letter). Awesome! Then at work I spent a long time helpong a colleague put the final touches to his MA thesis on the effects of different kinds of mulching on banana plants and we spent an hour trying to figure out how to include standard deviation on Excel charts (Alfred: those of you who have only a passing acquaintance with Ruairí or know him only through this blog may need to be told that he is not being sarcastic or (as Alannis Morisette would say) ironic here - he REALLY enjoys this kind of thing because he can now 'enliven' conversations with his fellow VSO colleagues by saying things like "Well, of course, in most areas of Rwanda they are still mulching with hill grass but a 5cm layer of Elephant grass properly applied significantly boosts nitrogen levels and can increase fruit output by as much as 16.4%". The complete silence that greets such interjections shows how deeply impressed the audience are by such utterances.)

Then it was off to Butare on the work bus and up to Gitarama to visit Rebecca Young, another VSO volunteer. She lives in a really nice house that she is about to be moved out of as the water supply seems to be hopelessly contaminated - so far, she and Karen who shares the house with her have had typhoid (both), amoebas (both), giardia (Becky) and parasites (type unspecified - Karen). Tom from Food for the Hungry was also there. Anyway it was a wonderful evening, one of the most pleasant in ages. As soon as I arrived in dinner was served - chicken fajitas, guacamole, carrot salad, chips, beer, fruit salad and yoghurt and it was gorgeous. And the fajita mixture was made with real chicken sent all the way from Canada and the USA and tasted really nice. Then we chatted, played a game called Jenga Truth or Dare which involves removing wooden blocks from a large structure without making it collapse and then answering the question written on it (Truth) or performing the action (Dare). All new to me if old hat to others and a very pleasant evening.

Next morning I slept in until NINE O'CLOCK!!! Karen had made coffee and left it in the electric coffee machine and I had it and bread and bananas and an egg. (Alfred:The egg turned out to be uncooked when he cracked it open so there was a wonderful five minutes while he wandered around looking helpless with a cracked-open raw egg in his hands while Becky set up the hotplate and found him a frying-pan!). Then the bus back to Butare, meeting another VSO Helen on the way, met Sarah in Butare who is now back from Kigali after her three weeks working for MINEDUC (Alfred: and a wonderful. character-building experience that was, from her accounts). Then we met up with our landlord who drove us out to Gisagara and spent an hour there with his nephew-electrician discussing all the wiring that is going to be put into our house so we will have electricity for the early New Year!!

PHOTOS
The photos I put on the blog are, of necessity, very compressed. I have now uploaded some of my favourites onto my page in Flickr if anyone is interested. Only some of them are up yet as it takes a VERY long time - each photo is between 1.5MB and 2MB and at an upload speed of 2-3kbps ... well, you can do the Maths yourself. (Alfred: Emmm, surely 'yourselves'? Or do you think there is only one person out there reading this blog?) So if you are reading this and are in Rwanda, avoid the page. If you have a good connection speed you can find them at http://www.flickr.com/ and just type 'Ruairi' and 'Rwanda' into the search and you should find me.

TIGER WOODS
Alfred: Haven't exactly been able to keep up with all the details of what the hell happened here but I thought this one was rather clever:

Tiger, Tiger, bleeding bright
In the driveway of the night
What small Swedish hand or wrist
With a three-wood your head kissed?

Hi everyone!

2009-12-17T22:42:00.003+02:00

Just a brief scribble - just got in from the pub where I managed to limit myself to ONE beer in two hours (Alfred: this being the third night in a row he has been up there with Enock). Enock got one of the new TIGO modems and, while they are a lot cheaper, they seem to be just as crap as the MTN ones, so no improvement there. It was announced on the radio today that the start of the school year in 2010 is being delayed from January 11th to February 2nd to allow extra time for English training (and, no doubt, completing the building of all the new classrooms that are curently under construction). That is going to make my January a lot more complicated - I have a two-day Education VSO conference on 14th-15th January and then I am supposed to be in Kigali for eight days helping with the in-country training for the new intake of volunteers (Alfred: and saying 'goodbye' to Martine as well - weren't going to mention that, were you?)

Work has kind of petered to a halt this week for no reason that I can tell - not just me but most people in the District Office seem similarly disaffected. However, the landlord rang to arrange for an electrician to come and wire the house over Christmas so at least HE thinks the electricity is actually going to make it as far as us! A surreal sight this evening on my way to the pub - I could see Christmas lights flashing on and off in one of the shop doorways. When I got there this guy was making them flash on and off by pressing the ends of the exposed wires to a car battery!

More soon - I leave you with my favourite picture of those I have taken so far in Rwanda! Reminds me of Peig in some strange fashion .... (I think you get the full-size version if you click on it. I hope to upload the really big one - along with others - onto my Flickr page soon. Just go to Flickr and type in Ruairí and Rwanda)

PS: What is this sh*t about people queueing up in Listowel to shake hands and sympathise with a convicted sex offender? Please someone tell me it is some kind of joke .......

Christmas is coming and the .... em, goats are getting fat!

2009-12-15T21:02:00.003+02:00

Alfred: for a guy who spends his days whining about how little work he has to do, you'd think he could use some of it to update the blog! But, truth to tell, you aren't missing much, life has been very quiet recently. It now looks like English training has been postponed until after Christmas which is going to cause havoc for Ruairí as he volunteered to be with the new VSO intake for about ten days in January - tough choice. Given Martine is leaving on January 21st, no bets are being taken on which option he is going to go for given the choice .....

Christmas plans are well afoot - ten of them are off to Kibuye together for three or four days (I say 'them' advisedly as I don't think his Lordship has any plans to bring me along. He is already having sleepless nights wondering how he is going to cart that mountain of electronic equipment he seems to bring everywhere with him up to Kibuye and back via Kigali. I mean, it's only four days and he is going to be with friends, and Martine, and wonderful scenery, and beer - does he really need a laptop, MP3 player, Palm Pilot, camera, surge protector, recharger leads for all of the above??). At least he will have time to write his blog instead of leaving me to take up the slack!

Re the last blog entry by the way, a slight correction - the prize for the District for being number One in the anti-corruption listing was one million francs (€1,250) and not ten million as Ruairí reported. It is going to be spent on a staff outing, possibly to Gisenyi.

OK - I'll start nagging him again, watch this space!

Wild weekend ... and other stuff

2009-12-10T14:38:00.003+02:00

LONG WEEKEND

Got the bus to Butare after work on Thursday to meet my friend from Gikongoro (whom we all refer to as South African John even though the other Johns have since left) for dinner. A very pleasant evening in the Chineese restaurant, where the service was slightly less slow than normal and we were undercharged on the bill. Mukesh, an Indian co-worker of John’s, came with him and we had a really nice long chat, staying there until 2300.

One of the reasons for coming in was that I needed to go to the District Immigration office in Huye and get my green card renewed. But first I went to the post office to see if anything had come in – and quelle surprise: THREE large parcels!! OK, two of them were my Amazon order which they had sent in two packs and the third was a parcel from New Zealand for another volunteer, Jane Keenan, who used to work in Butare. In fact Jane was leaving Rwanda in two days’ time so one the one hand at least the parcel got here before she left but she was unlikely to be able to use the contents much!

The reason for going to Butare for my green card was that my local immigration officer never seems to be in his office so I decided to go to the District Office in Huye (Alfred: Huye = Butare: Another of these places that now has a new official name and an old, traditional one which is still what most people use. These things take time, when Mukesh told Ruairí that he was from Mumbai ,it was probably the first time that he didn’t mentally translate it into ‘Bombay’ in his head). Unfortunately, even though I had gone through the entire process with Sarah a few weeks before, I had completely forgotten exactly what I had to do and went to the offices in the wrong order. The procedure is as follows (for this district, I hasten to add, it’s different elsewhere):

Get a photocopy of your passport and current visa and two passport-sized photographs
Go to the bank and pay the RWF5000 fee and get a receipt
Take the receipt to the Rwanda Revenue Authority Office and get a receipt for the receipt
Take the receipt for the receipt to the District Immigration Office between 0800 and
1200 on a Friday morning with the two photographs and they will complete your card.

Anyway, I went to the Revenue Authority first, who turned out to have moved offices. By the time I went to the bank there was a queue of seventy-four people waiting to be served so I gave up (Alfred: Yes, he actually counted them. Words fail me …). Headed off to Kigali, called in on my Kenyan friend Abraham and gave him the three volumes of Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy (we are fellow SF fans but he has a hard time laying his hands on books), met Martine, went to a Rwanda Revenue Office and got my receipt (it’s easier in Kigali – you don’t have to go to the bank as well),went to the bank anyway to get some cash out of the machine – the machine gave me my cash but kept the card and they told me to come back Saturday morning – and then lunch in a place called La Sierra which I had never been in before , went back to Nyamirambo to drop off the bag and then off to Pasadena to meet Jane Keenan and her friends for farewell drinkies.

It was my first time in Pasadena, a restaurant/bar somewhere in Gikondo-Nyenyeri and I can’t say I was impressed overall. Service slow and inefficient as usual, some interesting dancing to watch (they do salsa nights here as well) but a nice group of people (Alfred: I persuaded him not to actually go through each of them one by one, no need to thank me, I did it for my sanity as well as yours). Then six of us got into a taxi to head home – four of us to Martine’s in Nyamirambo (with Jean and Jane) and dropping two friends/cousins of Jean’s off along the way.

Well, I have taken many interesting, strange and frankly scary journeys around Rwanda in my fifteen months here but this one was definitely in the top five. You forget that there are roads right in the centre of Kigali as bad as anything out in the rural areas. The big tarmac roads loop around the city and in between them is a dense network of tracks and paths. We took these to get to where Jean’s friends/cousins lived and a slow, tortuous, bumpy route it was. The Toyota Corolla’s suspension was OK but not designed for these roads with seven people on board – the soreness of my rear end was only mitigated by my having to focus on not getting concussion from banging my head off the roof.

Once we dropped John Bosco and his companion off I figured things would get better but almost immediately we got to a really steep climb, at the bottom of which the car got stuck in a sandy bit. So everyone piled out, the car backed up and then tried to take a run at it (difficult given the holes, crevasses, gullies and whatnot that the road ‘surface’ was comprised of). After a few goes he managed and roared away, pursued by us who were now worried we would get left in the middle of nowhere. When we caught up with the car again, there was no driver in it but he shortly re-emerged from the bushes doing up his fly – glad to know it wasn’t only us who were nervous (Alfred: Really? You think it is more comforting when the driver is ALSO scared? You need to think this one through, mon vieux).

Eventually we came to where the dirt track joined the main road to Nyamirambo and the driver immediately pulled up and said that he had run out of petrol. It seemed rather sudden (it would be far from the first time that I have been in a vehicle in Rwanda that ran out of fuel) but we got out of the car anyway. As we did so, we noticed there was a police checkpoint at the junction we were heading to and the reason for the sudden fuel loss became clear!!

Anyway, we got four motos home and then sat up to all hours chatting – Jane opened her big parcel and then shared out the contents as she could hardly bring them home with her. I got a bag of TVP for Sarah, popping corn, falafel mix, and some ground cumin and coriander.

Saturday was mostly frustrating – into town latish, went to the bank and queued for forty minutes to be told the cash machine maintenance guy hadn’t turned up the previous day and I would have to come back the following week, then went to Kisimenti to meet Jane for a farewell lunch but she got behind schedule so eventually we all just met up at the airport. And even then she was running so late that when she got there she went straight through to check-in so we ended up just waving at her through the security barrier. Then Martine and I went to visit Cathryn in Kirsti’s house and I met the most wonderful dog called Buffet, an enormous black Labrador who I think I have now volunteered to walk at various stages over the Christmas when I am free.

Then I went to join Thom for what turned out to be the highlight of the weekend – watching Chelsea getting beaten and playing miserably against Manchester City at the Chez Lando hotel. Actually the game wasn’t the highlight. Both of us were hungry so I ordered an omelette speciale (Alfred: for the uninitiated, an omelette speciale is an omelette containing pretty much whatever has been left around the kitchen bound up in eggs. It always has tomatoes and onions in it, almost always chips, and sometimes can contain any one of – or all of – the following: rice, peas, spaghetti, cheese, green beans) (one of my staples) and settled back. Eventually it arrived and … well, how do I describe it?

Imagine a Scottish amoeba, from a tough background that has fallen on even harder times. Imagine it going on a binge in a seedy pub in the backstreets of Glasgow where it got embroiled in the amoeba-equivalent of a fist fight (a pseudopodia scuffle, I suppose) in which it came off second-best. Staggering from the pub, bruised and battered – that’s what the object on my plate resembled. At the very least an omelette should be round – this one (hence the amoeba comparison) was anything but. Frankly, it looked as if it had been dropped and not very expertly reassembled on the plate (I did actually check the underside for gravel, hair etc). Anyway, I was hungry, it tasted OK and I ate it.

Then came the bill. You always have to check bills here VERY carefully and there was obviously something wrong with this one. I called over the waiter: ‘C’est quatre milles francs pour l’omelette speciale?’ I said in a slightly falsetto tone that tried to convey the obvious absurdity of the rhetorical question I was posing. ‘Oui, monsieur, quatre mille’ said my impassive counterpart, no doubt reciting the Kinyarwandan equivalent of ‘Here we go again’ in his head. Well, I figured it was my fault for not asking in advance (another thing you always do if there is no menu available) and paid up with a minimum of cursing and swearing.

The cursing and swearing resumed once I got home to Nyamirambo and made a beeline for the toilet, an object whose acquaintance I came to make in a more than usually intimate degree over the next twelve hours (thankfully Martine had had the plumbing repaired the previous week so it was no longer necessary to flush it by slowly filling buckets of water from the shower and pouring them in).

Sunday – well, uneventful. Pottered around, then into town, a bit of shopping, bus to Butare, a beer (Alfred: ah yes, just the thing when you have a gippy tum, pour in a 72cl bottle of chilled Turbo King!) and then headed home. As I hadn’t seen my friend Enock all week I gave him a buzz and invited him for a quick beer. Bad mistake. Suffice to say I didn’t get to bed until 0120 and when your alarm is set to 0520 that’s a toughie.

SCIENCE CHAT-UP LINES (I nicked this from a Facebook group thanks to Freddie Hayden):

Would there be any resistance if I took you ohm?

I’ve had my ion you for some time.

Would kissing you increase global warming and damage the Arctic irreversibly, or is it just enough to break the ice?

You're so hot you denature my proteins.

If I was an enzyme I'd be DNA-helicase so I could unzip your genes...

You're so sweet I am developing insulin resistance.

Girl, I want to be your differential because then I’d be touching all your curves.

You fascinate me more than the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Let's convert our potential energy to kinetic energy.

How about me and you go back to my place and form a covalent bond?

Seismically speaking, geologists make your bed rock.

You are sin2 X and I am cos2 X and together, we are one.

I less than three you….. (I <>

Your love is sweeter than 3.14159265...

How can I know the 100 digits of Pi and not the 11 of your phone number?

I'm not being obtuse, but you're acute girl.

I need some help with my calculus; can you integrate my natural log?

Your skin is as smooth as an endoplasmic reticulum.

You’re like telophase, I admire your cleavage.

Hey baby, want to form a synapse with me and exchange neurotransmitters?
Hey baby, can I be your enzyme? Because my active site is dying for a chemical reaction.

Can I plug my solution into your equation?

Baby, you turn my floppy disk turn into a hard drive.

I think my heart just lagged.

You’re so cute you make my zygomaticus muscles contract.

I’m POSITIVE I’d like your electron, want to bond?

I heard you're sin because you're always on top when we make tangent.

Looking at you, creationists may have a point after all.

Hey baby, I think you are 1/Cos C (Sec C)

WORST EVER NEWSPAPER MISPRINT?

I have always had a soft spot for these, part of my proofreading OCD probably. Anyway, surfing the net with Enock the other night, we were looking on Google News for any news from his home district of Kabale in southern Uganda and came across this item in the New Vision, a Ugandan daily newspaper:

A number of schools in Kabale District, Southern Uganda, were closed last week when three students tasted positive for dysentery.

GISAGARA DISTRICT RULES OK!
I may have mentioned before that I was the first ever overseas volunteer to work in this district. Well, it took them a while to get used to me and me to them but I have to say overall they are a pretty good bunch of people. There are thinks that infuriate me, things are incredibly inefficient from time to time but, judging from what I hear from other areas, they are doing a pretty good job.

And then two pieces of information – one to explain it and one to underline it. Firstly, the present districts date from 2006 when the old provincial, prefecture and sub-prefecture structure was scrapped. Elections were held in 2006 for a mayor in each of the 30 districts of Rwanda. The next election is scheduled for 2010 but, of the original 30, 28 have since been removed from office for corruption, inefficiency or whatever. Only Nyaruguru District and Gisagara District still have their original mayors! Nice one KAREKEZI Léandre! And not only that, we still have the same Executive Secretary. No wonder we have gone from 16th to 10th to 4th ranked district in Rwanda in the space of three years. Next year number 1!

Secondly, when I went to see the Executive Secretary yesterday (Wednesday – the timeline has got a bit confused) I was told he was in Kigali with the mayor to receive our award for being number one district in the anti-corruption campaign. And the prize? A certificate and a medal? No – ten million Rwandan francs (about €12,500) – a huge amount of money. Interesting idea – pay people not to be corrupt. Next question is what to do with it, eh? Watch this space.

THE RETURN OF JEREMY?
Some people may remember Jeremy, a bat who lives in my attic with his hundreds of cousins and who made a brief appearance in this blog some months ago (and wrote a comment too if I remember correctly). Well either he or a cousin reappeared the other night, flying wildly around the sitting room and crashing into the walls, window, my head, some books, the door and the sofa before eventually running full tilt into one wall and knocking himself out. I thought he had actually found his way out and went back to reading my book by the light of my head-torch. It was only when I was going to bed that I noticed something lying on the floor (JUST before stepping on it). Bats look really strange on the floor so it took me a while to figure out what it was. Anyway, having had previous experience I grabbed a big square lunchbox, whacked it down over him, slid the lid underneath and released him into the garden. Once he was in the box he certainly woke up and moved around like the bejaysus so I am hoping once released he soared off into the night air and freedom. If not he probably got eaten by something as he lay in the grass. Life is tough.