On the Move

So I have been traveling a lot these past couple weeks, both for work and pleasure. While I am very much enjoying seeing more of the country, the voyages themselves have their ups and downs (pun intended – I make a lot of those in this post, Dad and Maia, keep an eye out). The views are incredible, but, while Rwanda is small, three hours in one of these buses starts to wear on you, especially when you are only making day or overnight trips. As I’ve said before, they really pack these things to the max. Even the larger ones used for cross country voyages don’t leave you much personal space with a bag in your lap. I’m just very grateful to be small. What’s more, the Muzungu attention becomes particularly annoying when you are making your fourth three hour ride in four days and just want to be left the f%*& alone. Anyway, here is a map of Rwanda for some reference as I tell you a bit about my journeys of late.

Weekend in Gisenyi

Last weekend I went to Rehengeri (aka Musanze) and Gisenyi, in the north east of Rwanda, with my housemates. I’ve done that drive once before to go to Goma (directly across the border from Gisenyi) for the volcano hike in Congo. It is breathtaking. The thousand hills in this part of the country are more like mountains. They jut up hundreds of feet and as your bus hugs the side of them the view is incredible. Rivers wind through the valleys below and everything is green green green. The hillsides surrounding you are all terraced and gridded, each rectangle a different shade of green where the crops change. Then, as you get into Gisenyi, you get a view of the volcanoes that straddle the Rwanda-Congo border, with mist all around the top of them. It is phenomenal.

In Gisenyi, we stayed with Laura’s friend Radu, this awesome Romanian guy who works for a wildlife conservation group in Virunga National Park across the border in the Congo. It rained the whole weekend, which put a damper on our plans for tanning and swimming in Lake Kivu, but we had a lovely time nonetheless and took a dip anyway on Sunday morning. The water is very warm, and Radu’s house sits right on the lake with the most gorgeous view and its own little beach. We are talking about taking another trip out there in early April during Remembrance Week, the week set aside to commemorate the genocide, which most people have off.

 

The view from Radu’s house and this awesome Dr. Suessy tree

Radu’s little beach where we went swimming

GAKO Organic Training Center

I have also been doing a lot of traveling for work, starting to visit various agricultural education institutions around the country. The first trip was a visit to GAKO organic farming training center in Kabunga, a 20 minute bus-ride from Kigali. This place was awesome! They mostly train small-hold farmers, NGOs, and leaders from farming cooperatives, in which many farmers in Rwanda participate. GAKO is fairly small-scale, but some of their ideas and techniques are fascinating.

The have this garden design that they call “kitchen gardens” where your vegetables are planted on a mound and in the middle is a hole where you put compostables. The compost just does its thing and fertilizes all the vegetables from the middle of the mound. It’s fantastic, and now that I know what they are, I’ve been noticing them all over Rwanda.

A mound kitchen garden

A terraced kitchen garden

In addition to serving as a hassle-free way of composting, the kitchen gardens are also a great space-saver. This is especially important in a country like Rwanda with very limited land and a growing population. Another land efficient technique that GAKO teaches involves planting vertically in sacs so that you have produce growing out of the top of the sacs and out of all sides.

Onions and some other vegetable growing in sack gardens

Some of the most fascinating work that GAKO does involves animal waste. The cow dung, for example, is used first for powering gas stoves.  It is so simple too! They just put the dung in a sealed chamber and the gas it gives off rises up through the piping they have installed and into a kitchen where it is used like any other gas in a stove. What’s more, the dung is used again in manuer!

 

Input and Output

In addition to cows, GAKO also keeps rabbits, goats and pigs and uses all of their waste to create organic fertilizers. You know me, I couldn’t resist taking pictures of more pigs.

Big Pregnant Pig

Adorable little piglets!

All throughout the training center there are also different useful plants. Some have medicinal purposes for humans and animals while others serve as pesticides.

Albert, my guide, showing me one such medicinal plant

I had a wonderful time chatting with Albert as he showed me around the farm. He has been working for GAKO as a trainer for over three years and has some profound insights. We were talking about the difficulty of promoting organic agriculture in central Africa because of government quotas as the counry trys to develop the economy and a desire to produce as much as you can quickly, which is obviously easier with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. He was telling me about a trip they took to train some farmers in Burundi where they encountered a whole nother obstacle to promoting sustainable and organic techniques. Burundi is not as stable as Rwanda and still experiences extreme violence and displacement relatively frequently. The farmers there explained that they see the benefits of such techniques, but until the fighting stops, it just doesn’t make sense for them to make the kind of time investment it takes to grow organically. They need to produce as much as they can while they can. They need stability before they can focus on anything more.

This anecdote touches on one of the primary issues I am wrestling with here. The more I work in the fields of agriculture and education, the more I think I could find life as a teacher or an organic farmer fulfilling and happy. I would be able to really see the fruits of my labor and the tangible differences I am making. However, I studied central African history and politics and my interest up until now has always been in resolving the crises here. I know that the more I work in this region, the more this problem will come up. Everything else you do here can only matter so much until the fighting stops. Of course, stable access to food and quality education are crucial components of establishing a lasting peace in any country, but I can’t help but be impatient. I want to do something that directly works toward ending the violence now. What I’ve realized though, is that, short of joining the UN as a peacekeeper, in order to get to a position where I am actually working to stop the fighting, I will need first of all a masters degree and second like a decade more experience on the ground. I just don’t think I want to pursue either of those steps at this stage in my life. Anyway, I’m starting to divulge more than is necessary about the existential crisis I am going through, so I will stop there. Suffice it to say that I am working on going with the flow and  being opened to whatever comes next – not the easiest lesson for me, but an important one.

Umutara Polytechnic University

My next trip was to Umutara Polytechnic University in Nyagatare, in the far north-east of the country. This was my furthest trip, so I got a hotel there for the night. The landscape in this region is much flatter and drier than the rest of the country, but still green and hilly by its own right. You pass rivers and lakes, massive fields of maize and endless forests of banana trees. Every so often you see herds of cattle, black and brown and white and speckled grey, some with magnificent horns three feet long, and their herders trotting along behind whacking them with a stick.

I met with Dr. Mashingaidze, the Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, who was extremely helpful in answering my questions and gave me a tour of the campus. The university was established only a few years ago in what used to be a vocational training center, similar to our land in Bugesera. As a public university, they face many challenges that I hope Akilah will be able to avoid. It has been a struggle for them to get the resources they need to adequately serve the number of students that the government expects them to admit each year. At the moment they have no land for students to practice in, resulting in many graduates with extensive theoretical knowledge of agronomy, but little technical know-how – a problem I am discovering is fairly wide-spread in the country. Their classroom and lab space is also insufficient, forcing them to rent out buildings in many different areas of Nyagatare. Even their limited livestock don’t have enough space, which I saw first-hand, a bit more graphically than I would have liked, when we visited the piggery and two tiny piglets lay dead on the wall because they had been suffocated under one of the larger pigs the night before.

Dr. Mashingaidze and I also discussed a problem that all universities must be facing right now, which is the transition to English. The whole country is having to deal with the shifting of the national language from French to English, which only happened two years ago. However, university students, who have conducted their entire education in French and are well-beyond the age at which it is easiest to learn new languages, are uniquely negatively affected. Dr. Mashingaidze refers to this batch of students as “the lost generation” and the phenomenon really calls into question the merits of conducting education entirely in English this soon. I have been having many discussions with my housemates on this subject, two of whom have been teaching English to second-language learners for a number of years now. It is so sad and unfair to me that we, as Americans, can go anywhere in the world just about and expect people to speak English, while people here are implicitly told every day that their culture and their native language are not good enough. That to be able to express themselves eloquently in Kinyarwanda is not a valuable skill. Those moral implications aside, students suffer in all other subjects when they struggle with English and indivudals who may actually be very strong in math, science or history will continue to perform poorly on national exams as a result. In addition, the implications of learning a second language when you do not have a strong basis in your first language are disturbing to say the least. Teaching languages improperly in this way can cripple a person’s writing an communication skills to a degree that is difficult to remedy once you reach adulthood. This problem is not unique to the developing world, as any ESL student in the states will tell you.

This is The Colonel, a really old donkey  at Umutara. I guess he was in the 1990 Rwandan war for liberation and therefore is allowed to go wherever he wants on campus. When I arrived his ass was sticking out of the doorway of the classroom in the background.

INATEK

My most recent visit was to INATEK, the Institute for Agriculture, Technology and Education in Kibungo, to the far south west. I told you I was all over the country! The landscape here is something in between the lush jutting peaks of Gisenyi and the dry subtle hills of Nyagatare. The valleys are deep and wide and, as always, very green. I met with Dr. Kamatari who has been on the faculty of INATEK from its beginnings. We discussed many of the same issues that Umutara is facing, namely limited land, resources and equipment. The campus was lovely however, and it turned out to be such a beautiful day that I have developed a fondness for the region and would like to be able to spend more time there before I leave.

The view on the way to INATEK

Back in Buges

Meanwhile, back at Akilah’s farm in Bugesera, things are moving along. We have been doing some transplanting lately, moving the seedlings from the seedbed out into various plots on the land. I got to spend a day helping to clear some of the overgrown fields and do some hoeing, preparing holes for the sweet pepper, watermelon, and pumpkin seedlings.

Our seedbeds overflowing!!

Avocado Seedlings

Transplanting

The casual laborers who work on our farm tend to change every few weeks, especially the women. I don’t really know why this is, but I imagine that it has to do with family obligations seeing as how most of them, even those who seem very young, often have multiple children already. I enjoy working with them though, and it seems that they appreciate my effort at helping and trying to speak Kinyarwanda. They certainly find it amusing at the very least. Last week I hung around after work was finished, while Jon distributed the week’s payment (which is a little more than a dollar a day), and made some friends. One of the women has been bringing her little daughter to the field lately, and we all had a good time playing with her.

  

My new friends – don’t worry, this very young girl is not the mother of this adorable baby, though that would not be entirely surprising

I am still enjoying my house at Maranyundo and am ever grateful for my housemates here. However, I am quickly realizing that fitting in around Nyamata is going to be pretty much impossible. I have found a couple social situations that don’t make me feel like such an outsider. One Sunday, a couple weeks ago, I was walking into town to catch the bus and there was a football match (soccer) going on at the field in the center of town. Everyone was so interested in the game that I was able to sit and watch for a little while without being stared at or commented on, a rare and valuable occurrence. It is so much easier to observe and appreciate people when you aren’t the center of attention. Two nights ago, my housemates and I went to one of the local bars here because we heard that there is a band every Sunday. I’ve been told that Rwandans are big country music fans, believe it or not. The band did play one country song, which was a trip, but for the most part they stuck to African jams, which I think was for the best. This was a good reminder of how live music totally transcends cultural boundaries. I couldn’t understand a word the lead singer was saying, but man could he play that guitar. As the night went on more and more people got up and started dancing, ourselves included. Even when it started to rain everyone was reluctant to go inside. It was a good night.

In other news, weekends in Kigali with the wonderful groups of friends I’ve found here are a fantastic and much needed outlet. Last Saturday I played Settlers of Catan (an amazing board game) for like eights straight hours. Then, I went bowling and drank Pina Coladas out of a pineapple! Yes. Also tonight I am cooking dinner with Denise and Kim (two of the Akilah teachers) and watching Madagascar, which Kim has never seen.

Also, Elizabeth and Dave have gotten a new puppy!!!! that I get to stay with when I come into town. He is a Rhodesian Ridgeback and, while he doesn’t officially have a name yet, Ian (one of the newest members of the Akilah team and a resident at Dave and Elizabeth’s) has taken to calling him Buxby. Ian is English.

 

Needless to say, I am in heaven.