Friday 27th February to Thursday 5th March: Days 175 – 181 in Rwanda.

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.

FUNDRAISING!!
As many of you will remember, I spoke before about four projects I am hoping to fundraise for:
a) Raising money for a motorbike for my moto driver who spent 13 years in prison after being falsely denounced after the genocide
b) Supporting the Kivu Writers Workshops, the only firum for encouraging creative writing in Rwanda
c) Supporting TABARA, the first and only organisation for single parents in Rwanda
d) Helping the work of the Liliane Fonds organisation who give medical and educational support to handicapped children around the world.

All my friends and family will be getting emails in the near future with more details and – importantly – how to actually send the money. If you are a reader of this blog and are interested but suspect I don’t have your email address, just email me at roheithir@gmail.com and I will add you to the list.

FRIDAY
Busy day! Paid Alexandré before I left as I am off to Butare/Gikongoro for the weekend – decided to give him a pay rise as he is now doing all my laundry as well as washing the floors and dishes and various other odd jobs that otherwise I would have to employ a domestique for. Work was work and left early to head to the bank and immigration office (Alfred: extract deleted – basically the bank took AGES and there was no-one in the immigration office – that’s the essential facts, you can live without the excruciating detail!).

I met Tiga en route and she offered we a bed for the weekend so I don’t have to book into the Ineza. Dropped off my stuff and then Francois picked me up for dinner. Now, I presumed we were going out somewhere but it turned out to be dinner en famille with his wife and three of the four kids and a friend. It was a really great evening and it turns out to be their last in this house as they are moving to a new house tomorrow. What was also nice was that Francois seemed to be so pleased that I was visiting him at home and I was equally pleased to be asked!!!

Song of the Day: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening (Herb Ellis & Oscar Peterson)

SATURDAY
The best-laid plans ... we were supposed to be heading for Gikongoro to meet up with Amy in South African John’s place and watch the rugby (Ireland v. England) but he got called away to Kigali for a meeting so we decided to stay put. Spent the morning doing some work (it is umuganda so everything is closed), then shopped (see list on previous blog and add sardines but no waragi – one beer a day with Enoch is enough alcohol for the moment!). Tiga then carried my shopping home for me while Andy and I chilled out in the Faucon! (Alfred: truly the age of chivalry is dead). Not just that but, when I asked if it was possible to tune to the rugby channel, they called the owner at home and he drove back to the hotel to tune in the satellite receiver for us! And, as if that wasn’t good enough – IRELAND WON!!! Not the greatest match in the annals of rugby history (Alfred: oh, give me a break, it was woeful! Seventeen successive up-an- unders at one stage – does no-one run with the ball anymore?) but a win’s a win, especially when you are watching it with a fanatical England supporter (Alfred: ‘fanatical’ is putting it a bit strongly – at least Andy has actually PLAYED rugby whereas you went to a school where you would have been expelled for doing so!) Then we went off to the Chineese Restaurant in Taba to meet Jane and Jean for dinner, which was really good. A real pity we didn’t get to see Amy or John but a pretty good day nonetheless!!

SUNDAY
Sunday was a relax and chat kind of day, copying music and videos for each other and watch/listen to Andy chortling to himself as he watched the political highlights of Saturday Night Live that my sister had sent me on a flashdisk (thanks Sis – the Obama and Clinton stuff is good but the McCain and Palin stuff is priceless!). Andy and I had a long chat about how both of us find ourselves rather moribund at work, so we decided to try and encourage each other to get going a bit more if at all possible!! He has recently been told that he is no longer covered to ride his motorbike (Alfred: probably never was, if you ask me!) which has really screwed up his programme.

Déo collected me at 1400 and brought me home with a brief stop at Matar to buy bread (last one in the shop). Alexandré had washed everything in the house he could lay his hands on, including the tea-towels .... and my coat. This has never been washed in water before but it seems to have survived the experience tolerably well. I’m afraid to take my shoes off now in case he washes them too! Stir-fried cabbage for dinner (still just about usable once I peeled off enough layers).

Recipe for stir-fried cabbage: chop two medium onions and a green pepper and chop a few cloves of garlic (they’re small). Heat peanut oil, fry veg. Add garlic, ground cumin, ground coriander, some medium Madras curry powder and a teaspoon of puree. Then add very finely sliced white cabbage. Cook until cabbage is properly wilted. Add a little water if necessary.

MONDAY
My phone got me up at 0515 to make sure I got to the Monday morning District meeting in time! Everyone was glad to see me there (which made me feel even more guilty about missing most of the other meetings!). Good – if long – meeting. Apparently President Kagame, the three vice-presidents and a bunch of others had a special meeting last week about local government and have issued a load of decrees with immediate effect. Among the most notable are:

• The Mayor’s phone number must be put up on the outside of all office doors: if anyone is in any way unhappy with the service they have received, they are invited to ring the Mayor and tell him about it.
  
• If any query or file has not been dealt with after three days of receipt, the individual involved will have three points deducted from their something or other (performance rating?)
  
• If it remains undealt with after five days, a fine will be imposed on the individual!

While the meeting was in progress, the heavens opened and Francois and Alexis said they would wait until the rain ended before heading back to the office. I decided to go home and get a fleece, seeing as I had an umbrella. Bad idea – it was a lot windier than I realised and I got soaked!! Sheltered at home until the rain ended and then headed to the office. By the time I got home for lunch, it was scorching hot!!

No English class today (Tue-Thurs only from now on) so I worked through to 1600 and then met Enock for my first official Kinyarwanda class – in Vestine’s, over a beer (best way to learn a language). Enock is quite strict about pronunciation and had me repeating things over and over again (‘Nta’ is pronounced ‘nhhhaaaaa’ or something like that and it crops up a lot!) to the hilarity of the other customers!!

Got home to find out Alexandré had thrown out my last few tomatoes, with which had been going to make a pasta sauce – must have figured they were in too sorry a condition. So potato salad it was – with onions and mayonnaise, what more could a body ask for.

The Section (Rwandan Leaving Certificate) results were due out this week – I wonder where they are?

Then another attic incident – see observations later!!

I also got some emails from VSO Ireland – wanting me to write stuff or source info on various Rwandan-related topics: should keep me and my friends busy for a while!!

TUESDAY
Work was a little quiet today – Francois had gone off to Kigali to collect the Section exam results and we were all waiting with bated breath. The last two years in a row our District came first in Rwanda and everyone is hoping it will happen for a third year running! Meanwhile I did the usual preparing school inspection forms, looking over old reports, preparing training materials and helping people install English learning material on their laptops. People have an amazing number of beautiful brand-new laptops and absolutely no idea how to use them (with a few honourable exceptions). They pay for them themselves – basically, if your boss(es) tell you you need a laptop/motorbike/whatever for your work, it’s up to you to go out and get it!

Alexis vanished off to Mugombwa for a meeting (that’s about as remote a spot as we have here in the District) and I had the afternoon to myself in the office, which was great as I actually get to chat to people who call in, especially school directors, without the others around. They feel they can actually be a little critical and more open about stuff when the director and chargé are not there to overhear!

English class was doing and acting out adjectives – good fun once sufficient people turned up for class. Walked to the bar with Enoch and two soldiers who reminded me so much of the two main characters in Of Mice and Men it wasn’t true!! Enoch had seen the school’s results on the Internet and English was again the best subject in his school and his school the best at English in the District. And, out of the whole District, only one – yes, one – studenthad failed the exam (Alfred: his name is Martin and he goes to .... ah, no, I'll spare his blushes), so Gisagara looks set to be number one on Rwanda again!

(Alfred: educational aside - usually it is Ruairí who does this but never mind. As Ruairí teaches in a private school – and, if I can say so on his behalf, a pretty damn good one – it is ironic in a non-Alanis Morisette way that it is the very lack of private schools in Gisagara district, due to its poverty, that make the exam results so good. Students have to achieve a certain grade in the O-levels to be allowed to go to upper secondary. However, if you have the money, you can always go to a private upper secondary school, which will be filled with those who failed the O-level exams. Inevitably these students will do less well in the A-levels and thereby drag down the average. There is no social cachet to going to a private school and paying fees, outside of a few really posh ones in Kigali – you go because you were too ... educationally disadvantaged ... to get into the state school!)

Enock went off at 1800 to teach his colleagues but I had been joined by another work colleague, Sosthène. I installed some stuff on his laptop while he told me about his work in the health unit. I had translated some stuff for him recently – a summary for his mini-thesis on malnutrition rates in Gisagara (MUCH higher than anyone had realised, by the way) and even though he is still waiting for official word on his mark he has already had inquiries about publishing it, as it is a really good piece of research (sample size of over 6,500 children).

However, Sosthène is also very religious (I need a word other than ‘very’ here) and winced every time I took a sip of beer. He isn’t exactly trying to convert me (though I feel he really would like me to) and contents himself with explaining how happy religion makes him and other people, the solace he finds in God’s love and the many miracles he has seen with his own eyes following meetings of his prayer group! My rejoinders of:’ If you believe in God, then God is everywhere and you don’t need to go to a church to find him’ didn’t go down particularly well! But he is a really nice guy and extremely good at his job. And he is also the only surviving member of his family – his mother, father and all his brothers and sisters are dead (he was showing me photos on his laptop, I didn’t want to ask why at this early stage of knowing him!)

When we were leaving he paid for his Fanta and the brochettes he had ordered for us but then went into an orgy of explanation as to why his religion would not allow him to pay for my beer!! I’m not sure what branch of Anglicanism he belongs to, but it’s not the Church of Ireland!!
Dinner was egg-an-onion sandwiches – far too late to cook at this stage!

WEDNESDAY

François arrived with the Section (A-level) results and they seem to be as good as we hoped, though – in the usual Rwandan way – things are never as simple as they seem. Students sit different versions of A-levels and subject combinations: optional subjects sometimes only count as 60% of a subject, sometimes it’s the best five of six or six of seven, so there’s a lot of work to be done before we can be sure we are number one in Rwanda! We also have a scare when Francois’ computer refuses to open a 27k file saying there isn’t enough space. Turns out he has a virus – he spent €900 on a new laptop but didn’t invest in any antivirus software! So I am trying to download AVG for him but at 60MB and a connection speed of 2.5kbs (at best – it actually registered 0.04kbs for a good while) it’s going to take me days!

In English class this afternoon I had designed a crossword for them to do – opposites of adjectives (if the clue is ‘white’, the answer is ‘black’). Easy – well, no. None of them, and I mean none of them, had ever seen a crossword before and it took most of the class to explain to them what it was!! Talk about taking things for granted!! They felt it was really hard work and asked if we could stick to word searches instead!!! (Alfred: he’s typing this while the class do a word search on Thursday – it also appears that the idea of alphabetical order doesn’t mean anything to some of them – every time they look for a word on the list they just start at the top and read down through all of them – the fact that the word starts with ‘w’ and the list is in alphabetical order .......)

Dinner was green pepper and lentil savoury curry – and it was great. I am eating far better these days, might even start to put a little weight back on (though the total absence of fat and near-total absence of sugar makes that unlikely).

OTHER NEWS
I’m still reading loads – in the evening by candlelight/kerosene lamp it’s about the only thing I can do after 1900! A couple of OK thrillers (Linda Farstein and James Patterson, though the former is a bit too stuffed with legal procedures for my liking and the latter – about vampires – a bit too weird and gruesome). I finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind and it is one of the best books I have read in ages, equalled in its magnificence by Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I am just amazed I never read before. I have now started Anthony Seldon’s biography of Tony Blair and Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which my friend Éamon posted me from Dublin (her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, is one of the all-time great first novels, comparable to Iain Bank’s’ The Wasp Factory though bearing no resemblance to it in style or content!).

WHAT THE &@!* IS LIVING IN THE ATTIC?
This is getting a bit creepy. I finally figured the squeaking was bats because I heard them around the pub and Enock said that’s what they were. Then, on Monday night, something HEAVY walked across the ceiling, I mean no way was it a mouse or even a rat (as far as I know). I did the sensible thing which was to put in my MP3 earplugs and go to sleep. But I am going to have to summon up my courage pretty soon and send Alexandré up there to find out what is going on!

TELLING THE TIME – Enoch in Kigali
Do you remember a few weeks ago when I was supposed to meet Enock in Kigali and come down with him to Butare on the bus? He texted me to say he would be in Kigali at 9 p.m. so I decided to head off on my own, only to find him at my house when I got there!! It turns out he meant 3 p.m. Most East African countries tell the time from 0600 in the morning and 1800 in the afternoon: so what is nine o’clock for us is three o’clock for them. He just forgot when he was texting me which time reference to use! This has happened to me a few times so far – it makes learning telling the time in Kinyarwanda very hard!

KEROSENE LAMP
Figured out the problem – when you light it, the flame is low, but it will flare up quite quickly as the glass heats up and the air inside it also heats, so you need to keep on turning down the wick for the first ten-fifteen minutes. It also helps to wash the glass regularly (Alexandré gets annoyed if I do it so I let him).

DOGS and PUPPIES
I am not going to get a puppy – much as I want to, but I am just away too much and while I feel Alexandré would guard it with his life if I asked him to, minding dogs is not a common Rwandan trait and, especially with a puppy, I think I’d just feel guilty all the time. I’ll just make do with Box, the dog at the local pub, and my pictures of Milli and Bess!

FOREIGN POLICY DEVELOPMENTS
Well, wasn’t Lauren Nkunda the surprised man when he arrived in Rwanda with his diamonds and cash only to be tossed into clink by the Rwandans. You have to hand it to the Rwandans, when they make a decision they don’t do things by half. Growing criticism, threats of aid reduction from the Dutch and a general feeling that he was getting out of hand and Hey Presto! Complete policy reversal and joint operations against the interahamwe with the Congolese army.
NEWS FROM HOME
Glad to be in Africa at the moment.

St PATRICK’S DAY LOOMS!!!
This will be the first ever official St Patrick’s Day celebration in Rwanda! Big posh bash in the Serena Hotel in Kigali on Friday 20th March with the Irish Ambassador and his ex-Rathdown School wife (Pamela Uwakwe, class of – I think – 1986). Going to be FUN!!!! Lots of pics and stories to come.

MOTORBIKE
To buy or not to buy – that is the question ...