Massive Blog Update 3: Everything since Christmas!

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!