Getting to know Gitarama

Today’s my third day in Gitarama, and I’m doing very well. The people at Ugama/CSC, the organisation that’s hosting me and at whose microfinance partners I will work have taken very good care of me and have arranged my accommodation very well.

Travelling to Rwanda took a long time (about 22 hours from the Steyr area to Gitarama) but everything worked out just fine: I took a plane from Vienna to Frankfurt and then changed to an Ethiopian airlines flight that carried me to the African continent: the airport of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Ethiopian is a very modern airline, the biggest difference with Western companies is that the annoying elevator music before take-off and after landing is replaced with some smooth Ethiopian jazz; those who have seen “Broken Flowers” will know what I mean. After sleeping on the plane I could enjoy the sight of the sun rising from the mountains of Ethiopia.

A two-hour wait in Addis was followed by my final flight, to Kigali (again on Ethiopian). What struck me was that on this connection between three African capitals (after Kigali, the plane would continue on to Bujumbura in Burundi) the plane (a Boeing 767 with a capacity of around 250 people) was packed, while between Vienna and Frankfurt there were about ten people in a plane that could fit at least fifty. It looks like the economic troubles are hitting the West much harder than developing countries that do not depend on Western consumers for growth. Another thing that was clearly noticeable from the air was the high population density in Rwanda: the green mountainous landscape was glittering with the reflections of uncountable metal roofs.

In Kigali, I was struck by the heat; if landing in Addis was like entering spring (it lies at an altitude of around 2,500 meters and thus the temperature was around 20 degrees, very comfortable), landing in Kigali was like entering summer: at around 1,500 meters, it was already 30. Kigali is clearly hotter than Gitarama by the way, because there are far less trees but far more people and vehicles. In Gitarama, I would say the weather is like in Europe on a nice day in May: around 25 degrees, sunshine or some cloud cover and it rains from time to time.

I was picked up from the airport by Monsieur Celestin from Ugama/CSC, the organisation that is hosting me. We drove around the city a little bit for some errands, and one thing could be noticed immediately: Rwanda is very clean. Compared with Istanbul, my previous experience with a big city in a developing country, Kigali seems tidy as a monastery, with hardly any discarded objects in the streets. Yesterday I heard an explanation for this: once a month, all the inhabitants of the smallest administrative units in the country (communes with around fifty inhabitants) gather to do public works, be it repairing roads or digging ditches to prevent erosion. I’m still awaiting the first public-works day to see how it really works in practice, but in theory it’s a great idea: by making people responsible for their own public space, they are likely to take much better care of it.

Once we left the city and the rural landscape unfolded itself, a change in temperature was clearly noticeable. I estimate the temperature outside the city was five degrees lower. As for the landscape, it is beautiful: a hilly landscape with houses scattered around it. The pattern looks like this: each house is surrounded by a plot of land that is rather small for European agricultural standards (about the size of a large backyard), and the inhabitants plant a multitude of crops and trees on it. Ideally, there’s also a cow or a goat, and this is how the inhabitants get their food. This diversity is very easy on the eye: it forms a nice pattern of green and brown on the hills, with patches of the soil colour in between: brownish salmon that can be seen on unpaved roads, steep slopes and the bricks that the houses are (partly) built of.

It took us about 50 minutes to reach Gitarama. The winding road from Kigali to Gitarama is one of the principal roads in the country, and therefore it is paved (virtually no potholes), with two wide lanes. It is quite calm, so people drive in the middle of the road and then move to the right when a car is approaching in the other direction. One thing I always look at in a new country is the carscape, the brands and types of cars that are driven. In Rwanda it’s clear: Toyotas, Toyotas, Subaru busses, Toyotas, Suzukis, and yes, Toyotas, preferably four-by-fours. The Japanese brand’s reputation for quality appears to carry a long way.

Upon arrival in Gitarama, we first visited the Ugama/CSC office and then I was taken to my new home for the coming six months: a small apartment next to my landlady’s house. My landlady has a nice house very close to the city centre and within walking distance to the offices of Ugama and the two microfinance organisations that I’m going to work for. She used to work at the Rwandan embassy in Brussels for more than a decade and has moved to her hometown Gitarama recently to retire. My little apartment consists of a spacious bedroom, a small room by the entrance, and a bathroom. I have everything I need: running (non-drinking) water, a normal toilet, a shower (albeit cold) and electricity. Through the shower window, I have a very nice view on the hills of Gitarama.

Gitarama is a rural city: most households have some crops and many keep an animal in their backyard. In fact, one could say that the pattern that one finds in the countryside also applies to Gitarama, except that the density is much higher, and that there are many city facilities: many shops, a large market, a stadium, hotels, bars, nightclubs, a large bus station, several churches, a mosque, etc. The town is spread out over several hills, with marshland in the valleys. There are not many Westerners here, only a number of development workers, so I attract quite some attention in the streets, which is an interesting experience.

The poverty here is quite apparent: people work in the fields all day to harvest just a little bit of food, and a construction worker makes only around a euro a day, while a bag of fruit costs about the same in the market. On the other hand, everyone who can somehow afford it wants to own a mobile phone, and they are not much cheaper than in Europe. This brings me to a source of great inequality: in the West, because we have a service economy, labour is valued very highly and paid very well, while many goods are produced at the lowest possible cost in Asia and then sold at comparable prices everywhere. Add transport costs to the picture (Rwanda is a landlocked country), and you have a situation where a construction worker in the Netherlands works a day at the most in order to be able to purchase a new mobile phone, while here it would take at least 50 or even 100 days for someone doing similar work.

In terms of communication, things are going fine for me: the personnel at Ugama all speak French and at least some English and are very friendly. However, I still feel quite naked because I don’t speak any Kinyarwanda, the national language (just “muraho?” to greet and “amakuru?” to ask how people are doing). It is a Bantu language and will be quite difficult to learn, but I hope to at least manage to buy things by myself soon.

My first week here in Rwanda is for settling: I will start working at Uniclecam Ejoheza, a cooperative microfinance provider, on Monday. Until then, I spend my days at the office of Ugama/CSC, learning about the work of my host organisation.
Ugama is a local NGO that provides services to rural cooperatives. Almost all farmers in Rwanda are organised in such cooperatives, which facilitate the sharing of equipment and selling products together, amongst other things.
So what kinds of services does Ugama provide to cooperatives? Most of its activities, which range from schooling and advice to providing seeds, are related to increasing the food security of farmers (who mostly produce for their own household’s needs). This can be done in many ways: there is both a drive to increase production by professionalizing farming (which often implies using pesticides and artificial fertiliser) and to increase the durability of farming by preventing erosion and sustaining fertility. A second pillar of Ugama´s activities is transformation: adding value to agricultural products by transforming them (e.g. from soy to tofu or from sunflower seeds to oil).

Ugama used to also provide loans to cooperatives, but it has since transformed its microfinance branch into a separate entity and merged it with another NGO´s microfinance institution: Uniclecam Ejoheza, where I will start working next week.

I will keep you all posted about my activities here! This post is quite long because I still have the time to write a lot and a lot of new impressions to tell you about, but don’t worry, the next posts will be shorter once I start my regular work! The internet connection is slow, so no photos yet.