Goma, despite the fact that it was besieged by Laurent Nkunda’s infamous rebels in October 2008, does not really show visible war damage (unlike Sarajevo, a city that I visited in 2006). This might have to do with the fact that half the city was destroyed by lava streams from a nearby volcano in 2002: everything looks chaotic anyway. Most of what I saw of the city is covered by lava debris mixed with garbage. In the poorer areas, wooden cabins have been erected as (temporary?) shelter, which gives the place a strangely Scandinavian feel (lava+wooden cabins = Iceland, right?). In the wealthy areas, lots of huge mansions are arising from the rubble. While that might seem a bit strange in the country with practically the poorest population in the world, it is easy to explain: the people who plunder the Congo’s vast resources (like gold, diamonds, coltan, …) get ridiculously rich, and Goma has the most important airport in the Eastern part of the country (with air travel being the only reasonable way to cover large distances), so it is a logical place to settle for anyone doing “business” there.

The history of the Congo is a sad one, that consists mainly of looting: in the time of the Transatlantic slave trade, the armies of Africa’s coastal kingdoms waged war there to capture slaves for the Americas; in the 19^th century the Belgian King Léopold made it his personal possession; after independence, it was Mobutu Sese Seko who put billions in Swiss bank accounts and equipped his home village with a Concorde-airport; since his death in 1997, anyone who has the resources to finance a standing army or rebel group (which often just means buying AK-47s for a bunch of kids) can control part of the country, force the local population to mine resources, and sell them on the world market where they end up in jewellery and laptops.

Goma, while dirty and chaotic, is not that scary though (otherwise I wouldn’t have gone there of course); apart from a one-legged man who claimed to be a security agent and told me to pay him because I had taken an illegal picture of a sign by the road, we did not encounter any problems (Eric told the guy he would call the Rwandan police), and most people were just as friendly as Rwandans. Statistically, I did do one of the most dangerous things ever (?) in the Congo though: taking motorbike taxis is dangerous enough in Kigali, but in Goma there are no traffic rules or passenger helmets. On the ride we passed some guys on a truck who did have helmets on, blue ones. Their truck was white; a large contingent of Indian UN peacekeepers are stationed in Goma. Even if we do not take the actual military vehicles into account, Goma must have the highest density of UN jeeps in the world, something like 10%.

We preferred spending the night across the border in Rwanda, the country where I guess you could theoretically walk around at 3 a.m. waving around hundreds of euros clinched in both hands without encountering any difficulties. We had a nice Sunday in Gisenyi, swimming in Lake Kivu and exploring the area a little bit. No need to cross the border again.

UN peacekeeping; see the blue hat?

So, what’s been happening around here? Lots of things: I was at the agricultural exposition in Kigali promoting CAF’s warehouse receipt system (you know, the thing I wrote about two blogs ago), and I hung out with some great people from Florida State University.

They were here in Gitarama/Muhanga for an annual volunteer programme called Global Peace Exchange. Too bad I got to know them too late though: they actually spent more than two months here, but I didn’t really get to know them until a few weeks before they left. That was because of my “why should I approach Westerners just because they’re white?” doctrine (which by now I have pretty much abandoned).

My volunteer activities here have been expanded: I now also give English conversation classes and computer workshops to the three organisations that I deal with here (my hosts Ugama/CSC and the two microfinance institutions). It’s great fun, their level is already quite good so we can do some interesting stuff.

What’s less fun is the fact that electricity and running water get interrupted very frequently lately. It’s dry season (three rainshowers since the beginning of June), so reservoirs get depleted more quickly, and I guess the heat somehow affects power generation as well. Plus, without electricity, no water is pumped, making things worse. It’s annoying to have to shower with a bucket around three times a week, but I manage. And the stars look even better without light pollution!

Inge in the back of the pick-up

Last week and the week before that, Inge, who’s been a good friend of mine for years, happened to be here for her work (at AgriProFocus, an umbrella organisation that coordinates the agriculture-related work of Dutch NGOs). So we actually had some professional meetings (one dashing past rice fields in the back of a pick-up truck), and also had fun on the weekend, going out with my Rwandan friends (there was a great live band!) and diving into luxury in the countryside (at George and Lydie’s lodge in Shyogwe; that’s where my Belgian friend Bart stayed when he was still here – by now he’s finished his thesis back in Gent).

That’s all for now, let’s see what interesting things I can do in the weeks ahead!

Their stay was eleven days, giving us the time to do some extensive travelling. Rwanda is a small country (as I have mentioned, it is about the size of Belgium) but has an amazing variety of different landscapes: beautiful hills used for agriculture in most of the country, savannah at Akagera National Park in the East, the enormous Lake Kivu to the West, Nyungwe Rainforest in the Southwest, and really high volcanoes in the Northwest. The latter is also what Rwanda is famous for, as it is there that the Mountain Gorillas can be found. We (or I, as it was me who was planning the trip) decided to skip the volcanoes and gorillas, as this is what all tourists in Rwanda do (boring!) and because it is quite expensive (500 US dollars a person).

A little map of our trip (trajectory in lime)

During their first two days in Rwanda, I didn’t want to haul my parents around too much, so we stayed in Gitarama (a.k.a. Muhanga), meeting my friends and visiting the three organisations that I deal with the most here: CAF Isonga and Uniclécam EjoHeza (the two microfinance institutions) and Ugama/CSC (my hosts). We also had dinner with my landlady, Madame Astérie, and her daughter Nathalie, who is visiting from Belgium.

My parents visiting CAF

On Tuesday, we took off with Madame Astérie’s car and her driver, Aimable (she rent us her Suzuki Vitara 4×4 for a very reasonable price, which really increased our confort during our tour of the country!). Our destination that day was Kibuye on Lake Kivu, where we took a boat trip to an island with thousands of bats, swam, and had a very nice fish dinner at our hotel, Centre Béthanie. The next morning we had to get ready for a long trip, to Nyungwe Forest. Had the paved road to Cyangugu in the South been ready already, it would have been a lot faster, but as the road is still in very bad condition, we had to take a long U-shaped detour via Gitarama and Butare.

Waterfall in Nyungwe Forest

Nyungwe Forest is the biggest forest I’ve ever seen, it took us three hours to drive through it (on a paved road)! It is a tropical high-altitude rainforest with a wide diversity of species. Of the many animals there, we saw mainly small monkies though. We spent the night on the Western edge of the park, at a guesthouse close to the Gisakura tea estate (stunning views of the tea fields, the forest’s mountains and Lake Kivu far away in the valley!). On Thursday we set off for a guided four-hour hike into the forest, making a long descent to an amazing waterfall. After a rewarding lunch, we also paid a short visit to Gisakura tea factory (I had NO idea how tea is processed!), and then headed back to Butare, where we spent the night.

Butare (officially known as Huye these days) is Rwanda’s main university town, with the National University and several other institutions. In combination with some European-style buildings from the time when it was the colonial capital (until independence in 1961), this gives the city a very pleasant feel. On Friday morning, we visited its main attraction: the National Museum, which was donated by the Belgian King Boudewijn/Baudouin in 1988. I liked it a lot, as it has been kept in very good shape and really shows traditional (pre-colonial) Rwandan culture very well. We then headed North, but before continuing onwards to Gitarama there were more museums to be visited: the three royal palaces in Nyanza. The most interesting one is a replica of the Rwandan Mwami’s (king’s) hut from the early twentieth century, an enourmous space constructed from woven fibres and wood. Next to it is the colonial-era palace (the Belgians kept traditional power structures in place and placed themselves above it), and at a nearby hill there is a palace that was built just before independence and has therefore never been used as such. It houses a nice modern art museum now.

The weekend was spent in Gitarama, so no travelling, although we did have an intensive programme because all my friends here wanted to meet and spend time with my parents. We also took taxi-mopeds to nearby Kabgayi, the most important catholic centre in the country.

On Monday 8 June we set out for the last leg of our trip: Akagera National Park, on the border with Tanzania. Supposedly the park is not as impressive as the big savannah parks that Tanzania and Kenya are famous for, but we did manage to see some really amazing exotic animals in the wild! On our afternoon boat trip on Lake Ihema and our early-morning safari drive we came across: nile crocodiles, hippos, fish eagles, warthogs (you know, Pumba), a black mamba, many impala (Rwanda’s national antilope), baboons and other monkies, giraffes, buffalos and zebras. We spent the night at the Akagera Game Lodge, which is very comfortable and has an awesome pool, so we had some quality relaxing time as well.

Giraffe at Akagera

My parents’ last night and day in Rwanda were spent in Kigali. I took advantage of the situation to be treated to some quality Western-style food and Bourbon coffee, we visited the Genocide Memorial (which for me was almost as shocking and saddening as the first time), and my parents gained the experience of racing through the city on moto-taxis and being squenched into public minbusses. Their plane left at 3.00 in the morning on Thursday 18 June.

All in all, my parents’ visit here was a big succes: we did not encounter any problems whatsoever, and my extensive planning (I don’t think I’ll ever plan a trip in such an organised way again) totally worked out. Rwanda, as a microcosm of all Sub-Saharan landscapes, really is a great country for a short African vacation: in two weeks you can go on safari and see all the big animals (they’re going to import more lions, rhinos and elephants to Akagera), swim in beautiful Lake Kivu, visit mountain gorillas and hike through a beautiful and huge rainforest. At the same time, the country is totally safe for tourists. If the government manages to maintain this unique level of safety, promote tourism in international media, and build the huge new African-hub airport that they’re planning, Rwanda could really become a major tourist destination. 

My work here has become more and more interesting: while I started out working only at Uniclécam EjoHeza (“BetterTomorrow”), a small union of savings and credit cooperatives (kind of what Rabobank or Raifeissen must have been like in the 19^th century; the clients are the owners), I started to also work part-time at CAF Isonga (“CAF on top”), a somewhat bigger microfinance institution that has the status of Société Anonyme (S.A.). Combining work at the two is great, because whenever things are slow at one office I can walk five minutes to the other and work there. CAF is the only S.A. in the country not based in Kigali, and a really interesting organisation: it has developed an innovative system to increase productivity of small rice-farmers.

Rice fields at Mukunguri

How does it work? Most farmers here are organised in production cooperatives, so they try to combine their production and sell big amounts. This usually does not work very well, as the cooperatives are often poorly organised and it is more lucrative to sell to travelling traders. This is where CAF comes in: it provides credit to the farmers so that they can increase their production using improved seeds and fertilisers, but they have to agree to sell all their rice to the cooperative. At harvest, they go to the cooperative’s office where they receive a voucher for their production. They can then go next door to the little CAF office, where their voucher is used to repay their debt; the surplus wanders into their savings accounts, which they can access of course if they need cash. So why don’t the farmers sell their produce to little traders like they did before? Firstly, they are sure that they can sell all their produce to the cooperative at a guaranteed voucher price right after harvest. Secondly, there is warrantage: the cooperative stores all the rice until the price on the market is highest, and then sells it to traders. The additional profits from this are distributed to the farmers according to the amount they sold to the cooperative. Everybody wins in this concept: the farmers get credit to increase their production and then benefit from the storage (which admittedly is a form of speculation), CAF makes a profit on the amounts it lent to the farmers for planting and to the cooperative for storage, and the cooperative can become a strong player on the rice market. When a Terrafina delegation (Dutch microfinance initiative) visited the CAF office at Mukunguri (in the middle of nowhere, no electricity) I joined them, and the office was packed with customers.

CAF customers

Repayment rates are at around 99%, so the whole system seems to be working very well. At Uniclécam EjoHeza, we’re considering borrowing the concept for manioc (cassava). So what do I do at these two institutions? I get a lot of trust (why I don’t know, perhaps because of my two master’s degrees), and they allow me to brainstorm with them on business plans and demands for subsidies and financing and then have me write the documents. Apart from that, I help wherever it is needed.

Besides work, I also do other things. On Dutch Queensday, I was at the embassy for a low-key party (thanks a lot Karst T!). There I met Mara, Inge and Sarah, three Dutch girls doing medical-related internships. They invited me to join them for a weekend trip to Gisenyi, so I did. Gisenyi is the northern Lake Kivu resort town, and basically forms a twin city with Goma, DRC. The proximity of the Congo is quite noticeable there: UN soldiers on leave from the peacekeeping mission in the Kivu provinces, lots of Congolese licence plates, and many offices of big humanitarian organisations.

We wanted to go swim on the public beach along the boulevard, when I was offered wooden statues by a street seller. I have developed a taste for negotiating, so our little chat turned into the event of the week for the hundreds of people hanging around on the beach. When the deals had been struck, they decided to linger, hoping for another spectacle, that of seeing Saar, Maar and Inge (all blonde) in their bikinis. So, no swimming that day, but we compensated it the next morning by going to the private beach and pool at the five-star Serena Hotel. It was a pretty good deal, all we needed to do was order drinks and rent towels. A tip for all visitors of Gisenyi!

The past months I have also gotten to know Kigali much better (partially thanks to my six visits to the immigration office; I have an awesome visa now though). I was wrong about the lack of Western-style facilities there, in fact there are quite some. The fact that my guidebook is from 2006 led to the disappointment I mentioned last time. The biggest discovery has been Bourbon Coffee, a Starbucks-esque mini-chain where they turn Rwandan coffee into excellent espresso and serve hot food as well. A trip to one of the brand new supermarkets and shopping malls is also like a short visit back to the Western world (barcode readers!!).

I still find the capital a little annoying though: while it has only 700,000 inhabitants, it is spread out over a large number of hills (kind of like L.A. I imagine), and you often have to travel ten kilometres to get from one place to another. The upside is that you can do this by motor-taxi, which is very exciting (also because it’s dangerous).

The guidebook from three years ago is outdated in many ways: even here in Gitarama (which is now named Muhanga by the way) buildings are shooting up like mushrooms, petrol stations get all shiny and lit up like back home, and the internet connection is about five times as fast as when I arrived I would say. Most of this development takes place in the cities though; rural Rwandans are still among the poorest people in the world. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s not entirely true. The village where I once had dinner by candlelight is now connected to the electrical grid.

One thing that I find fascinating is the often random way that parts of Western culture sickle through to Rwanda:

Firstly the clothes that most people wear here. Very often it is very apparent that they originate from the containers that Westerners throw them in when they don’t need them anymore. Sports jackets from VfL Unterbentheim, Westwood High or FC Knokke and “funny joke” T-shirts with vulgar lines on them that people get from uninventive friends for their birthday and then throw away without ever wearing them (e.g. “ich bumse besser als dein Freund”).

Secondly the old Japanese minibusses that provide public transport for most people. Their drivers/owners usually paint them to display some affiliation: names of musicians like Lil’ Wayne, 50 Cent, Akon and Lucky Dubey (the South-African Bob Marley); football clubs and their sponsors like Arsenal (Fly Emirates!), Manchester, Chelsea and Barcelona; Jesus and God; and even (to my delight) Barack Obama! On the road from Gitarama to Kigali, you can also frequently spot one of them with the N-word in spelled out in huge letters (the gangsta way, with an A in the end).

Bart on a bicycle taxi

Last weekend, I finally visited Bart (my Flemish friend) at the place where he’s been staying here in Rwanda: Shyogwe, in the countryside south of Gitarama. His Belgian hosts, Georges and Lydie (he’s a Rwandan-Belgian filmmaker and she’s an amazing cook), have a little hotel where they receive their guests in a very personal manner. The place is great: on top of a hill, with an amazing mix of traditional Rwandan architecture and modernism, using mainly local materials. The way there is also very interesting, a dirt road through really rural villages, where we had to take a bicycle-taxi to get back to the city.

Next time, I will write about my parents’ visit here (they are arriving in one week!).

]]> http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/rice-fields-and-cityscapes/feed/ 2 adriaanbayer Rice fields at Mukunguri CAF customers Bart on a bicycle taxi http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/lots-of-dutch-kibuye-a-heatstroke-kigali-and-the-genocide/ http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/lots-of-dutch-kibuye-a-heatstroke-kigali-and-the-genocide/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:43:56 +0000 Adriaan http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/?p=77 ]]> I have quite something to tell! First of all, I have been meeting a lot of people from the Netherlands lately. This is not a coincidence, as the organisations that I work with have very good contacts with Dutch NGOs, and many happened to be passing through in late March and April. In total, I met five Dutch and one Belgian working for three Dutch organisations doing development work here in Rwanda: ICCO (whose Toggethere programme brought me here), Terrafina (microfinance) and Wageningen University.
One of the Dutch I knew already: Monique from ICCO is the one who got me in touch with Ugama/CSC, the organisation that is hosting me! It was nice to show her what a good job Ugama/CSC has done to make me feel at home. Monique also took me along on a Saturday mission to Rubengera, where the white ICCO Land Cruiser (from Bukavu in the Congo) took us over a rough path to visit a pepper field in the hills: for some time I was in a white jeep cruising through Africa (see also the romantic adolescence image I described in the first Rwanda blog)!!

Monique and Hubert in front of the ICCO jeep!

Given that Ruhengeri is quite close to Kibuye, a lovely little town on Lake Kivu, we spent the night there. Lake Kivu is one of the Great Lakes of Eastern Africa and forms the main part of the border between Rwanda and the Congo. It is deep, going down more than a kilometre. In deep lakes like that, there is the danger of huge methane- and CO2-bubbles emerging, swallowing swimmers who then find themselves pretty deep below the surface. Apparently a lot of people have drowned that way around Kibuye, so when I went for a swim after an early-morning run on Sunday I made sure I stayed close to the shore! It was absolutely great to drift in the water and enjoy the view of the Lake from the Centre Béthanie, the hotel where we stayed. All in all, it was very relaxing to be in such a beautiful and calm place and talking Dutch all the time with Monique!

Lake Kivu in Kibuye

The week from April 7th to 13th was the national week of mourning for the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, the event that had a defining impact on the Rwanda of today, and looking at the holocaust and the genocide against the Armenians, will remain on people’s minds for generations to come. Over one million people died in the Rwandan genocide and the humanitarian crisis that followed, which means it affected everyone here. It was a strange experience to be in Rwanda during the commemorative week: as an outsider, it is impossible to grasp the full extent of the horrors that took place in every corner of the country, and people know you can’t. At the same time, there is a lot of blood on the hands of Western governments, who through their passivity allowed the genocide to happen (or in the case of the Mitterrand government, helped facilitate it to some extent, but don’t get me started on that now), and as a European I felt somewhat guilty for that.
To show my respect, I participated in the commemorative ceremony on the 7th. Given that the weather was pretty grey when I left, I decided to dress like I would at a funeral back home and also not take a hat. Not a good idea as it turned out, as the sun did come out after a while. With the big crowd and the sun, it was quite hot, and apparently I suffered a light heatstroke there: I got a big headache, and my feeling for temperature was totally off for several days. I was lucky that everything was closed in the afternoons during the week of mourning, so I did have some time to recover. On Saturday, I had recovered enough, so I went to Kigali to visit the national memorial centre there. That was an intensely heartbreaking experience: the centre is from 2004 and documents in a very graphic (yet professional) way what happened from April to July 1994. It was very crowded, and so there was a lot of devastating sobbing from visitors for whom the memories got too much. I’m glad I went there during the week of mourning though: it enabled me to witness and understand the incredible grief that people still feel about the genocide.
Given the total destruction that the country and its society underwent in 1994, it is truly amazing to see the progress that has been booked: the economy is booming, and all the survivors do their best to transform Rwanda into the best-functioning country in Africa.

In Kigali, I also took some time to explore the city centre and check out if there really is such a big difference between the products available there and here in Gitarama. Thus far, I would say there isn’t: given the image of Kigali as the “El Dorado for rich Rwandans who live just like Westerners”, the supermarkets and shops I found were rather disappointing: nothing you wouldn’t find in a European town of around 5,000 inhabitants, and at prices for imported products that are even higher than in Gitarama. Maybe I’m wrong though, and I have to look more carefully. It’s not a big deal anyway: it’s not like I’ve been craving imported food, I was mainly looking for some decent non-stale chocolate. There are considerable opportunities for development in the Rwandan food processing sector: after all, it is ridiculous that cacao is harvested in East Africa (Kenya for instance), transported to the Netherlands to be processed in hypermodern plants, only to be shipped to Northern Africa as Snickers for the middle-Eastern market, and then end up back in East Africa when the chocolate has turned grey!

Two weeks have passed since I last posted an entry. The main reason for this is that there was not too much going on: I had some digestion problems (giardiasis, don’t look it up though, it’s pretty gross) for around five days which kept me from travelling, for instance.

I have already found bunch of friends who are my age here in Gitarama: through Madame Astérie, my landlady, I got to know Gilbert, who in turn introduced me to his group of friends, centred around three DJs who run a tiny studio close to my workplace. Besides DJ-ing at parties, their main business is selling people videos and other digital gadgets for their mobile phones, and burning CDs and DVDs. As everyone knows everyone in this town, I’m starting to develop quite a social network myself, finding lots of interconnections between my group of friends and my colleagues. I also got to know the tiny Western community here in the area a little bit, running into two British girls the other day, and (again, through my group of friends) meeting Bart, a néerlandophone Belgian who is working on his thesis here. This Friday we went out: me, the group around the three DJs, Bart, and the Belgian ambassador’s son and daughter who were passing through on a visit with their parents. It was very nice to talk to some fellow Europeans and to dance with them and my Rwandan friends! The DJ even put on some “white” music for us (he thought we’d like Kelly Clarkson, haha). The only thing that annoyed me a little later on were some men I didn’t know who were trying to dance with me all the time. I mean, I’m perfectly comfortable with the local habit of men dancing with each other as if one of them were a girl (there really is nothing homoerotic about it) as long as I know the person I’m dancing with. When it’s some random guy (who is also not very attractive), it gets really annoying, especially when he’s pulling me away from girls and won’t let go of me.

DJ Maurice explains the meaning of PRIMUS to the Belgians

My work here at Uniclécam EjoHeza is also starting to take more and more shape: my main task thus far has been assisting in the creation of a three-year action plan for two of EjoHeza’s ten microfinance cooperatives. This is where my lifelong computer experience comes in handy: I can handle software like MS Word and Excel much more quickly than my colleagues. I have also been asked to do a little research on the influence of the agricultural cycle on savings and deposits at the Muhanga cooperative (that’s here in Gitarama), pretty interesting stuff. A week ago, we also had a celebration, at the cooperative in Kamonyi (on the road to Kigali), where I was the only white person among the 1,500 attendees. The governor of the Rwandan National Bank was also there, and he even mentioned me in his speech (as the action plans I’m working on will be used to for a financing request). And, of course, there was some traditional dancing and singing!

Yesterday I had a cool first-time experience: having dinner in a house without electricity! Monsieur Laurien, the coordinator at Ugama/CSC (the organisation that’s hosting me) took me to hill where his family is from, at some kilometres from Gitarama, and introduced me to his parents (who are in their eighties!) and some of his brothers and sisters. It was very nice to have some amazing-tasting food that had been produced a few hundred meters away on the same hill (except for the rice) by the light of a petroleum lamp.

My first weekend here was both relaxing and interesting; I got to sleep in on Saturday (which is quite nice because I usually get up at six here, at sunrise), and went on my first Rwandan run: it was quite tiring because of the slopes everywhere, and I imagine that the altitude (1,800 meters) is also playing a role, but that may just be a bad excuse for running out of breath. On Sunday, I attended the women’s day celebrations for the Muhanga district (that Gitarama is part of) with the Ugama/CSC delegation. As the celebrations were delayed somewhat, we joined the convoy of officials (around five cars) that went to visit a Ingandist camp. Ingandists are genocide perpetrators who have already served a long prison sentence. Because they have shown regret (and because it is not feasible to keep dozens of thousands of perpetrators in prison for decades), they have been pardoned and put to work on infrastructure projects. It was a very strange experience to see hundreds of convicted looters, murderers and rapists going about their daily business. Among them were women with children, which I found bizarre, but I guess life continues even among imprisoned criminals of both sexes.

With Me. Esperance and Me. Bélagie on women's day

The women’s day celebrations were naturally much more cheerful, with dance and song, but also with some very long speeches in Kinyarwanda. With my still limited vocabulary of twenty words and phrases, this was somewhat tiresome. The most important officials present (the mayor of the district and a senator, both women) even gave two speeches, which I’m sure were very interesting. I guess they were the most important persons whose hands I shook since Michelle Obama’s. Rwanda, by the way, as the highest proportion of women in parliament, higher than Norway or anywhere. A good reason to really celebrate: there were several groups who danced and sung, including some girls dressed in traditional leopard costumes. I’m sure that wasn’t to entertain tourists, as I was the only Umuzungu (white person) present.

Speaking of skin colour: it may be a cliché, but in a rural town like Gitarama a white person still is an attraction. When walking to work, I always hear the word “Umuzungu” at least ten times, mainly from children. I always smile and ask them how they are doing (“Amakuru?”). Some of the smallest kids on the more quiet sideroads even come running towards me for a hug, which is very heartwarming! While people notice me, I’m ashamed to admit that I have difficulties remembering faces here. I never realised how much I usually depend on things like hair-colour and -style or eye-colour; here men all have either shaved heads or short, very curly black hair, and everyone has dark brown eyes. I’m improving though, it helps to write down people’s names and then picture their face in my head.

View from outside my appartment (the mosque is down there)

Another cultural phenomenon I’m experiencing is the daily five-in-the-morning shahadah from the nearby mosque that often wakes me up (Muslims make up about five percent of the population in Rwanda). Back in Rotterdam I always used to be supportive of the rights of religious communities to communicate with their followers through speakers or bells, but now that I wake up to five minutes of calls for prayer almost every morning, I’m considering supporting a ban on shahadahs and church bells from, say, 23:00 to 8:00.

In terms of my volunteer activities here, I started working at Uniclécam EjoHeza on Monday. It’s a union of ten clécams (savings and credit cooperatives) in the region, hence the name. Ejo heza means “a better tomorrow”. I will be helping with requests for donor funds, researching possibilities for the clécams to work together with rural production cooperatives (like Ugama/CSC’s members), and investigate ways to increase the viability of the ten EjoHeza clécams.

I got the question to what extent people have access to electricity and drinking water here. Well, within the cities and along the major roads, most people have access to electricity (from dams in the country, or imported from Uganda and the Congo) but in rural areas this is not the case. The network is also quite unreliable, with frequent outages of an hour or so, and all desktop computers need a stabiliser to regulate the current the computer receives. In terms of drinking water, the tap water here in Gitarama comes from basins that are filled with rainwater, and is supposedly okay to drink. I prefer to boil it before though, but I don’t mind flushing my mouth with it after brushing my teeth. Again, in rural areas people mostly do not have access to tap water.

For those interested, the food here is quite nice: most of it is locally produced (except for some of the rice) and bio because farmers can’t afford fertilizer or pesticides. A typical meal consists of a selection of the following ingredients, all on one plate: rice, potato fries, young bananas (that taste like potatoes), beef or goat meat, brown beans, aubergines, avocado, manioc (some sort of root), peas and (sweet) potatoes. For those who want it, the whole thing is finished off with some sort of gravy and a spicy pepper sauce (jalapeños!). When I’m thirsty, besides water, I have the choice between two Western multinationals: I can either support Heineken (Primus beer and Amstel, both brewed here in Rwanda) or Coca Cola (with its many brands). Oh yes, the variety of fruits is awesome! Little oranges (that are easy to peel), prumes de Japon, little yellow thingies, little red thingies, pineapple, little bananas and so on and so forth.

This weekend there might be some going out, so I’ll keep you posted about that!

It took painstakingly long to upload these two photos by the way, so don’t expect too many in the future!

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.

Where I’m going

I came up with the idea of going to Africa when I was about 17: one night I couldn’t sleep and a plan that seemed crystal-clear came to me. The plan was to go there for several months after finishing secondary school and do volunteer work. I believed (and still do) that I, as a citizen of the wealthy world who has had plenty of opportunities, should contribute at least a little bit to the effort of expanding the opportunities that people in developing countries get. In Africa, too many can’t take any chances because they don’t have any.

In my head, I would be racing around the continent in white jeeps (preferably with the logo of some international organisation such as the UN or the Red Cross on it) helping those in need. I figured any aid organisation would be happy to accept the help of an enthusiastic 19-year-old and take him along in its white jeep. Reality proved more difficult: looking at several websites I found out quite soon that without experience, volunteering actually costs money. That was quite a turn-off, so my Africa-plans were moved to the back of my head for a few years.

In my fourth year at Erasmus University Rotterdam, I came across what I thought would be an ideal opportunity: the Global Experience Programme, a cooperation between the UN’s World Food Programme, the Dutch mail company TNT and AIESEC, the student association. This is a six-month internship at the WFP in Africa. I applied for it last year (when I was at the College of Europe), but unfortunately I didn’t make it through the second selection round (I messed up in a simulation game, apparently). I didn’t really have a decent Plan B, so when I graduated in June 2008, I had to start looking for a different way to fulfil my African wishes, as I didn’t want to give them up. After all, the time to go is now: I don’t have any obligations or commitments yet, so with the help of some savings and debt I am able to leave.

After some searching and assessing the feasibility of several options, I ended up with Togetthere. A cooperation between two (protestant) Dutch development organisations, ICCO and KiA, Togetthere uses the two organisations’ extensive network of partners to give young people (age 20 to 32) the opportunity to spend some time in a developing country and contribute to development cooperation projects. Within a couple of months, Togetthere found me my volunteer spot in Rwanda, and it fits my profile and interests very well!

Microfinance, offering financial services to customers who would be too poor by conventional banks, is a discipline that fascinates me: potentially (and ideally), this means offering more opportunities to the poor through a commercially viable activity. Where people have access to loans, they can get an income from little microenterprises and are able to repay their loans in most cases, so the loan provider can make a profit, or (in case there is no profit objective) at least the microfinance institution can finance itself. This fascination is why I chose to write my masters thesis at the College of Europe about microfinance, which in term led to my Togetthere assignment: in Gitarama, I’ll be working at two microfinance institutions, CAF Isonga and Uniclecam Ejoheza (the latter is a cooperative financial service provider). My tasks will be mainly at an analytical and strategic level, so it should be very interesting and challenging.

Now about the country: the first (and often the only) thing that comes to mind is the 1994 genocide. This is understandable as it was the biggest massacre since the Second World War. However, the country has achieved a remarkable recovery since then. In any case, Rwanda is very safe today, safer than most African countries. Crime rates are low, and even though there is quite some instability in the region (especially in the Congo), the Rwandan military protects its borders very effectively.

Rwanda is a small country: both in terms of size and population it can be compared to Belgium. This means it has the highest population density in all of the African continent, which is problematic in a country where the majority of the population are subsistence farmers. Partly because of this, Rwanda is among the twenty poorest countries in the world, both in terms of income per capita and the UN’s Human Development Index. Over the past thirty years, Rwanda has consistently had lower human development rates than the average for sub-Saharan Africa: since 1995, however, it is catching up fast.

Eco-tourism is an important source of growth, with both amazing agricultural landscapes and three National Parks: Volcanoes Park with its mountain gorillas in the Northwest, the vast Nyungwe Forest in the Southwest, and the savannah of Akagera on the Eastern border with Tanzania. Imagine having all that in a country the size of Belgium! Rwanda is also called “the Land of A Thousand Hills”: all of the country lies above 1,000 metres, but the highest peaks can reach up to 4,500.

With three other towns of about the same size, Gitarama (at an altitude of around 1,800 m) is one of the contestants for the second biggest city in Rwanda, with a population of around 100,000. According to my guide book, it’s not a very interesting place for tourists. But then, I’m not a tourist!

On Tuesday, when I land in Kigali, I will start discovering a country (and a continent) that I can’t really imagine at this point. This is more exciting and scary than anything I have ever done! I’ll keep you posted about my experiences. I’ll be back in Europe on September 12^th, and probably move to Brussels quite soon, either for the European Commission stage (if they take me) or for a try-my-luck job search. Until then: Africa here I come!

PS: Over the coming six months, I will probably be able to regularly post blog entries: internet connections are very slow, but I don’t need to be online to write. In terms of photos, I guess the situation is very different, so don’t expect too many before I return. If you want to reach me, the only really reliable way is probably my gmail address (so not facebook or my other email accounts).

Tagged: gitarama, microfinance, rwanda, volunteer work ]]> http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/going-to-rwanda/feed/ 6 adriaanbayer Rwanda http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/yes-we-did/ http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/yes-we-did/#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:38:02 +0000 Adriaan http://adriaanbayer.wordpress.com/?p=21 ]]>

Out of state volunteers: me (NL), Samantha (NY), Peter (London UK), David (NY), Gretchen (San Francisco), Silvester (Texas), Corey (Vermont/NY), Kate (NY)

Here it finally is: my account of what I’ve been doing in Ohio. I apologise for not having written anything while I was actually in North America, but the campaign was pretty busy and I did not have a computer with me. I hope my facebook friends could guess what I was up to looking at my status updates.

So, what was it like? First of all, I had picked a rather complicated (cheap) way of getting to Columbus: a flight from Vienna to New York’s JFK airport via Amsterdam (Schiphol), and then a Greyhound bus from midtown Manhattan to downtown Columbus. This meant that I first had to get from JFK to Manhattan using public transport (which takes around an hour and a half), get a bus ticket, and then spend the entire night and morning on the bus. The upside was that I had a little time to meet with my friend Josef from Canada, whom I had met at a French course in Brussels (the one just before going to the College of Europe) and who is now studying city planning at Columbia University.

I arrived in Columbus around noon. The Greyhound had given me the chance to catch a glimpse of cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and a lot of pretty boring countryside and highwayscapes. I did manage to get some sleep, so that I could start doing campaign-related things once I arrived at my field office on East Rich Street.

Columbus is actually a nice city: a million inhabitants in Franklin County, quite an impressive skyline for a city that size, and three nice neighbourhoods close to downtown: the German village, where 19th century brick buildings give a somewhat European feel, the Short North, where you can find many bars between downtown and the Ohio State University campus, and Bexley where I lived with my host family, the Sellmans. Bexley is a separate municipality that starts around five kilometres outside downtown. It’s a very nice area, a garden suburb: tree lined streets and lots of big houses with nice yards. I felt very lucky to be staying there, especially because my host family are real europhiles: Karen and Jerry met when they were on exchange in Switzerland, and their daughter Megan is married to a German guy, so their cute baby Miriam is bilingual.

An average campaigning day looked like this: I’d arrive at the field office between nine and ten in the morning, to stay there or to head out to a field office somewhere else in Franklin County (often Hilliard, where the grassroots field office was in a pretty cool garage). Until around 4 pm., we were mostly calling people (if we caught someone at home), asking them who they were going to support: if it was Barack, we’d ask them to vote early (which was possible for almost a whole month by mail or in person) and whether they would have time to volunteer. In the late afternoon, it was canvassing time, going from door to door basically asking the same questions. And we were quite successful: on the last few days before the elections the lines at the only early voting location in the county were up to 6 hours long (90% voting Obama) and we almost didn’t know what to do with all the new volunteers; as a consequence, during the weekend before the election, more experienced volunteers like myself (you become a ‘veteran’ within a week) were helping out with coordination rather than doing the main volunteer activities, calling and knocking on doors. At that point, I was happy to leave them to the newbies, as some voters were being ‘hit’ more than twice a day. In general, I really enjoyed canvassing though: you get to talk to all kinds of people, from wealthy professionals to people living on social security, from Somali immigrants to gay couples sharing nice suburban homes. Some other things I did were less exciting but also necessary: folding brochures and writing postcards to voters, for example, are pretty mind-numbing activities. After getting back from a canvas, after 6 pm.. there were often some idle hours during which we would relax a little and grab something to eat. Then, data would start pouring in from field offices across the county: the results of the phone calls and canvasses. Data entry is essential: the best canvasser is useless unless her findings are processed in time, so that it is known who has been called or visited yet and who hasn’t, and where Obama supporters can be found. I’d spend the rest of the night doing data entry, usually finishing off at around ten or eleven. An exception were the final days before the election, when I often stayed until after midnight.

I’ve been using the term ‘we’ a lot. Who were ‘we’? Volunteers and some interns from all across the country: there would always be a large group of locals from the Columbus area, but they often stayed for just a few hours, so a large part of the hard core of volunteers were from out of state: lots of New Yorkers, Californians, people from New England and a handful of Southerners. This is one of the effects of the electoral college with its principle of ‘the winner takes it all’: their states had essentially been decided already, so for those who wanted to get Barack elected it made much more sense to come to Ohio (or another battleground state). At the Rich Street office, I was the only continental European, although there were quite a lot of Brits: around six who were there for more than a week, and a group of eighty (!) Labour Party canvassers who flew in for the last four days. In terms of age groups, we were also very diverse: students, professionals who had taken some time off, and quite a lot of pensioners. It was amazing to see how much a polarised election like this one can inspire people to become politically active: the number of volunteers was staggering, far greater than anything you would see in a system with proportional representation. Part of it also had to do with George W. Bush’s horrific legacy and Barack’s charisma of course, but I would still estimate that American elections mobilise far greater amounts of political activists than European ones (at least on the continent).

The peak of excitement (before election night itself, of course) came on Sunday before the elections: on November 2nd, Obama himself came to Columbus to speak to a crowd of 60,000 at the Ohio State Capitol, and I was working the section for disabled people together with many of my friends from the Rich Street office! Now I had already been working at the rally on October 24th, where Michelle replaced her husband who was visiting his grandmother in Hawaii at the time, and I did end up on the seats right behind her and get to shake her hand there, so I was used to something. But the rally at the State Capitol beat that: it was so much more massive, and Barack himself was there! He gave a marvellous speech, and I got a really good look at him because the disability section was close to the stage. I especially liked this part of his speech:

“Yes, government must lead the way on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and our businesses more efficient. Yes, we must put more money into our schools, but government can’t be that parent who turns off the TV and makes a child do their homework. We need a return to responsibility and a return to civility. Yes, we can argue and debate our positions passionately, but all of us must summon the strength and grace to bridge our differences and unite in common effort – black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American; Democrat and Republican, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, disabled or not.”

Some of my friends stood even closer and got to shake Barack’s hand after the rally, and I somewhat regret that I was not as eager to get to him. I got to talk to John Glenn, however: he was the first American to orbit the earth in 1962, then became the Ohio Democratic senator for 24 years, and returned to space at the age of 77. The cool thing about it is that my father and uncle also got Glenn’s autograph back in the sixties when he was on a world tour and stayed in the Hotel des Indes in The Hague, across the street from the house that my grandmother still owns.

Two days later it was November 4th: election day. I had a really nice task, get-out-the-vote canvassing. This entailed knocking on doors of voters whom we had identified as Obama supporters to make sure they did vote. This was very rewarding work: I was in an African American neighbourhood, and it was touching to see how much the election meant to people. Some even thanked me for what I was doing. It might sound strange, but hearing someone say “Thanks for doing this” makes your work a lot more meaningful.

After a day of knocking on doors, I reported back to the Rich Street office, where we watched the first results coming in. Then we headed to the election night party that was organised in a big hotel downtown. When we entered the hotel, we heard frantic cheering upstairs, so we ran there as quickly as we could, to find that Fox News had announced that Obama had won Ohio. We quickly joined the celebrations, as this was basically the final decision: at that point, John McCain would have needed several upsetting wins in Democratic states to make up for the loss of Ohio. I still regret that we didn’t get to the hotel one minute earlier though: it would have been more exciting to be watching as the results were being announced; now it was kind of like running into a pub in the Netherlands thirty seconds after the Dutch football team has just scored a goal in overtime during the World Cup final. The rest of the night was great, with parties at several locations and happy people everywhere. Some people (including myself) were also too tired to properly celebrate though; that was a pity.

I left Columbus on Thursday to go to Canada: this year was my last chance to catch my friends from my 2005 exchange at the University of Western Ontario in London while they were still there. We had a little residence reunion which was great, and I spent another four days hanging out with my friends (thanks again Mal and Emily for letting me stay with you!!). I then went to New York city, where I stayed at Josef’s place for a couple of nights, checking out museums and exploring the city, and spent the weekend at my cousin Ashley’s in Amherst, Massachusetts. On Monday (November 17th), I took the bus to Hartford, where my uncle Kees picked me up to take me to New York in his bus. Unfortunately, I had caught the flu during the weekend and had a fever, which made the flight back to Europe from that night not very pleasant. By the time I got back to my parents’ around 24 hours after leaving Amherst, I had developed a light pneumonia, which I’m still recovering from as I write this.

Although it ended with some pneumonia, my four-week trip to North America was absolutely great: I made tons of new friends, experienced the US from the inside, shook hands with the future first lady, talked to an astronaut, saw the current president-elect speak, caught a glimpse of Brian the Backstreet Boy (Sarah and I ran into his arrival at a concert venue in London), and attended a public interview with Paul Simon in a bookstore in New York (he also sang and played the guitar!). Worth it!