The perfect breakfast

It’s no secret that physically we are not “roughing it” here. Breakfast shows this very clearly. Full cream milk only 1 day old, local honey, lemon marmalade made from our garden produce, fresh bread or rolls plus fruit salad of pineapple, banana and orange (our garden again). Unfortunately, the menu also includes 1 doxycycline pill!
Perhaps best of all, however, we can take 20 minutes to sit on the veranda and enjoy it together, with a stunning view over the lake to the Congo mountains. I think back to 5-minute “solo” breakfasts at home, where it is dark for about 4 months of the year. “Quality of life” is a wide and undefinable term, but for quality of breakfast, Rwanda is streets ahead.

Waiting

I visited the gacaca recently. This is the local court system which is being used across Rwanda to investigate genocide crimes from 1994. When we got there we found instead a meeting about security, being addressed by a senior army officer. This was at great length, of course (nearly an hour). When he had finished, there was the formal opening of the court and the identification of witnesses before the trial began. By this time my back was quite sore with standing and waiting and I was feeling hot, tired and dehydrated in the glare of the direct sun.
Then I thought about the families of the murdered, who have waited 12 years for justice. They have also had to wait their turn in the gacaca process and finally today for the army officer to finish his speech.
I am an amateur at waiting.
There are echoes of the Psalms here, people waiting to see God’s justice come on the earth.
How long, O Lord?
How long will the wicked be allowed to gloat?
Hear their arrogance! How those evildoers boast!
They oppress your people, O Lord, hurting those you love.
They kill widows and foreigners and murder orphans.
“The Lord isn’t looking”, they say, “and besides, the God of Israel doesn’t care”.
Psalm 94, New Living Translation

The mzungu baby

Aimee, one of the diocesan staff, had a baby recently and yesterday we all went round to visit. I got a chance to hold the baby and someone joked that it was a “mzungu” (white person). Sure enough, the skin on the arms was paler than mine (admittedly now quite well tanned).
The baby presents were definitely in Rwandan custom : 2 crates of Fanta, a hen and a large matoke (savoury banana).

The first signs of Christmas

Of course Christmas is completely different here. The first time I really heard it mentioned was in relation to the police. “The police become more harsh in December – they are trying to get more money before the end of the year. You even see them in the villages.”. There seems to be some truth in this, there is a lot of police activity and I had my first slightly unpleasant encounter with police recently, normally they are very pleasant.
The second conversation about Christmas involved food prices : “They start to go up near Christmas”. I can’t vouch for this personally. What has surprised me is that there has been little mention of it in church. I thought an Episcopal church would be stronger on celebrating Advent (apparently it is more significant in the Catholic Church). This week the church is being painted and decorated there are some special meetings next week, but there is certainly no Advent theme in worship yet.
Last Saturday we were in Butare and there was one shop with a tiny Christmas tree and a tinselly Christmas banner, but otherwise they are thankfully free of Western glitter.
For our part, we have put up some fairy lights on the veranda, taken a suitable branch to act as a small Christmas tree outside our door and are working our way through a chocolate advent calendar (thanks, Clare!). With reports of storms at home and the weather actually improving here, it’s hard to believe that there are only 12 days to go.
There is one other sign of Christmas – the flow of newsy emails from the UK has dried up! Presumably everyone is writing Christmas cards?

The first 100 days

We have just passed 100 days in Rwanda. Coincidentally, it arrived just after I had prepared a report for Rwanda Aid. My first surprise was that it was about 8 pages long. I didn’t think I had done that much since coming here! It also coincided with a very inspiring meeting with the bishop, where we were able to share ideas about our work and the way ahead. As always, the difficulty is putting ideas into practice. That is particularly tricky here where the management systems (i.e. the tools to implement ideas) are weak or non-existent. Challenges all around.
We have passed some kind of milestone apart from merely counting the days. The difference is subtle but noticeable in a number of ways.
• We have started getting interested in the news again, Rwandan, British and world.
• We have found a new confidence in speaking French and not worrying about grammatical errors. We are also starting to understand African French better.
• We understand a fair amount of what is happening round about us (we think) and do not need to ask so often. This makes life easier, but it also means that some of the novelty and wonder of living here is wearing off.
• We have people we would count as friends.
• We are seriously missing people at home.
We are also past the stage where we can say “we have just arrived here”. There are lots of things which are still new and mysterious, but the settling-in period is over (as is 1/7th of our time here).

Surprised by the sun

I was surprised to notice recently that the sun here does not always set in the same place. Being very close to the equator, our days are pretty much the same length, but the sunset is definitely moving. This was disguised because it is the rainy season and sunset is usually behind cloud, but I had expected that it would always be virtually due west. The technical explanation is provided by my dad, who used to teach navigation.

“Being on the equator greatly simplifies the calculation of the bearing of the sun at sunrise and set. Cyangugu is at 2* 29' S of the equator but that will not affect the situation to any extent.
The amplitude or bearing at sunrise is the number of degrees from 090--- N from the Spring to the Autumnal equinoxes and S of 090 for the rest of the year. The same applies to 270 at sunset. At the equinoxes it rises at 090 and sets at 270.
The maximum angle away from the E---W line occurs at the solstices and is 23.5* The sun therefore rises at 066.5 and sets at 293.5 on 21st June and rises at 113.5 and sets at 246.5 on 21st December.
These values for the amplitude of the sun at the equator are the same as the sun's declination on the respective dates. Minute by minute value for declination is given in the nautical almanac for each year. You could get an approximate enough value by drawing a cosine curve or even a straight line graph of angle against time”.
Reading this led me to another surprise – the sun is not always directly overhead at mid-day, as I had imagined it would be. This will only be true at the equinoxes.
If all this technical writing detail seems difficult, there is also a very simple parable here. I don’t understand half of what goes on in Rwanda, even simple things like the rising and setting of the sun!