Plastic bags and other rubbish

If you wanted to give an example of a draconian measure, you need go no further than this :

“Article 104 of the Environment law bans the importation, production, storage, use, sale and distribution of polythene bags. According to the law, anyone found in possession of a polythene bag may be sentenced to one to five years’ imprisonment or a fine ranging from five million to 50 million francs.”

You can see the original article on the New Times website. Of course this law is not implemented as it is stated here, although it is true that plastic bags acre confiscated from passengers arriving at Kigali Airport.

The shop where we buy bread has most of the loaves and rolls in plastic bags. When I ask about this, people believe that there are different kinds of plastic bags, only some of which are affected. This may well be true, although I haven’t managed to confirm it yet, but the use of plastic for packaging is certainly reasonably common. What is interesting is that Rwanda is very largely clear of the littering by plastic bags which characterises some other African countries and which led to the passing of this law.

There is a wider issue about packaging and about waste disposal generally which the country needs to deal with and quite urgently. Virtually all manufactured goods are imported and the number of goods which are overpackaged western-style will definitely increase. The modern supermarkets in Kigali are already producing a lot of packaging waste and it will need more than a draconian law against polythene bags to ensure that there is infrastructure in place to deal withy this.

The week in brief

Sunday – In church, an announcement is made asking the congregation NOT to take change from the offering basket.
One family brings their new baby to give thanks for her surviving 5 days in intensive care shortly after birth. It’s a reminder of the difference health care can make, but the infant mortality figures here are still frightening.

Monday – our normally reliable MTN internet connection, via the mobile phone fails.
It’s goat day at the refugee camp at Bugarama, 50 goats to give out from our Christmas appeal. Chantal, the Social Worker, has it well organised, but inevitably there are some unhappy people who feel hard done by. In the end, though, we manage to get the job done. For the people living here, this is a drop in the ocean, but the local official with us says that the government will complete the house-building we and other churches have started. A very encouraging sign of how churches can lead the way despite very limited resources.

Tuesday – we usually meet with a group of Rwandan friends after work for a Fanta : the English club, as we reluctantly call it. Tonight we invited a new acquaintance, the friend of a friend, but the atmosphere changed noticeably when he arrived. One of our friends explained that they needed to get to know him first before they would feel comfortable in a group like that (we meet in a pub). This society is still very divided and distrustful.

Wednesday – the ufucu (mole) lives! The mole traps in our garden were dismantled (empty) ages ago, but today there were 4 large molehills on the grass. I’m quite glad – Wikipedia confirms my suspicions that moles are carnivores, but our neighbours stick to their convictions that the moles will eat the sweet potatoes and other plants.

Thursday – I gain a new respect for Rwandan wildlife when we see a 2-metre snake on the road while we are on our way to Nyarusange. It’s only the second one we have seen here and it’s 5 times as long as the first, which was dead. The live one is quite a scary sight. Instinctively, I drive round it – it’s only afterwards that I remember an episode story from the “Lady Detective Agency” series where a snake gets caught in the engine of a car.

Friday – an email from MTN suggests the oldest IT trick – turn the phone off and then back on. The internet connection is duly restored.
Dinner at the “pork restaurant” with a friend – the menu consists of pork and matoke (savoury banana), but at £5 for the three of us, including 1 kg of fresh pork to take home, we can put up with the lack of choice every so often.

Saturday – I’m cooking dinner for the first time since Sheena came back from Scotland and attempt stovies using matoke. Unfortunately the matoke has ripened since we were given it on Tuesday and the stovies turn out really quite sweet and not very pleasant. Next time I’ll use a recipe.

Murambi

There was a warm, gentle breeze blowing when we arrived at Murambi Genocide Memorial Site. It’s just 2km from the main road and despite the group of people working at the entrance, it was very quiet and peaceful.

At the front door we were directed by a young man past the main building to a set of terraced brick buildings. He opened the door to the first one : inside were wooden benches piled high with preserved human remains, not much more than skeletons, covered with white powder. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers, now withered. The second and third doors revealed the same. It was only in the third room, where there were some larger bodies, that I realised that most of the remains were of children. There were obvious signs of damage on many bodies – holes in skulls, broken limbs. Murambi was built as a school but never used and has more than 20 such rooms. Between 40,000 and 50,000 people were killed here in the space of a few short days in 1994. They had gathered to seek protection from the killing which was going on around them.

For me, as I suspect most westerners, the only appropriate response in such surroundings is silence, or perhaps a few words in a hushed voice, but we were joined by one of the handful of people who survived the massacre. He now works at Murambi, telling his story to visitors. He has a dent in his head where the bullet entered. I have to admit I found his talking intrusive and distracting, but it did provide the only information on the events at Murambi. The memorial is stark in its simplicity and its portrayal of the extent of the genocide.

A large shed has several ropes on which hang the blood-stained clothes taken from the victims. On our way back to the car we were shown a large hole which served as the mass grave. Most of the remains had been exhumed form here. We signed the visitors’ book and left. It was about another 20 minutes before we spoke.

Rwandan story - never been to school

S has never been to school. She is in her thirties now, so this was in the 1970s. Her mother died when she was young and her stepmother did not think it was important for girls to go to school. This would have been well before universal primary education was available in Rwanda, anyway.
Now S is married with 6 children and is a lady of great enterprise and considerable artistic flair. She is learning English, she cleans houses, she takes on sizeable painting and gardening jobs, providing employment for other people as well. It is still a struggle to make ends meet, because these jobs are intermittent and her husband works as a guard, which provides a regular but small wage.

Rwandan story - the family split

One family fled Rwanda as the RPF approached at the end of the 100 days. After some time in the Congo, they decided to return, except for the father who was frightened and one of the brothers, who had got a job.
When war came to the Congo, the brother was killed in cold blood along with some priests. The family was told this by someone who buried the bodies. The father fled into the jungle : he has not been heard of since. The split in the family became permanent.
One of the dilemmas for families like this is that Genocide Memorial Week is about victims of the genocide, not those who died in the war in the Congo in the years shortly afterwards (some say that the numbers are about the same). They can therefore feel excluded from the events.

Another brother of the family has recently been sentenced by the gacaca court for minor crimes. His wife and 2 young children are dependent on the rest of the family for support.

Rwandan story - the walk to Angola

I have a friend here whose family fled Rwanda at the approach of the RPF at the end of the genocide. With many others, they went into the Congo as refugees and kept walking to escape the RPF soldiers. They eventually ended up walking to Angola. With no prospect of settling there, they started to return and were eventually repatriated from Lubumbashi in the Congo by UNHCR.
Now my friend’s father is in prison, expecting to die there. The family visits him every week.

Rwandan story - caring for the genocidaires

R lost many members of his family during the genocide. He told me his own story some time ago a- I remember that he spent about 3 weeks hiding in the forest before he was able to escape to Congo.
R now does a lot of voluntary work with prisoners. He visits Cyangugu Prison regularly to preach and to give pastoral care and to prepare them for release. Among those there must be those who are responsible for the deaths of his family members.

Rwandan story - escape on a motor bike

A is a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman. During the genocide she managed to escape from the country. While he was in Rwanda the Interahamwe came for his motor bike. There was one night of a very close call when he was imprisoned and threatened with death because he had hidden it. Eventually he too escaped to Burundi.
At the end of the genocide they were living in Cyangugu. They have clear memories of being hungry and watching the UNHCR food convoys driving past them and into the Congo where food was given out in the refugee camps. It is well known that many of the camps were full of people responsible for the genocide.
A and his wife braved some dangerous times in Cyangugu after the genocide to bring help to people living here.

Genocide Memorial Week

Saturday 7th April marks the start of Genocide memorial week. This year is the 13th anniversary of the terrible events. It’s not clear yet exactly what is happening – even a phone call from the bishop to the mayor failed to produce a programme, only a promise that it would be delivered to the office on Friday.

It is clear what will NOT be happening and that is anything which involves celebrations. Churches have cancelled baptisms and confirmations. This is not so much for the events themselves, but more for the parties which would normally follow. Even Easter Sunday will, I think, be different because of this.

It was indeed “one of those days” in the usual sense, but it was also one of those days which contained so many of the things which epitomise life here, that it is worth recording. In later years, when I wonder “what did I do while I was in Rwanda?”, I will re-read this.
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The plan was simple enough – to take Sheena to the farm and then to go to the office. However, the previous evening our electricity suppliers and nemesis Electrogaz arrived without warning or invitation to change our meter to “cashpower”, a pay-as-you-go system they are introducing. We had to hurry round to their offices just before closing time to buy some credit, managing not to get too riled by the cashier asking us why we had come so late.
We arrived home, entered the numbers from the credit card only to be rewarded with an error message. Repeated attempts produced the same result and it was apparent that the 5kWhr Electrogaz had left us would expire some time during the night despite our best efforts at conservation (security lighting is a must).

A visitor staying with us attracted some other visitors at breakfast time, so it was 10am before I arrived at the Electrogaz offices. To their credit, they produced 2 technicians quite quickly, but no vehicle : I was expected to give them a lift to the house. Once there, Some 10 minutes of fiddling only produced the conclusion that we needed to return to the office to see the boss.
Naively, I stayed in the car expecting a quick turn-around, but after 15 minutes decided that the 2 needed some follow-up. I found them in a queue in the boss’ office, which took a further 20 minutes to be dealt with and concluded with us returning to the house, this time with 4 Electrogaz employees. Fortunately by now my sense of the ridiculous was engaged and I had renounced any hope of productive work that morning, feeling grateful once again for my earlier decision to postpone management training from the afternoon. This would have caused me severe stress in the current circumstances.
Our “work party” attracted a group of 5 kids from next door, plus our guard and a young man who sells crafts nearby. Fortunately, we have steps beside the meter, so everyone was able to get a good view, although there was more talk than action.
While the Electrogaz team was failing to repair the meter and then was putting the old one back, Modeste, our guard, approached me with Derek from next door as interpreter, to ask if he could chase the mice from the garden. “Not mice, exactly, they live in the ground and eat the sweet potatoes”. Moles (ifucu, in Kinyarwanda). Having agreed that they could do this, I took the Electrogaz team back to the office with electricity restored but the cashpower machine still broken.

After a morning of meagre achievement, there was a sudden burst of fruitful activity in the afternoon : a meeting at the dispensary to discuss the way forward with our AIDS Project, combined with a progress review on my severely septic finger; a discussion with the bishop on welfare policy; afternoon prayers for Holy Week.

Back home the mole catching was creating much activity and hope : traps, consisting of deep holes, wires and springy sticks were being dug. “Bring back the moles”, I thought, “they made a lot less mess of the garden than these traps”. Sheena was more concerned about being the first to find a dead mole in a trap and made Derek promise to check them early in the morning.

That evening our neighbour called in to check on my finger and also to talk about the UK team he currently has here working with children and using puppets to tell parables and gospel stories. The school holidays mean that the children of the family who are studying in Kigali are home, bringing a couple of friends, so it is 4 to a bed and more mouths to feed than I can easily count. His wife, also studying in Kigali, is coming home for Easter week-end and the 8 from the UK team have also been invited for Sunday lunch after a visit to the prison. This is African hospitality in action.