Population control

Vision 2020 for Rwanda, a very detailed and in many ways highly ambitious plan, appears to accept that the struggle to control the population will not be won in the next few years. It forecasts that the population growth rate will show a meagre decrease from 2.9% in 2000 to 2.2% in 2020. Because of forecast drastic cuts in maternal mortality, infant mortality (1.07% to 0.5%) and a corresponding increase in life expectancy, the population is forecast to rise from 8.3 million to 11 million by 2010 and 14 million by 2020.
This is hardly surprising : the odds are stacked against population control. Tradition favours large families (and our experience is that women are often more keen on having a lot of children than men are). In addition, the country is largely Roman Catholic, at least nominally, while the second church, the Pentecostals, has the same view on artificial methods of birth control. This, in a country where half the population is under 18, means that the population is inevitably going to grow steeply at least in the next few years. Messages about limiting family size are hard to frame appropriately and are likely to fall on very stony ground. Their delivery is also impaired because they are largely created by a generation which has already produced large families and is therefore not a good role model. “Do what we say, not what we have done!”
The genocide provides a grim backdrop to this. So many people lost parents, children, siblings in that time of horror that small families must still seem very insecure and vulnerable.
Immigration will fuel this population growth : Rwanda is much safer than neighbouring eastern Congo and is much better organised than Burundi, while there are still returnees coming back from Tanzania and Uganda where they went into exile either before or during the genocide of 1994.
In several countries in Europe, Scotland included, the birth rate is now less than is required to sustain the population at its current level. It is hard to remember that this did not come about as a result of propaganda exercises by the government, but as a result of increasing prosperity and improving health care.
There are some signs of hope for limiting population growth here :
ß Increasing access to tertiary education is already delaying the age at which some young adults are ready to marry
ß It is not what any country would aspire to, but we have met several young men who have told us that they cannot get married because they are too poor. They usually express this in the traditional way of not having enough money to buy a cow.
ß There is a realisation among some, usually wealthy or well-educated, that having large families will now mean high costs of education as access to fee-paying secondary schools increases.
ß “Caisse sociale”, a scheme to pay pensions, should bring confidence at least to those in employment that they will have some income in their old age
In the meantime, I just cannot imagine how Rwanda can sustain 14 million people in such a small country.

Population pressure

Rasano School is one of the clearest examples we have seen of the problems of the birth rate in Rwanda. The road is tricky, curling through the forest around the sides of very steep hills. There is no public transport here, nor commercial traffic either and the road beyond Rasano, leading to Bweyeye, is currently closed in several places for repair.
The land is difficult. Apart from the slopes, it is hard to cultivate and is limited. On one side is the forest, a protected National Park. On the other side is a deep valley with a river at the bottom marking the border with Burundi.
As you walk round the area, it is hard to see where the 1200 children come from. The houses are small and scattered, and there is no obvious centre of population. Normal family size is 6-10 children in 2-3 bedrooms. Many of the children have a very long walk to school, because the catchment area is wide.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this land in this location cannot sustain even the population it has now, let alone in the future as many more young people enter adulthood and start their own families. While Rwanda as a whole faces the same issue, it is in areas like this where the pressure is greatest and the effects are already obvious and severe.

Troubled heart, sore head

Rasano Primary School is on the edge of Nyungwe Forest, right next to the Burundi border. A recent visit produced the frequent combination of a troubled heart and a sore head. The troubled heart comes from seeing so many people in dire poverty, the sore head comes from thinking about solutions or remedies. Perhaps “palliatives” or even only “appropriate course of action” would better describe what is within our capabilities.
It doesn’t take long to identify the main problem at the school, as the following statistics on the school roll show.
P1 – 385
P2 - 353
P3 – 371
P4 – 264
P5 – 145
P6 - 44
The dropout rate at p4, when the children start to stay all day at school, is huge and much more of a problem than we have found anywhere else. All the local people at the committee meeting were convinced that the solution would be to provide food at lunchtime. Some felt that the whole school (1200 pupils!) should be fed, but we managed to convince them that we could and should only provide an incentive for the seniors. The obvious difficulties are there : finding finance and sustaining it, how to manage a programme so far away from Kamembe, ensuring that only the children are fed and getting parents to value education and not just free food.
We have agreed to look at how we can do it, but oh how often “we will discuss it” is remembered as “you promised”! There are some months of grace before the start of term in January and porridge (Rwandan, not Scottish) seems as if it might be a possibility.

The mole hunter

He is about 5 feet tall, his spear is 6 feet. He is an elderly Batwa who is sometimes employed by the diocese to clear the cathedral grounds of “ifucu”, or moles. He wanders about barefoot, but for a lot of the time he stands very still over a spot where he has opened up the soil under a molehill.
I have never seen him actually in action, but his success rate is quite high : I have seen the petty cash payments, of 200 Frw (about 20p) per mole killed.

Walking in the dark

Working in a culture different from our own often feels like walking in the dark, but we sometimes do this literally, too. There is street lighting on the main path near our house, but it only functions intermittently. Cloudy nights and the lack of houses with security lighting can make it very black. If we are visiting people nearby, or accompanying visitors who have been with us, we often end up walking where we cannot see the ground. Putting your feet where you can’t see is disconcerting both literally and metaphorically.
Occasionally there are glow-worms (or something similar) beside the path, but last night there were about 100 in a 10-metre stretch, small flashing green lights in the grass verge, just like LEDs. It made quite a dramatic and very beautiful display, although there was not enough intensity to light the path, but only to show where the edge was.
There are some things, often the most interesting, you can only see by walking. There are some things you can only see in the dark.

Congregation of 600

Communion is once a month in the Episcopal Church and in the rural parishes all the “daughter” churches gather together. Each parish only has one pastor, but in some parishes there are up to 8 churches, often scattered in the hills, accessible only by footpaths.
We were at Bweyeye, where a congregation of 600 gathered, including many children, of course. It’s quite daunting to have such a large number in front of you – I can’t remember the last time I was in church with so many people. The worship was enthusiastic, the choirs were excellent, the welcome was extremely warm and our re-telling of Jesus’ stories seemed to go down well. It was a real privilege to share communion with over 300 people who have been confirmed as Christians.
Whenever we visit churches like this we are expected to speak - re-telling parables seems within our competence and a “safe” option! Our theme was about God seeing our hearts, not being impressed by the outside (the stories of the widow’s 2 coins and the 2 men praying in the temple). It seemed appropriate for Bweyeye, a community which is far away from the rapid development and emerging wealth of Kigali, but which has a real depth of faith and a vibrant church amidst some terrible poverty. There is no electricity, no secondary school, no running water, 2 cars and a few motorbikes.

Starting the day

I was wakened at 0545 this morning by a knock on the door.  Even by Rwandan standards this is early, but I was not surprised to find that it was Kenneth, the head teacher of the local primary and a good friend.  Yesterday he got back from Kigali with 2 pupils who had taken part in a national language competition.  At 0200 this morning(!) he had a phone call to say that they had won and that they needed to be back in Kigali (by 1200) for the ceremony.

My part was to supply a loan of £30, because the school had no petty cash and a lift to the bus station for the 3 of them to catch the 0630 taxi.  The children were immaculately dressed and of course were quite excited about all this.  

In return, I get a day away from the office, because he also told me that it had been announced on the radio the night before that today is a public holiday because of a Muslim celebration.  It’s still beyond me that there can be a national plan for the year 2020 but a competition for children and a public holiday cannot be organised 24 hours in advance.  I suppose it shows that culture goes much deeper than we sometimes think.

An apt phrase

When our friend Odeth talks, she has a huge store of idiosyncratic phrases, which are often highly descriptive. She is from the east of Rwanda and has worked in Uganda for some time, too, so she speaks English with Ugandan idioms, but in a highly individualised way.
There was a power cut at the office, so work had stopped. She asked where Sheena was and I said that she was at school. “There will be no problem there”, she said, “that is just chalking with children”. It’s a great way of describing so much education here in Rwanda!

Living history

We recently visited the north of Rwanda, where we spent a couple of nights with friends in the former house of Rosamund Halsey Carr. Ros Carr came to Rwanda in the middle of last century with her game-hunter husband, but after their separation she started a pyrethrum farm near Gisenyi. In those days the crop was at risk from the ravages of elephants which seem to have been abundant in the region. Later she was a friend of Dian Fossey, who did so much work with the gorillas and after the genocide, by now in her eighties, she started an orphanage which is still running. She died last year.
The house has a spectacular setting right underneath the volcanoes and because it is so high it can be quite cold. We had a fire in the hearth the 2 nights we were there. There is also a large formal country garden : when the mist is down you could almost be in England.
There is history everywhere : furs on the bed (these had to be hidden when Dian Fossey visited!); elegant china; one of the household staff, trained by Ros Carr, who serves dinner in a white jacket; loads of interesting books.
One of the most memorable parts of the time there was reading the local history of the genocide in the house where it happened. Before her forced evacuation, Ros Carr was in the house surrounded by an angry mob demanding that she hand over some of her staff. She knew many of the people in the crowd, had seen them grow up in the neighbourhood, but they were still at the roadside shouting at her as the troops drove her back to the main road and Kigali. It’s all so calm and friendly now that it really is hard to believe, but that is so often the case with Rwanda’s history.

Rain

This week the rains really arrived after a false start in September. It’s not that it rains all day, but when it comes, usually in the afternoon, it can be too heavy even to drive safely. All activity around the town stops, people just shelter and wait for it to end. The children next door didn’t get home from school until 8pm on Tuesday because we had a very extended spell.
The rain of this week brings home what it is to be poor in this country. You often see people absolutely soaked to the skin, knowing that they probably have long walks ahead of them into the surrounding countryside and may not even have houses which are proof against the rain. They also face the risk of flooding from the streams which appear everywhere during rain in the land of a thousand hills.
It has also demonstrated that in an isolated community like ours, everyone is to some extent poor. Power cuts have become more frequent. The rain, or more likely the accompanying lightning, has brought a problem with telephone landlines, making the banks inoperative for 2 days and also preventing anyone who has pay-as-you-go electricity from buying new cards. They require the Electrogaz office to use their internet connection, which is down. Since Thursday is “gacaca” and everything is shut in the morning, it will mean 3 days without a bank.
In all of this, people remember that the rain is necessary for planting crops and there are few complaints. In fact I am amazed at how little damage is done to the newly-planted crops even by the downpours of this week.