Pics from lake Kivu.

This is the place I stayed, the "Bethanie" guest-house in Kibuye. It was a very pleasant overnight stay, if not that exciting. The lake was gorgeous to swim in, refreshing and no crocs or hippos, or Bilhartzia. I just don't think there is room for any wildlife in this country, too many people!

To the country!

After two weeks in Kigali, I decide to go to Lake Kivu in the west for a swim. I go to the main "bus" station, a chaotic confluence of dozens of Toyota mini-vans - the "buses". 1300 RWF (1 pound 30) buys me a 3 1/2 trip, jammed into a van designed for 16 small people (max!) but carrying 20 average sized ones. It's not so bad, if a bit pungent. Water for washing is scarce here.

The countryside is very pretty, ALL terraced very tidily, right to the tops of hill/mountains.

Not much chat in the bus, though the driver keeps up a 3 hour monologue in Kinya-Rwanda. All I notice is that he uses the word "Mazungu" a lot: 'white person'. First I get a bit paranoid. No-one answers when I ask what he's talking about. Then I guess that actually there must be another common word like Mazunga but which means something else. He just can't be talking about me for 3 hours.

I seem to specialise in turning up at african lakes, in the pitch dark of night in the rain. It is so here. Kibuye is the town I was aiming for but it turns out to be pretty much just a petrol station. I get a moto-taxi to a lodge I've booked on the lake shore and I eat dinner beside the lake, looking at the orange glow from an active volcano over the lake in Congo. Surreal. Early night under a full mosquito net, at 1400m it's low enough to worry about malaria here.

A visit to the genocide exhibition

Sunday March 25th - A very moving experience. There is an exhibition building giving the history of Rwanda since before colonial times to now. It seems that the Hutu/Tutsi names were originally a tribal socio-economic title. Dependant on how much land or cattle you had. The Germans initially, then Belgian colonials took that and made it a psuedo-racial divide. The colonials, the church, the local administration all acted to strengthen the divisions between the two over decades. After independance the divisions were deeply rooted and exploited.

There were several genocides actually, over many years. The biggest and last started on April 6th, 1994. It was meticulously planned, orchestrated and executed, and all manner of people became killers - the most shocking for me being priests and nuns who killed their own congregations. Religion just didn't seem to be factor in preventing it.

Around Kigali, you can see people who are convicted of crimes during this time - they wear pink prisoner overalls and are taken to do work around the place (like in brick factories). Some 80,000 are in jail. 1M were killed. Of course, people are still being exposed and convicted. Bodies are still being found - like 300 who were found in one well just last week.

People do talk about it very openly here. There has been a national facing of the issue which is hugely impressive, and the divisions are being taken down and peoples energies redirected - one example being 'Muganda', 1/2 a day on the last saturday of each month when all people, nationally, get together in their local area to clean, tidy, fix potholes etc. Everyone I've asked seems to really enjoy it too. Non-crucial work and travel is not allowed for those hours. Some people at work still say that some people work better with some than with others (meaning the Hutu/Tutsi divide), perhaps, I am sure that 14 years isn't enough to turn the tide on 150 years of propaganda, though what has been acheived in this time seems very impressive.

How much?

Kigali a is relatively expensive place. A trips into town and back from my place is 7 quid. There goes my per diem. Not expensive by London of course, but I think I need to get a car. There are much cheaper moto-taxis (motorbikes) but my place is too far out to get many passing, and you can't call them.

Food is not that cheap either. At my local mini-market - some fruit, 1 ltr of juice, 1 ltr water, a box of cereal and 4 small yoghurts comes to 11500 Rwandan Francs, or 11 quid.

At restaurants, of which there are a few good ones, a good pizza will cost a fiver, about the same for a good steak it seems. Not so bad really compared to the mini-market. Just that you need a taxi to get to them! Oh for the auto-rickshaws of Chennai, come back, all is forgiven!

I still haven't sussed out the price for Gillete Mach 3 four-pack (razers), which, so far , I've found to be an identical price in pounds in every country I've visited. Will keep you posted.

Going out

Saturday March 24th - After a day walking around town, which I managed to stretch out to 1hr (it's tiny) I decided to head out to dinner and a bar, toute seule, recommended by Lonely Planet. Taxi to "The New Cactus", which is a big roofed terrace overlooking the hills of Kigali. Good french-style food (I had steak) and friendly service. I order a bottle of the local beer - Primus - and a 700ml bottle is plonked down in front of me (one size fits all!).

After that I walk to the bar. This walking along pitch black streets thing is getting easier now. I don't feel any threat. The bar is "Republica", another terrace with a great view. It's fairly busy and I plonk myself at the bar, the barman smiles, comes over and shakes my hand. This guy is a proper barman, recommending the drinks, chatting as he sees I'm alone.

I talk to some locals next to me, with an american, and we all end up going to a nightclub called the "New Cadillac" - a cavernous, very very sweaty-smelling 1970's carpeted space, playing a mix of hiphop, reggae and very old cheesy house music. At least people are dancing fairly normally here, unlike the doggy-style of the Ghanaian place I went to!

The mission

Friday, March 23 - I needed a beer. It was dark (gets dark about 7), no streetlights, and I'm still getting used to this area but thought I'd walk to the local shop about 500m away. It was freaky. All these high fences and security standing outside didn't encourage me. Desparate times though, and I’d been assured that is was safe enough...

By one of the houses a guy standing out front calls to me. We talk, turns out he was cleaner-cum-guard, young, very friendly. We chat in pidgin English/French. His name is Fidel. He actually walks me 100 yards further on, which makes me wonder why he feels the need to do this... At about the darkest part of the walk, down the hill, a guy stops on his motorbike and offers me a ride. I say thanks and no, so he asks for cash. My heart skips a beat but he’s smiling a lot and drives off. Turns out he was a moto-taxi. I make the shop, a welcome pool of light. Oh yes, Amstel beer! More pidgin conversation establishes that the beer is normally 500RF (50p) but since I don’t have a bottle to return it’ll be 1,500RF for a 300ml bottle. Going back is even more scary, darker somehow, but no-one accosts me this time. I get back, quite relieved, not really knowing how dodgy what I’ve just done is. Every single person I’ve met is incredibly friendly, but I guess the history of this place is on my mind. Man that beer was good.

Flood, fire...

Thursday, March 22 - The office is a non-descript 3 storey building on the way to the airport from Town. 3 floors. It does seem to rain most days but today it was really powerful for the 30 mins it lasted. We flooded on the second floor! Not sure how that happened really...but it was close thing as we stopped the tide about 3m from the room with all our servers in!

It didn't stop there. The building has it's own diesel generator, which needs to run frequently as the city power out here often cuts out or has too many voltage fluctations to run things on. But, mid-afternoon, the wiring between the generator and building caught fire. No power. Had to go home.

Pics of the area around my house

This first pic (<--)is the view out one window (mosquito net in the way), showing the incredibly tidy gardens all around here. Every house has a gardener. The background is just another suburb of Kigali.

This next one is from the bottom of my road looking back. Showing the rows of these places. Also the banana plantations at the edge of it. A guy carries 3 water cans and will have to carry them all back from a km away. On the far right horizon you can see the stadium where a handfull of UN troops kept about 10,000 civilians safe during the war.

And this one looks over our surrounding plantations to the city centre of Kigali, which is just on the hill in front of the big hill in the background, just to the right of it's summit and about to get drowned by some heavy rain. The centre is tiny & doesn't look that much bigger close up!

My new place

The bank has rented a guesthouse for us consultants. It's a nice place, but in a weird area. Like a suburban english development of semi-detached places, but with much bigger fences. A bit too isolated from the city, on the top of one of the many hills. But it has spacious rooms and a garden. There is a wee mini-market 500m away, but no public transport. It's where all the higher-ranked civil servants and motley consultants like me live.

We are surrounded by local families who have a very different style of accomodation...We have big water tanks and piped water. They carry jerry-cans 1km to the nearest well (a spring actually, a hole in the ground).

Like everywhere in Kigali, there is an army of people starting work at 6am clipping hedges and keeping things tidy.

The bank has provided a live-in maid who cooks, cleans and washes clothes...Her name is Vestin. This is taking some getting used to, the live-in part.

Why here?

The company I work for (Opportunity International) have teamed up with the biggest micro-finance operation in Rwanda, called Urwego. Urwego means "Ladder" in Kinya-Rwanda. Urwego have 30,000 clients. A big operation in the micro-finance world, but just scratching the surface of the population here that could benefit.

Urwego just did loans. The new OI-Urwego operation will be a full bank, offering loans, savings & current accounts, term deposits etc. With tellers, vaults and lots of branches.

The loans will be as before - the core products will be "trust bank" loans - which are a single loan to a group of people. Here it's 30 people per group, typically. Each member has a proposal for how they will use their share of the money, and the bank helps them develop that idea. The group manage themselves to make sure each member pays back their due amounts. So on the banks books, there is one loan, but it helps 30 families. This is done to reduce the banks overhead - a level of "trust" is given to the group to manage their affairs and pay back the loan.

Typical in the micro finance world, most of the clients are women, since they make the best poverty-fighters; sending their children to school, improving the families nutrition and usually repaying better. They may do dress-making, wholesale (e.g. buying big bags of rice and dividing into smaller sizes), agriculture, food preparation etc.

And a typical group loan here will be for 16 weeks, and between 30-100 quid per group member. Repayment rates are far higher (say 96%) than in for loans in the developed world - there is much more motivation. And the bank gives a lot of support & training on how to build a business and manage money.

So, my work here is to make sure the banking software & systems needed are built, tested and trained out. I'm taking over from some other guys who built most of the system, but there were some differences of opinion about how it was going and they had to leave before completing it. For a project like this, it would typically take a year from start to finish, but I'm just here for the last 3 months of it.

Kigali - first impressions

March 19 - This is a small place. The airport is almost right in town. Emmanual, a driver from work picks me up. The place looks VERY TIDY (it's known as the tidiest city in Africa, apparently). A bit dusty (deep red earth in these parts) but really well tended. Grass verges, no litter, no uncollected rubbish... Kigali is built mainly on the crests and flanks of many low hills ("Les milles collines" or the "thousand hills"). It's warm (but not hot), a wee bit humid (very pleasant, and this is summer – at about 2000m altitude). In town there are street-hawkers peddling the economist (!). Hardly any cars (opposite of the traffic hell that is Nairobi), a parliament building peppered with bullet-holes still (but no sign of damage anywhere else). It's small but spread out, I hear French, English and Kinya-Rwanda (the local language shared in this part of east africa).

Rwanda is a country of almost 9m people, but Kigali has only 600,000. This a very rural place, and yet it's the most crowded country in Africa. Almost every patch of land is given over to agriculture - as I'll see later, from the bottom of valleys to the tops of every hill/mountain, it's a heavily terraced and worked land. And yet 30% of the population don't produce enough food to feed themselves adequatly.

I am dropped off at the office and start work straight away...trying to get to grips with what's been done here so far in the project.

Now this is what I call boarding!

On Monday morning, 19th March, I leave Nairobi for Kigali.
The boarding process for this 1hr flight was very funny. There was a flight for Istanbul and one for Kigali both boarding from the same gate. Two different queues but no indications as to which was which. Ok, having muddled through that and into the lounge (shared by the two flights), someone announced that “the plane is boarding now” but didn’t indicate which one...and the Istanbul one was due to leave within minutes of mine. Asked the gate staff and was told the Rwanda airways flight was going first – but I was booked on Kenya airways according to the ticket. No, I was told, you are actually on Rwanda airways. Fine. Out the door and – brilliant! We walk to the plane across a busy tarmac. None of those stupid shuttle buses that take you 50meters (or 20 meters, as at Mumbai domestic for flights to Goa). There are trucks, luggage trailers and other planes taxiing across the tarmac that we had to wait for or scoot across in front of. Then, identify your baggage on the tarmac and walk right under the plane wing and rear engines (an old MD80) and up the rear hatch. Some poor buggers were still standing on the runway, milling around, when we taxied off, probably missing their luggage. The flight itself was, luckily, unremarkable.

March 18, 2007 - Kenyan 'Wildlife'

First, 2 days in Nairobi (Kenya) with friends

March 16-19, 2007 - I stay with good friends Di and Quentin (“Q”) in the Karen area of Nairobi –very posh; big houses, big fences, acres of grounds, good roads - an expansive and lush suburbia, with LOTS of security.
Their house is a bit Frank Lloyd Wright - half surrounded by a lake/moat with a fountain, and with their bedroom cantilevered out over it. Two enormous Rhodesian Ridgebacks – so big and muscled that they crash into everything (walls, plants) when they run around because they can’t change direction quick enough. Luckily they don’t seem to want to eat me :-)
It's great to see Di & Q again – I last saw them in Serbia in 2004 when Di and I did the implementation there.
I didn't have any expectations about these days in Nairobi, in the end what I got was:
• My first encounter with Giraffes - feeding them – learning that they have huge think grey tongues about 10 inches long with are very slimy and dextrous (can you say dextrous about a tongue??). And the worlds worst breath.
• Visiting a wildlife orphanage and getting escorted into a cage to pat the cheetahs. Every way they behaved in that cage just said “big pussycat” – they show all the same mannerisms, purring (like chainsaws), stretching, cleaning (not smelly at all) etc. And they are BIG…1m long bodies and a tail almost as long. These orphans were so domesticated now they can never be let back into the wild, which might be a bit sad in some ways, I guess, but they certainly seemed content.
• Seeing “Blood diamond” at the local shopping mall. You know, I was debating at what point to start seeing all these recent African movies; (a) before going to Rwanda, (b) while there, or (c) afterwards. Di made the decision for me! I’d read some reviews that said this film made some good points but was overall too Hollywood (and was too focused on the main actresses cleavage). I don't agree. I was very moved by it, almost feeling sick in the first half, and quite emotional in other parts later on. I’m not sure I’d have felt the same way seeing it in London, I was here – the same continent… And there wasn’t that much cleavage!

New Project! Kigali, Rwanda

April 7, 2007 - About 3 weeks ago I arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to help out on one of our micro-finance banking implementations that had hit some problems. The system was behind schedule, untested and built wrong in parts. It's meant to be for a 3 month period. Yeah, right...

So, above this point is Rwanda, below is Chennai (India, 2006) and right at the bottom is Ghana (2005).