Makin' the News

Until I have time to write my version of last Sunday's tree-planting extravaganza, here's what Kigali's New Times has to say:

Five University graduates from Canada currently interning with several organisations in Kigali on Sunday fulfilled their pledge of planting 500 cypress trees.

Assisted by10 members of Youth Association for Human Rights Promotion and Development (AJPRODHO-JIJUKIRWA), 40 residents and leaders of Amahoro village, the interns planted the trees along the newly constructed stone-paved road connecting Kacyiru-Kimicanga Road with Kinamba.

Before leaving their homeland in July, the Canadian group made a pact to directly offset the carbon emissions from their air travel by planting trees in their respective host countries.

According to Emmanuel Nzeyimana, President of AJPRODHO, the initiative is in line with environmental protection. He emphasised that planting trees is not merely a way to beautify one’s surroundings, but also good for health.

“We have to understand that there is a positive relationship between environmental protection and health for sustainable development,” Nzeyimana underscored.

He asserted that tree planting combats both soil erosion and air pollution, adding said that air travel is not the only contributor to air pollution but that any road vehicle is a major burden on the environment.

“In fact, a running engine releases two times more pollution when the vehicle is not in motion. Letting the engine run for more than ten seconds produces more carbon dioxide and uses more fuel than stopping and restarting the vehicle,” Nzeyimana noted.

Crystal Milligan, one of the interns working with AJPRODHO said that 97 trees needed to be planted to compensate for the carbon released into the atmosphere by her flight between Canada and Kigali.

Kacyiru Sector youth coordinator, Christian Munyeshuri, responded that the flights of each of the Canadians had been fully compensated for with 500 trees, meaning that the interns were free to return to Rwanda again in the future.

“But I will not call you ‘the Canadians’,” Munyeshuri stated, “After today, you are our own people in Canada.”

The interns initiated the tree planting idea and given the fact that environmental protection is one of AJPRODHO’s crosscutting themes of focus, it enthusiastically offered to support the Canadians in the initiative.

When contacted, the village leaders welcomed the idea and joined the rest for they also had a plan of planting trees to combat soil erosion in the area.

All parties involved in the tree planting exercise expressed keen interest in maintaining and developing this collaboration in the years to come.

The interns were sent by the Coady International Institute in Nova Scotia, Canada, as part of a larger contingent of 16 interns currently working elsewhere in Africa and Latin America.

If you visit the link, there's a small picture of our tree-planting team. As is the norm for the New Times, some of the facts are slightly less than accurate, but regardless it's good to see the story made it to the local media (even if we had to pay them to cover it, but that's another story for another day...)

Across the border...

Taken from the BBC, October 30th, 2008

Interesting coincidence that my last post was about our escape to Gisenyi... Just across the border, hundreds of thousands of Congolese civilians are on the move to stay ahead of clashes between Laurent Nkunda's rebels and Kabila's government forces. Nkunda has been taking the province of North Kivu by storm over the past two months and is currently less than 20 kilometres outside of Goma, the provincial capital. Rwanda has been accused both of bombing government forces and of cross-border attacks. Here in Kigali, it's hard to say what's true and what isn't; we're relying heavily on outside media for some idea about what's going on. I know there's more than a few of you who follow international news and may have put the DRC-Rwanda puzzle pieces together, so I wanted to assure everyone that I'm fine and in no danger. Rwanda is still perfectly safe and I don't expect any trouble on our end, although I'll be keeping a close eye on news reports in the next while. Nkunda declared a ceasefire yesterday evening but I think it's only a matter of time until he takes Goma as well, and it's difficult to say what the results of that might be.

Postcards from Gisenyi

Last Saturday, Katie and I took off for a day trip up to Gisenyi, a lakeside town in the northwestern part of Rwanda by the DRC border. Three and a half hours by bus there and three and a half hours back, but worth it - the drive took us right up into the rolling hills of northern Rwanda. It was mostly a lazy, relaxing day, so I'll let some pictures do the talking.

A Rwandan Thanksgiving

What do you get when you throw five CIDA interns into the best kitchen they’ve seen in months? A Thanksgiving feast!

Rwanda is a bit… tricky, shall we say, when it comes to eating. You can eat as many kinds of starch as possible in one sitting, but getting a more well-rounded nutritional experience does not come easy. Keeping that in mind, the thought of the upcoming Canadian Thanksgiving and all the deliciousness that means for most of us was getting to be a bit too much to bear for the five of us living in Kigali for these six months. A little creativity goes a long way in Rwanda, however; Logan tracked down a turkey (free-range, even, if you call wandering around someone’s yard in Nyamirambo ‘free-range’), Claire was gifted a 1.5L bottle of Chilean wine, and the rest of us supplied vegetables and pie recipes to put together a slightly haphazard but delicious Thanksgiving meal.

Bright and early Sunday morning, we all got together at Logan’s house, which has a kitchen complete with an OVEN (you have no idea how exciting an oven is in Rwanda). The turkey, who had met its demise the day before in Logan and Crystal’s presence, was in various pieces in a bag, ready for Claire to do her best with. Crystal and Katie set to work making squash pie (pumpkins are scarce around here) and Claire assembled a delightful apple crumble. Logan and I wandered helpfully. Various vegetable dishes were prepared while Claire’s turkey did its thing – sweet potatoes (no marshmallows here though, Mum!), mashed potatoes, broccoli, and peas and carrots. Tofu was marinated for the vegetarians in the house, and crispy baguettes were sliced up. Claire did a beautiful job setting the table, complete with a Canadian flag to remind us of home. Logan’s housemates (a Brit/American and an Australian, newly arrived the night before) joined us and were bemused by our cooking frenzy.

It was a Thanksgiving celebration not quite like any in Canada – a few little quirks and a lot of improvisation went into making the meal. Regardless, it was a wonderful day with great company… we’re considering a repeat for American Thanksgiving, just for good measure!

The Day I Met the Elephant

Last week, I happened to be on a field visit to one of the camps we work with that’s just within the borders of Akagera Park, one of Rwanda’s three national parks. The visit started out like they often do – people chattering to me in Kinyarwanda hoping I might catch something (and sometimes I do!), lots of excited preparation for whatever performance they’re about to put on. I found myself standing by myself in a crowd of women, one of whom kept telling me something over and over about a “mutware.” I knew I knew the word but couldn’t place it, so I turned to Alexi, ARBEF’s fantastic driver and said “Mutware iki?” (roughly meaning “What’s ‘mutware’?”). Now, Alexi and I have a lovely relationship. We make each other laugh, he keeps me amused during long (and frankly boring) Kinyarwanda speeches, and he looks out for me around the office and on trips. It’s an interesting relationship though, because Alexi is unilingual (unless you count his sole French phrase, “Tu es fatiguer?”) and my Kinyarwanda is, well, interesting. Our friendship is based on limited Kinyarwanda, absurdly exaggerated gestures and a lot of observation. It was immediately apparent that Alexi knew what “mutware” was, and boy was he excited. He wandered off to speak to the woman who’d said it to me, and eventually got the message across to me that “mutware” meant… ELEPHANT! There was apparently an elephant near the village that often wandered over to raid food stores (including home-brewing banana beer!). Alexi was determined to find me the elephant.

After our sensitization session was finished, we piled into the car and set off for the next village. It was explained by my supervisor, Enock, in French that Alexi planned on finding someone who’d seen the elephant recently and was going to buy something to feed the elephant. Let me be clear that at this point, I really thought they were kidding. See an elephant? Sure, we might be so lucky, despite the numerous complaints I’ve heard from tourists that there are no elephants in Akagera. Alexi stops and asks villager after villager if they’ve seen the elephant. Someone says that they’ve seen it just that morning, so Alexi tells him to hop in. We buy some bananas (I still fully believed this was a joke) and off we go. We drove for quite awhile and all we’re seeing is cows and goats… Not exactly the wildlife we hoped for. The villager we collected along the way jumped out, called out to someone nearby and the two of them took off hand-in-hand over a hill, signaling Alexi to follow. I’m painfully aware of the branches scraping the sides and bottom of the Land Rover and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this is not a good idea. Until we get over the hill and there is the elephant.

I can’t even explain how shockingly amazing this was. Just a pure “Oh my god, I really am in AFRICA” moment. Enock, Alexi, and I hop out of the car and make our way over toward the elephant, where the two villagers are already close enough to touch it. I should say at this point that I was indeed pondering my sanity of getting out of the car near an elephant – it was absolutely breaking the number one rule of safaris, not to mention the likelihood that the Coady probably wouldn’t recommend it and my mother would surely kill me if the elephant didn’t. But, hell, if this wasn’t the chance of a lifetime, I don’t know what is. Enock fed a banana to the elephant and kept calling me over, but I refused – I was happy being photographer. The villagers were not satisfied and wanted the silly muzungu to get closer, and pulled me over. I tried to get Alexi to come with me but funny enough, the man who was determined to find the elephant was more scared of it than I was! So… I fed the elephant. A wild African elephant ate bananas out of my hand. I have never been more delighted in my life. Sadly, he decided immediately post-feeding that he wanted to have a bit of a wander, so we backed off and watched from a distance, but for five minutes, I was a foot away from an ELEPHANT.

So, for all the tourists who complain that there are absolutely no elephants in Akagera, there are – you just have to know the villagers ;)