Update

To fill everyone in on what I've been up to:

-Last Weekend: Rwanda-Tanzania Soccer Match at Amhoro ('Peace') Stadium in Kigali. Rwanda won 1-0. Those infernal plastic trumpets that you can hear at all the World Cup matches? Yes, they blew them for the entire 90+ minutes, including halftime.

-This week: trying to get in contact with KADET, the MFI in Nairobi who I will be visiting eventually. Finally heard from them on Friday, and as I assumed, they are too busy/not ready for training yet. They would like me to come in mid-July, more about that later.

-This weekend: WORLD CUP! I'm trying to get excited since I'm away from America and have moved to the 94% of the world that actually gives a crap about soccer. So I actually watched both games yesterday, and felt robbed when both of them ended up as ties. But I'm excited for tonight's USA-England match. It's easier to care when you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night to watch.

So future plans? I'm going to continue to supervise the Micro journals at VFC, but my workload is diminishing as I transfer my responsibilities. I will be traveling at least a couple more times to the field branches, as they do some more hiring and will need additional training. So I'm hoping I'll have time to do some 'vacationing,' like spending a few days up in Uganda. There's a lake close to the border that has a campsite on an island that's really cheap and you can canoe around, so that sounds amazing. I'll wait to see what's going to happen this July. If I'm extended for a month, I'll mostly be helping at KADET in Nairobi. I want to take the bus at least one way (at least 24 hour trip, unreliable, dangerous, classic African experience) but I'm not sure I'll be up to taking it both ways. We'll see.

Antonina's husband will be visiting in a couple weeks, and we're all planning on going to Akagera National Park out East, where there's giraffes, gazelles, and elephants (lions if we're lucky).

Please continue to pray for me, especially as I look toward the future after this internship is over.

House-mates

NAME: Yacob
NATIONALITY: Ethiopian
MOTHER TONGUE: Ankaran
FAMILY: six children, 1 of 9 siblings, thousands in extended family
ROLE AT VFC: Consultant, helping them lower their PAR, training


NAME: Antonina
NATIONALITY: Russian/Belgian
MOTHER TONGUE: Russian
FAMILY: Married
ROLE AT VFC: Mobile Banking

Our current living situation sounds like a sitcom pilot, a classic fish-out-of-water story with lots of crazy stereotypes and personalities to exploit. Aside from Yacob's crazy stories about 30 m pythons eating buffalo (seriously. He grew up in the bush, his father was a missionary) and Antonina's love of beets and vodka (just kidding), they're fairly normal people. There's also the very interesting political discussions that we're able to have. Both of them are very well informed on global and American politics and issues, so we've had some lively talks.

All in all, they're lovely people, and I've been blessed to get to know them so far. Yacob has just gone home to Ethiopia, but will return to VFC shortly after I leave.

Rwandan History Part 1- Colonialism

I've been reading the excellent "The Fate of Africa" by Martin Meredith, and it's been very interesting to learn about Africa's transition from colonialism, and how its effects combined with the leaders of the time to bring about the Africa we know today.

Africa was dealt like so many cards among the great Western powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884. Rwanda and Burundi went to Germany for a few years, but after World War I they were transferred to Belgium. It was this relationship that had the biggest impact.

The Hutus and Tutsis in the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi had lived together for hundreds of years. The Tutsis were taller and thinner, with features that were considered to be more European (such as a slender nose). They dealt with cattle and livestock, while the Hutus tended to be farmers. As a result, Tutsis were wealthier and acted as a feudal ruling class, discriminating against the poorer Hutus. But these lines were not solid because of generations of intermarriage and migration, and there were some wealthy Hutus, and there were some Tutsis who were servants. Status was more important than ethnicity, when talking about relationships and roles. Tutsis were about 15% of the population, and Hutus about 85%. The king of Rwanda was a Tutsi.

The Germans and Belgians used the existing power structure, relying on the Tutsi ruling class to extend their control over the Hutus. The Belgians took it another step, issuing ID cards to further separate the two groups. Since it was difficult to determine in many cases whether a person was a member of one group or the other, those of unsure heritage with ten cows or more were declared to be Tutsi, and those with less than ten were Hutus. This erased any hope for upward mobility for the Hutus, solidifying their secondary status in Rwandan culture.

This gap grew wider, since only Tutsis had government positions, they had the best education opportunities and became taskmasters over Hutu laborers in the Belgian forced labor system. The Belgians had taken the united Kingom of Rwanda, and erased all sense of national identity, replacing it with a solely ethnic one.

Hutu intellectuals challenged this system in 1957 by writing a political manifesto which decried the political monopoly that the Tutsis held. Church leaders, including Tutsis, also called for reform. The Belgians suggested removing ethnic identification from the ID cards, but this would mean that the Hutus would give up their 80% majority, and they refused. Ethnic identity manifested in political parties, and violence broke out on both sides. In 1959, Hutu gangs attacked Tutsis, destroying homes and property and killing hundreds. The Belgians caught scent of the winds of change, and took the Hutus' side. Over 100,000 Tutsis fled to surrounding countries as violence continued, and elections in 1960 gave Hutus complete control of government. They abolished the monarchy and declared a republic, replacing one racially-based dictatorship with another.

Next: 1960-1994

Nothing New

If you can't see the picture, this is what my internet does on a not-so-rare basis- spend five or ten minutes down at zero Kbps, and then suddenly jump to 60 (which is almost fast enough to go on youtube!) It's pretty annoying. And this is the good internet, which World Vision is paying about $80 a month for.


I thought I'd update, even though not much has been happening. Work continues to go slowly, as the branches are getting the update forms in at a glacial pace.

In other news, I'm almost halfway finished with my stay here. It's gone by very quickly, and there's a lot I plan on doing before I leave:

-Visit Uganda and Kenya. A co-worker of my dad has family in Kampala, so I'll contact them and see about crashing with them for a night or two. In Kenya, I'll make it a work/pleasure trip (so that hopefully VFI will pay for some of my travel) to visit the MFI in Nairobi and help them get their Micro program running. I might stay for a few days to a week, depending on how much I can actually help them with. Probably in two weeks, or when I know that VFC is going to be on track with the journals in my absence.

-Go on a safari. The multi-day ones are too expensive, so I'll try to do a day trip (Akagera park here in Rwanda is reasonable, and has all the giraffes/elephants/lions that you would expect to find) I'll investigate trips in Kenya as well.

-Go to the genocide memorials

-Write some blog posts about Rwanda and African politics. This weekend I'll try to do a couple. I think it'll be a series of four or five posts, talking about colonialism, the genocide, and current politics.

Gikongoro

I'm spending two nights at the Golden Monkey Hotel in Gikongoro, in the Southern part of Rwanda. Today I went over the new journal forms with the credit officers here, also touching on good vs bad client photos and the new processes we're implementing. It's all happening very slowly, partly because I haven't anticipated a lot of problems we've encountered, and because communication is painfully slow. So we're gonna have the branches hire another person, buy another computer (there's only one in the entire branch so far- owned by the branch manager) and buy a modem so they can have internet. They'll send the information into the head office by email (novel, I know) instead of by courier.

After this, we went out even further into the boonies to visit some clients and a field field office. This part of Rwanda is very poor, and World Vision has a large (sponsorship) presence. On the way back, we drove through part of Nyungwe Forest, but I unfortunately only saw one monkey and didn't get a picture.

This is Rwanda's tea country. They grow black tea here, which is one of the greenest and most beautiful plants I've seen so far:

Then we stopped at the Kitabi Tea Factory:
Where one of Jean Marie's friends took us on a tour. Now, if you're gonna take a tour of a factory, take it in a developing country where they aren't twisted in knots worried about lawsuits and cleanliness. (I'm comparing this in my mind to the Celestial Seasonings tour, which is way less interesting, and more about packaging than actual tea.) We walked right up to the machines, with their whirring blades and grinders, dodged hooks hanging from conveyor belts, and had a great time. Here's what I'm talking about:


This grinds the leaves into tiny little bits, and has a cover (r) that keeps people from falling in when it's shut. I'll post the rest of the pictures on facebook. Now here's some Rwandan kids:

Mt Kigali part 2

This chap was one of probably hundreds of children I encountered who yelled "Muzungu!" as I passed, calling their friends to come get a look. The first 3/4 of our journey up Mt Kigali was through a couple small settlements, sort of the suburbs of Kigali. Children were out everywhere playing with makeshift toys or helping carry water for their families, and all were interested in seeing a white guy. It's my only experience with any form of celebrity, so I enjoyed it; many came up to shake my hand and say 'Good morning' (A few years ago, they would have said 'Bonjour' - some small evidence of Rwanda's transition to Anglophone Africa). A few walked with us for half an hour or so. Some of the toys they've made for themselves are pretty cool, such as this one with stilts:


After the hike, we lunched at Claude's house. He is a student, but he has his own property and has three other young men renting from him. We had lunch of cooked bananas with a tomato sauce, sweet potatoes (the white kind, not the orange kind), beans, and some kind of cooked greens. Very filling fare, all washed down with banana beer. They bought me a bottle of the brew, more for entertainment than anything else; none of them were interested in sharing it. It's not too bad, not very banana-y at all, more like a wine than a beer, but sweet like rum. It's dark brown and pretty strong (13% abv), so I added some water to make it more palatable. While we were eating, Claude's 81 year old grandmother visited from her home up on the mountain, interested in meeting me as well. She vigorously sipped her bottle of banana wine while wondering why I diluted the "medicine" by adding water.

Lunch in Claude's living room:
Claude, Freddy, and Gilbert in front of a traditional mud house somewhere on Mt Kigali:

Mt Kigali - Part 1

I took a moto from home to the center of town, met Claude and walked west through Kigali through markets and south through the pictured shortcut, one of the slum areas of Kigali. We walked nonchalantly through, dodging chickens, drainage ditches, and many children who announced our approach with 'umuzungu!' (white guy). As far as slums go, this isn't that bad; if you look closely at the picture, you'll see mostly concrete houses with steel roofs, and walls that separate compounds. They are still very poor, but they are sort of the 'middle class' when compared with the people who live in the more rural areas.

This being the 'land of 1000 hills,' I got a lot of exercise. The first few miles were entirely downhill, and then sharply uphill to Gilbert's house where we had breakfast. He is 30, single, and lives with his sister on a compound in west Kigali. Their home was modest, with few of the comforts we're used to (TV, stove, refrigerator, flush toilet) but consisted of three buildings on a walled-in lot that was probably close to a half acre. They had a garden where they were growing tomatoes, potatoes, onions, cabbages, and bananas. We ate toast and milk tea for breakfast.

Gilbert preparing breakfast