A week late - I'm a true Rwandan now!

Hope you weren't too worried by the lack of a post last week - had a bit of a busy long weekend partying which left me a bit jaded on Monday! Writing this during a power cut at my alternative “office” - already come on and off three times which makes doing anything online a bit tricky. Already been waiting over an hour for my brochettes to arrive so I guess it might be even longer than usual – definitely going to appreciate only waiting 20 minutes for food back home. Anyway on to the real news:

Started the experiment at the fifth washing station last Tuesday. The manager looked after us very well, giving us beds, food and beer which was a pleasant change from the other places we'd been. It was good we didn't start there or we would have been disappointed elsewhere! We can't go to the last one for another week for some reason, probably because they are snowed under with cherries as the season was late to start but will finish about the same time as normal.

The week before my birthday Butare sprang into action as if they wanted everything to look great for the day – buildings were repainted, the road building went along twice as fast, potholes in other roads were filled, bunting was put up along the streets and banana trees were tied to the lampposts. As well as that, pretty much every tree along the road to Kigali (150 km) was painted white too in just one week. Turned out that it wasn't all for me though... Kagame (the President) was visiting the day after. I didn't manage to see him as I was sleeping most of the day but we saw plenty of his personal guards as he was staying in our neighbourhood. It was pretty incredible to see what can be done when people have a target to aim at, my fellow mzungus think that he should visit more often (or have a few doubles) to get things done really fast!

My birthday was a reasonably civilised affair. As I eluded to at the start I'd been out partying the three nights before so was already feeling a little tired by the time it got to Sunday. We got a fridge full of beer and some brochettes and had a good time. Getting the brochettes turned into a bit of a hassle – we had meant to make them ourselves the day before, but that didn't work out. Instead we went to a cheap bar and asked to buy 40 off them, they said that was fine, but when we rang an hour later to see if they were ready they had changed their mind and said all the goat was gone... fortunately our local hotels had plenty ready so we bought out their whole supplies and that was sufficient. Left to right we have our landlord (self-invited) Jean Marie's wife, Jean Marie, Yours truly, Jan, Coucou, Zeta and Mario. (I hope you like my attempt at photoshopping using Paint!)

The coffee processing continues apace. Got home last week to find another 80 kg that needed drying and there is more on the way. Found out that it would cost $150 to take an extra bag back with me which makes my exporting plans more complicated! I think I'll have to just strap coffee to the outside of my bags and then surround them in gaffer tape. It might end up looking a bit strange, but it seems worth it to save the cash! Some of the first batches should be dry enough soon for us to cup, which will be great. Been doing some hand sorting as well which is very time consuming – think we might have to employee a few workers at some stage to get it done faster. Here's our sitting room (and kitchen and dining room) last week (there's been more added since):

Had no power at our house for the last few days which is a bit annoying. Houses on the other side of our road do so it must be a local fault which might take a while to repair. The forces that be seem to want us not to drink coffee – our grinder broke a few weeks ago and we can't find a replacement anywhere (fortunately another intern is coming from the US next week and is bringing one). I resorted to using a saucepan to crush beans which took about half an hour to make three cups (still worth it)! Finally we managed to get hold of some ready ground coffee and then the electricity went so we can't make hot water! Hopefully next week things will get back to normal. (After I wrote this, some guys came round to fix it, the “hour” has already turned into five hours, but it should get fixed today).

Visited a new school last week which was built by the American supermarket that Mario's company sell coffee to. It's a secondary school for girls (over here that means ages from 17-20ish) with a strong focus on science and technology. They aim to become self-sufficient for food, having around 5 hectares of land. We went there because they are hiring a farm manager and Mario was helping to interview. It was a really impressive place and they are going to start using worms for composting, as well as terra preta on their soil. It's a beautiful location too, although being about 800 m lower than Butare was a bit hot for me.

Realised I never updated you on my Kinyarwandan. It's coming along fairly well, I still can't really talk to people who speak no French or English but maybe with a few months more work I'll be able to. I finally got round to learning to count last week; it's difficult compared to all European languages as the words are all at least three syllables and bear no resemblance to our numbers, but it helps to get things for cheaper. They use the same word for tomorrow and yesterday, which at first seems stupid, but in fact is pretty sensible since you can always tell from the tense which of the two someone is talking about.

Finally, I've been meaning to say for ages that I don't like the design of the blog, but I can't work out how to change it... oh and I'm curious as to who is following this in Singapore, care to identify yourself? Hmm, actually one more thing I've been meaning to post for ages, here are the five types of coffee, from left to right, cherry, parchment, green, roasted and ground:

Hopefully that makes the rest of what I talk about make more sense.

Ikawa y'umuzungu

First I'll catch up with the photos I meant to add last week.

Here's a mountain of coffee cherries waiting to be pulped:

The cherries go through this machine before being graded with water to try and remove more of the pulp, before being put in a tank to ferment.

These guys dance around in the tank once fermentation is complete to remove the mucilage from the beans. After I took this one of the guys asked me if I had any other shoes... I thought he was meaning that I should get in the tank and help, but he was actually wanting me to give him my shoes. I tried to explain that I only have one pair of shoes so I needed them!

This is the set up for our experiments. Our assistant is washing one of the samples in a sack to get rid of the mucilage after fermentation.

And to show you what's going on in each bucket:

Finally the last photo from last week is this of our washing station (more of a drying station):

So now onto this week... Had Monday off as we were working on Saturday. Stayed up until 2am in the evening washing more coffee that Mario had bought earlier in the day (powered of course by coffee). On Tuesday we were supposed to set off for a washing station near Tanzania, but for some reason the manager won't let us do the experiment at the moment. Instead we headed for a different one that would take us. It was a pretty place with a canteen (well brochettes) and a bar (warm beer unfortunately) but there was also a hospital 10 minutes away with better food and cold beer! I bought some coffee there as it is at high altitude which should make it tastier. I bought 25kg of cherries for £10, which meant the farmer got more than three times the cherry price last year, and about a third more than this year (coffee prices have rocketed). We processed it ourselves there.

First we hand sorted the cherries to remove any that where unripe (left to right it is Vital, a technician with SPREAD, Jeff our driver and then the farmer). I only bought the ripe ones, the others will end up in some crap instant coffee.

After that we put them in buckets of water and removed any cherries that floated as they have been damaged by insects (I've got a photo, but it isn't very interesting). The washing station had a hand pulper which made the next step a lot easier than it could have been (Mario got people top pulp his with stones). As avid facebook stalkers will have already seen I helped with the pulping as well.

Then we floated them again in water to remove more damaged beans. Rather than fermenting, I put the coffee straight on a drying table which should make the coffee sweeter as the bean absorbs the mucilage. They make coffee like it in Panama and it's supposed to make good espresso. It takes longer to dry though as there is a lot of slime that needs to dry. I spend a couple of hours on Thursday hand sorting it to remove more damaged beans that don't float, as well as any that got broken in the pulping process. The staff at the washing station were quite amused by me not fermenting and then me hand sorting it, as it's normally girls work. It's drying at my house as I type, here's it yesterday (it's at the back, up against the wall):

If you think it looks unheigenic, don't worry the beans are in their own little paper bags that get removed before roasting and then the roasting will destroy all life as well.

Continuing the week, the next washing station we were going to go to was shut down because it was smelling too bad - all the pulp and waste water can stink pretty bad if it isn't dealt with correctly. SPREAD helped them sort it last year, but they needed to buy some products do deal with it, and they hadn't bothered to buy them again this year until they were shut down! Should hopefully get there next week though. So we tried another washing station, but this time the manager wouldn't let us come because they and SPREAD are in disagreement about who owes who money! Finally we did find a washing station to take us on Friday, about half an hour from Butare. Got about 5 hours sleep as we had to be at the washing station for 5:30. I helped some girls sort pulp from the low grade coffee on Saturday morning as I was bored. As usual they wanted amafaranga, but I couldn't explain that I'm in debt and not being paid (now I can: fiti idemi na ntago mbona umushahara). They had to settle for me taking a photo instead:

Hopefully we'll get the last of our experiments sorted this week by the time Jean Marie returns! Oh and I should have said earlier, that ikawa y'umuzungu means the white person's coffee.

Still alive (just)

As it turns out I have time for at least a short post, maybe more, we will see... If you read last week's post you'll know that I was away doing coffee fermentation experiments all week. I don't think I've really explained what happens so here's a quick overview: farmers bring bags of coffee to the station, it is weighed and then added to a tank of water, from which the staff should remove the cherries that float as they are damaged (still ok for Nescafe). Then the cherries are fed into a machine with a disk that spins, which removes most of the beans from the cherries. (I was trying to think of an analogous fruit to coffee so you can get some idea of what it's like, and I think that sloes are probably the closest, but the only have one seed). Then they are sorted again by floating, with the low quality beans being the ones that float. Next they are put in a tank to “ferment” - the beans are covered by a kind of mucus which needs to be removed, and if you leave them for several hours it starts to loosen and turn to slime, which can then be washed off. The final step of wet processing is to soak the beans in water for between half a day and a day – this might actually lower the quality though, so we're going to do some experiments to check whether it is actually necessary at all! Once processing is complete, the beans are moved to drying tables in the shade where huge numbers of women hand sort the beans to remove damaged ones and bits of pulp that got missed in the process. From there they are moved to the sun, until they reach 12% moisture. I was going to include pictures, but my camera is at home, so that will have to wait til next week.

As Jean-Marie is away I'm now the boss, which is a little strange! In the end the experiments didn't involve staying up all night as processing is a night long business so there are plenty of staff eager to help us out for a fiver. The first washing station we visited was about an hour and a half south of Kibuye, a city on the shore of Lake Kivu, in the West. It was pretty badly run as they didn't have enough water to process properly and several bits of the pulping machine didn't work as they should. The old fashioned processing method is seriously water inefficient – everything is moved through the system using water and then washed with more water, before being graded (by density) with even more water. The pulp should be being composted, but it really needs lime to neutralise the acids and that's expensive, so it's unfortunately left to rot which stinks and pollutes the rivers. I forgot to take any photos of the piles of pulp this week, but will next. Jan (the German) is going to experiment with creating his terra pretta using coffee pulp and hopefully turn it into a business that will operate at many washing stations in the future.

Had a bit of a hairy moment on Thursday when we got a puncture when the road was damp and slippery. As with most of the time, we were going round a bend and down a hill and the car had a little slide around, which got the adrenalin going! Fortunately our driver Jeff is good and he held it nicely and there was nothing coming the other way. It actually turned out well as we were 5 minutes from a city centre and even closer to a garage who repaired the tire for £2 (yes that's a 2)! Also fell off my bike yesterday – a car was coming the other way and so I couldn't see that there was a pile of stones on my side of the road until about two seconds before. I wasn't going too fast and managed to stop just before and only gently fly over the handle bars, getting a tiny cut. I had some Mutzig medicine and that made it all better though.

Mario has bought some coffee from farmers that we are processing ourselves outside the house (below). It's from an organic plantation where about a month ago Mario found frogs and birds nesting, something we haven't seen anywhere else! We're processing it differently, by drying the whole beans which moves sugar from the pulp into the bean, which will hopefully make a tasty espresso, I'll bring some back with me for tasting. We'll hopefully be visiting the old lady from before tomorrow to buy some cherries off her too.