The photos are back!

Hello again. First things first I have to start off with the great news that England beat Rwanda in the under-17 World Cup last night! I don't really care for football, but it is especially sweet to beat a country when you're living there. What was particularly funny was that Rwanda's best chance came just before we scored - I thought they had scored because everyone started cheering and then 20 seconds later we were winning (then I was the only one cheering).

Our local hotel has decided to pay the bill for the internet again so I'm going to catch up with the photos from the last few weeks.

I'll start off with this very flukey shot I got of Mario - couldn't have done it if we'd tried!

This is how we occupied ourselves one evening when we had no electricity and the floor was covered in coffee:

Here's a shot of the farm where all our coffee (except my stuff) has come from (not very exciting admittedly).

Mario found this frog there though before which is pretty cool:

This was with the students studying pyrethrum - I think you can see what I mean about it being a pretty crop...

...especially with this as the backdrop:

I have to show you this as it's pretty incredible. The plant on the left is grown in normal soil, whereas the one on the right was grown with Jan's charcoal compost - it's a pretty incredible result. I wanna try it out in England as I found a report saying it could double the profitability of potato farming in England (I'm starting my PhD in potatoes soon in case you didn't know).

On to the coffee! Here's the little roaster that we used to taste our coffee:

Here are the samples just before cupping:

And then me cupping - the strange look is because you're supposed to suck the coffee in hard so it coats your mouth and can taste it properly.

I finally got some money to go somewhere last week - our main mission was to go and pick up the samples from the fermentation experiment, but we're also starting an experiment composting coffee pulp. Pulp is probably best described as the arse end of coffee, as you can see:

It doesn't compost well by itself and if left alone just turns to a hot gunk. To make it go along more smoothly you can add lime and some Japanese stuff called Effective Microorganisms (EM). It seems to me a bit like snake oil - it's basically a microbial broth, but it costs ~ £3.50 a litre and that only treats one tonne! The lime is also expensive so we're using different combinations of lime and EM and will see if it's possible to do it cheaper. As another idea we are using stuff called worm tea instead of EM - it's juice which comes out of a worm composting unit used to compost pulp and is therefore dirt cheap (5p a litre). My thinking is that the microbes in it should be more suited to eating the pulp as it comes from pulp in the first place. Anyway, setting up the experiment meant lots of shovelling (7 tonnes) but as always we had plenty of people wanting to help out for £1, so it only took the morning (after starting at 6:30).

We had called the washing station manager before we arrived to check if they had EM and they said they did, but then when we got there it turned out that it had gone off last August! Fortunately we managed to get some sent to us on a bus from Butare (we were a 5 hour drive away) but it meant a lot more driving to go and get it and take it back. We didn't get back until about 9 in the evening after I had woken up at 4:30 and so I was knackered. We had to call in at the office to drop off the samples then I went to get some food and got a moto back home. When I got to my gate I realised that I didn't have my keys on me. Mario is away in Panama at the moment so I was a bit stuck... Luckily my driver was still up and nearby so he came and got me and we went to look for the keys - turned out that I left them in the door to the office (woops). In other stupid incidents I managed to wash my ipod a couple of weeks ago - I checked all my pockets, but then picked it up off the floor with all my clothes. I noticed quickly though and grabbed it out and popped it in the sun (the dry season has started now so there's no shortage of sun) and thankfully it still works! Thought that I had broken my camera too last week as I took it out my pocket and the lens was half out and it wasn't doing anything but it came back to life with some more electricity.

With not having had much to do recently I've been spending quite a lot of time hand sorting the coffee that has been milled. Even though I sorted it before there are still a lot of damaged beans to get rid of. Somehow women in Kigali manage to sort 60kg a day, but I struggle to do a kilo an hour (maybe I'm a bit too perfectionist). This is what all the crap stuff looks like:

Rightyo, think I've taken advantage of the connection sufficiently now, see ya next time!

So I'm late again, partly because I haven't been up to a great deal work wise and because the internet has been even crappier than usual of late. You'll have to make do without pictures again I'm afraid.

Spent (and I emphasise the spent) last weekend in Kigali which was a nice change from Butare. Money evaporates there just like in London even without having to pay to stay somewhere. Had a very good brunch (at 3pm) with some Danish friends – they had some proper bread and made pancakes with nutella. Went for a real pizza in the evening too making it a very good food day (there are pizzas here in Butare, but they are more like cheese on toast and not very good). Don't think I mentioned before that I had my first goat intestine kebab a couple of weeks ago – I didn't order it intentionally (or notice what it was at first) but after a couple of beers it was surprisingly tasty.

Been up North in gorilla country this week working with some students who are studying pyrethrum – flowers which contain insecticide (I think I talked about this before). It's hard to imagine a prettier crop to work with. Annoyingly though, most of the work I did with them so far has been wasted as it turns out that the next harvest isn't until November, which is when they need to have completed the write up by... Quite how nobody worked this out until now, months after they wrote their research proposals is a bit beyond me, but Rwandans are not particularly renowned for their planning abilities. On the plus side though, I was staying in a hotel with a hot shower, which after about two months without one was literally amazing!

As it's been a few months since I started my competition and nobody managed to get the right answers I guess I should tell you what things are being used for. My first shower leaked around the head so that nothing actually came out of the holes – the shoelace was tied around the head making the water come out as it should. When I moved, it got a new lease of life, keeping my mosquito net up (with the help of a nail I found). My internet cable is now used as a washing line – not sure if it will still work but as they only cost £1 it would be no major loss if it doesn't.

Will hopefully be moving to a new and better house soon, to where Jan is living. It's a real house with a kitchen and sofas, rather than our three rooms with no furniture. It also comes with a maid, a guard and hot water, but will only cost a little bit more than at the moment (£80 per month compared to £60). On a related theme, I've got somewhere to live once I get back too!

Learnt a couple of things about bike maintenance last week that I didn't know before – you can fix a puncture without having to remove the wheel and you can use an old inner tube to make a patch, rather than a puncture repair kit. Managed to snap the chain on my bike a week ago – not really sure how as I've never done that before – guess that my legs are too strong. It was interesting to watch a chain being fixed with a screwdriver, a rock, a nut and a spanner as well!

All the coffee we've got so far is now dry and we'll be roasting it this week! I'll let you know how everything goes next time. As I've been waiting ages to post this, we actually ended up doing some roasting today, but only some small samples that we took a few weeks ago. Had a bit of a problem with the main batch as we took it to be milled before roasting (to remove either the pulp or the parchment) but then some people tried to confiscate it off us as we're kind of not supposed to process coffee ourselves. Anyway, we got it back thankfully (we sneaked in whilst a guy was having lunch) so all is good, we just need to find somewhere else to mill it... We got to cup (taste) four of the coffees too – they certainly tasted different which is good, even though three were from the same farm, just processed differently. The natural coffee was very interesting, and not like normal coffee at all – a lot more fruity, with almost a hint of cheese (that sounds bad, but it tastes good). For cupping the samples are very weak, but we're going to try and find an espresso machine somewhere later on and then try the natural in that as it should be even better in that. I'll keep you updated.