It's been a while

It's been a while since I've got round to posting – have been meaning to for ages, but now that I'm on a bus I haven't got much else to do. It's kind of difficult to remember what I've been up to the last three weeks but I'll give it a go. In fact I can't remember doing much at all the first week but Mario got back from his travels two weeks ago and since then things have been pretty hectic. He brought a bottle of $150 Guatemalan rum back with him which made me very happy indeed (Ron Zacapa XO for any fellow aficionados out there). As well as that he had a good stash of Panamanian coffee from his friends – I had already been spoiled by the coffee I've been drinking, but now even what we were drinking before tastes a bit nasty. It's an expensive habit too to like good coffee...

A couple of days after he got back we went to see a friend of his who has a plantation of ~4000 trees that he is trying to get certified as organic. That hasn't happened yet unfortunately – they just got turned down as they have insect traps which use ethanol and methanol which are apparently not organic. I'll leave a rant about why organic certification is stupid for another day though. The plantation is in a beautiful spot, on the shore of Lake Kivu in the far North and our friend is planning to build some lodges there so that people can come and visit the farm. There were some stupidly tame birds there – even more so than pigeons – they were coming to within about two metres of me. The coffee from this year is being entered into the cup of excellence (a tasting competition to find the best coffees from Rwanda) and has already made it into the top 30, which is good news. I'll hopefully be able to get hold of a few kilos too to bring back with me.

Can anyone work out what this is about?!

Having already won free beer, me and Mario have now set our sights on gaining free brochettes too. We found out the owner of our favourite hotel has a coffee plantation and that they want to start making their own brand of coffee. We visited last weekend – I'd only had 4 hours sleep as some English students have arrived in Butare and so of course I showed them the wide variety of nightlife on offer (2 clubs) and then ended waiting 40 minutes for Mario + the owner to turn up. I should really have learned by now not to turn up on time, but old habits die hard. Anyway, the place was a complete mess – the yield from ~2000 trees was about 5kg which tasted like soil. Smart Coffee Consulting has produced a report of the steps to take though and for a few hundred pounds it should be possible to massively increase the yield and get a return on investment within a couple of years at most. We took a bag of Jan's terra pretta along with us and ended up using it to create Rwanda's first terra pretta coffee tree:

It was quite strange visiting there as I've been looking forward to being back home the last few weeks, but seeing how crap the plantation was and how poor the farmers are, whilst knowing what we could to fix it really made me want to stay. We got our free brochettes (Mario told the waiter to give the bill to her boss) so all in all it was a good trade.

I've also been trying to help the students again, which still proves to be a challenge! No matter how many times I explain that you can't copy and paste from Wikipedia to create a literature review they nearly all carry on. After telling them three times and still being sent crud we told them that if we find anything copied we won't help them any more. I thought that would be a big disincentive, but seemingly not as 2/3 who have sent things since have been entirely copy and pasted. Oh well, not my loss! One of the students is trying to test the pyrethrum insecticide on a coffee pest. We want to start in the lab seeing what concentration kills them so I told him to go out and collect some. I told him how to mix the concentrate to different strengths but he wanted me to hold his hand so I went along to see his “pests”. Unfortunately he hadn't thought it a good idea to check what they looked like before embarking on capturing them and when I turned up he showed me a beautiful collection of ladybirds instead...

Finally got the last samples from my experiment ten days ago and then cupped (tasted) all 120 samples last week. We taste 5 cups for each coffee so there were 600 to taste in 3 days. There were certainly differences - some tasty beautiful and others tasted like soil, but the final results aren't quite as I expected... I need to do some more number crunching though to see if I can get something which looks good.

As SPREAD have pretty much no cash left I've been stalking Mario around in Kigali to see how the export of coffee works on an industrial scale. The majority of the coffee passes through one warehouse where about three thousand women work hand sorting it to remove defective beans. It's a pretty scary place to walk in to as a mzungu guy! Once coffee has been hand sorted Mario gets a sample and cups it to check the quality and then if it passes another sample is sent to California to for his company's lab there to check. If they agree it is good then they ship, and if not the contained Is rejected and the exported needs to find another seller (not going to happened) or hand sort all 20 tonnes again!

Beer rebates and defecating in buckets

My luck with money has continued – last week I thought that getting $30 was good, but this week has been much better! Just after I posted last week I went for a beer with some friends and there was a competition to win a briefcase of cash. To win you had to guess a three digit code to open it. There weren't many people there (the promoters were blasting out music making it pretty difficult to talk) and so I was lucky enough to get the first attempt. Trying to think of some lucky combination, I chose 588 (May '88) and much to my surprise, the case opened!!! There wasn't any cash inside though and the guy looked rather worried. A few minutes later they told me that the case was broken and that any number opened it. I was fairly understanding, if a bit annoyed, but my friend was adamant that they should give me the money as I had opened the case. The boss came to apologise and offered us drinks but no money, but then one of them asked if I had a credit card. I said not on me, but he gave me his phone number and told me he would call me to sort things out. Needless to say he didn't call me, but I told Jean Marie about what happened and he got on to the manager of the hotel where we were and she in turn got on to the brewery. Eventually, on Friday I got a call from a manager of the brewery who told me he wanted to meet. I was expecting some kind of excuse as to why they couldn't give me the money, but in fact he told me that beer is supposed to be enjoyable and that therefore they would give me the money the next day!!!! They wanted to let lots of Mutzig (the beer) drinkers see them giving me the prize, but unlike most of the time, hardly anyone was drinking it. We waited a few hours but eventually they did give me the cash - £400!!! It feels like a lot more here too though partly as it goes further and partly because the highest denomination note is worth £5.

As you might imagine, my new found wealth made me try and give back as much money to the brewery in one night as I could. I was still alive the next day though and had all my belongings, even if it was almost 6pm by the time I managed to get up... Unfortunately though, the next time I got a beer, the price had gone up by 10p a bottle, but I can't really complain at that.

In other news, my laptop charger has kind of died – somehow the wire coming out of the transformer got damaged cutting the connection. It does still work fortunately and using my penknife (thanks again Joe + Victoria) I cut some of the plastic off around the wire and managed get the connection sorted again along with some bits of velcro from my phone charger and laptop charger. It's still rather dodgy though, especially as my plug adaptor is temperamental and has to positioned precisely to work. I got rather confused on Friday trying to use it at the office – I couldn't work out why it wouldn't work for about 10 minutes, before realising that the electricity had gone... woops.

Finally got round to moving house into the mansion on Monday. It's a pleasant change to have a toilet seat, a washing machine (well, a maid), a kitchen and a sofa and for only £10 a month more! As you can see it's a lot bigger than the last house. I don't think I put any photos up of inside the last place, but there was basically only one room with a table and a chair so there wasn't much to see!

The biggest change though is probably Jan's nutrient recycling system – if you can remember back to sometime in March you might remember what I'm on about already. If you can't remember / didn't read the post, I'm talking about humanure. Here's out toilet (we could have got it made in mahogany too, for a touch of class):

It's a very simple system – you do your business into a bucket, then cover it with sawdust and spray a bit of water over everything. I was sceptical to it working at first and it's certainly taken a little getting used to, but there is no smell and no flies at all. The sawdust serves two functions – firstly it adds a lot of carbon, increasing the carbon : nitrogen ratio which stops ammonia being produced by bacteria, causing a stink! Secondly it forms a biofilter when it's wet which traps any smells which come out. Once the bucket is full it can be added to the compost heap – surprisingly once the temperature of the heap reaches 50C and stays there for a couple of days, anything nasty is killed off. We've done some back of the envelope calculations and worked out that globally we flush away about half of the nutrients found in the fertiliser we use each year. If you take away the huge subsidies on fertiliser in Rwanda, people here produce fertiliser worth about $0.50 a day, which when you consider that many people still earn less than $1 a day is a pretty staggering amount of cash!

Rightyo, think that's enough for this week, I'll pat muself on the back for managing to post only 10 days after the last time.

Another country under my belt

I thought that I should try and re-establish some weekly postings after my recent slackness. (Well that was the plan, but things didn't quite work out as I will get on to later). As I briefly mentioned last time the dry season has begun. It is good news for drying clothes (and coffee) but has the downside of being very dusty and strangely enough is actually a fair bit colder than before (I was actually cold when I got into bed once this week). Although it is the dry season it does still rain sometimes, generally explosively as a storm. It's pretty easy to tell it's on the way as you can see the lightning coming towards town and the wind picks up just before it starts to rain. Saying that, I'm writing this having just got absolutely soaked coming back from town as it started raining as heavy as a shower when I was two minutes away. I'd got lucky on my way in to town though as I saw the lightning and so got my peddle on, only getting a few drops on me before I got there.

We took the coffee samples that we've collected to be processed nearby on Tuesday. We collected them as parchment so they need to be processed into green and then hand sorted so that we only have the good stuff. Jean Marie was visiting South Africa, but emailed me to tell me that we needed some inner tubes to remove the parchment and I imagined that the machine used rubber somehow to remove it. In fact there is no machine and instead our workers fill one third of an inner tube and then roll it on the floor with their foot to break the parchment. They can only fit about 150 g in at a time and so considering that we have 350 kg to get through, it's going to be a while until we can roast anything! Next door to the lab where our samples are being prepared is the real dry mill where coops can take their parchment and get it processed into green. Having seen that in action, I've seen every step of the journey coffee takes in Rwanda. Here's some guys loading the machine with parchment:

I helped Jan harvest his soy beans this week too – the same ones that I had a photo of last time. It was nice to do something relatively physical for a change instead of having someone else do everything! I spent a fair while trying to chase monkeys away who were trying to eat the beans before we could pick them. Unfortunately they're not very scared of people and even after throwing sticks at them and making lots of noise, as soon as we left their sight they would climb down from the trees again. One of the cheeky monkeys

So, as I said at the beginning I had hoped to restart weekly updates, but then I had a dodgy brochette which made me ill. I won't make things too graphic, but I was glad that there is a drain in the floor of my bathroom so that I could multitask. Fortunately it wasn't too bad and I was feeling better later on the same day. I think I'm going to have to give brochettes a miss for a while though, which is a shame, especially for my wallet as they are the cheapest food going. As I was lying in bed recovering, Jean Marie rang me to tell me that he wanted me to go to Uganda the next day and would need to leave in a few hours! It was a very unpleasant bus journey to Kigali as I hadn't eaten, was sat above the wheel (no leg room) with two bags and my ipod decided not to work – maybe the washing of it has hurt it more than I thought. To make things worse it was raining (as it had been all day – so much for the dry season) which meant that it took the best part of 3 hours instead of the normal 2. On the bright side, the hotel I was told to stay at was about 3 minutes walk from the best pizzas in Rwanda, which really sorted my stomach out nicely.

The reason to go was to learn about intercropping coffee with bananas. It's the norm in Uganda and research has found farmers can get the same yield of coffee and bananas when they are grown together, as if they grow them separately. Fairly obviously, it means they can make about twice as much money from the same area of land. In Rwanda and Burundi however, the government policies have been to stop farmers intercropping coffee with anything, even going so far as to uproot crops from farmers fields who try it. The main reason for it is that they thought that the coffee yield would decrease, resulting in less revenue for the government, rather than caring about the farmer. It's fairly understandable when coffee is such a huge proportion of their foreign revenue, but doesn't appear to be rational and they have far higher population densities than Uganda, so really need to produce as much food as possible.

Uganda was an interesting change from Rwanda. It's much more reminiscent of England (no surprise really as it was a colony) as they drive on the proper side of the road, have English plugs and there is quite a lot of land that is not farmed (and they all speak English). Not being a Belgian colony though there are no chips! Going off on a tangent... something I've been meaning to let you know about is that the Rwandan's have problems pronouncing their Rs, changing them to Ls – the result of which is that fries become flies and rice becomes lice. Anyway back to Uganda: It was really interesting to see how different the farming systems are, when the countries are so close. Farmers are much more free to plant what they like where they like and unlike in Rwanda and Burundi, farmers have chosen to plant coffee, rather than being forced to by colonialists and then their governments. The farmers we met also only grew coffee and bananas, whereas here coffee is a small part of the whole farm. Here, very few coffee farmers really know what they are doing in terms of managing the crop, meaning that they don't prune correctly or fertilise, making their yields crap. Another big difference with Ugandan coffee is that they sun dry the cherries like we have done here. For some reason though they get completely covered in mould though and the quality is fairly obviously reduced. I couldn't find out why, as even when we kept ours inside sweating away it stayed ok.

I came back richer than I left which was nice too – we got $20 a day when we where in Uganda, even though we only had to pay for dinner and beer. Then on the border a guy couldn't use his calculator and ended up giving me two and a half times more cash than he should have done! It was only for $20 but it was a nice bonus. I had more dollars but the rate they offered was bad compared to Kigali so I said no, but then one of them chased after me across the border and gave me a better rate than in Kigali. I've found that walking away is the best way to get a good deal here (not sure if I've mentioned it before) if motorbike taxis want too much (more than 30p in the day and 40p at night) you can just tell them you'll walk – as soon as you take two steps they pull up and tell you to get on for the proper price! Just remembered another thing I was meaning to write – evidently in school the first (and maybe only) English phrase kids are taught is “good morning” but they're not taught what it means and so say it at all times of the day. I tried to explain to some once they should say good afternoon, using my brilliant Kinyarwandan but unfortunately it didn't work. I tend to reply with mwaramutse (good morning) too now instead. One did actually say good afternoon to me once as I cycled past and I almost fell off my bike in shock. Saying that, I know that I've been caught out saying bonjour in the evening in France...

Think I've made up for not posting last week now.