three photos

Ok, taking the opportunity of having a reasonable internet connection to add some photos! Just realised I don't have any software to automatically resize photos so have to use printscreen and paint. I've got more I wanted to upload but the connection is a bit dodgy and I need to leave in a minute.... I'll try to add more soon.

Managed to get a few more uploaded

This is Jean-Marie talking to some kids in the far SW of Rwanda - he's very good at making people laugh and smile. He was getting them to sing or say good morning and then giving them 100RWF (10p) when they did which made them very happy.

That's me in a tea plantation at the edge of Nyungwe. There's another of me failing to stand up, but you'll have to wait to see that!

This is a shot of the rainforest I mentioned before. You can't really capture it in photos though, especially from the road, but it looks absolutely awesome.

A young coffee tree looking nice and healthy. You can maybe just about make out the berries, but they aren't ripe yet.

An action shot of Jean-Marie tying some ribbon to a coffee tree. We've marked them so that farmers keep the berries from 25 trees separate and record the weight so we can guesstimate the yield from a hectare of plantation.

Finally, an example of the intercropping I was going on about in my first post - bananas, cassava and beans all growing together - very clever!

Mwaramutse (good morning)

So, it's a new week so I thought it's time for an update. As Alex kindly pointed out mzungu is actually specific to white people rather than just foreigners. On a related note, I was actually called Japanese this week by a kid, which made me chuckle.

Some fellow Brits visited us last week from the University of Bradford, who are studying a Masters in "Peace Studies" (whatever that is). They were going all around Rwanda but came by to find out how coffee has helped to generate cash for communities after the genocide. We also had a visit from a Kiwi film crew who are making a program about coffee for a show called global radar in NZ. My boss, Jean-Marie showed them his worm farm and talked about soil in a very enthusiastic way (he needs his own TV program about soil in general), which as the students said, made worms sound sexy. We sold the students some coffee that we had helped to roast a couple of weeks ago and then went out for lunch with the profits - that's the way I like to do business!

Work wise, I've been redesigning an experiment examining how fermentation time affects coffee quality. Just in case anyone's interested; the old method contained pseudoreplicates and was going to rely on staff at coffee washing stations following the method, which was quite unlikely since it could involve staying around for hours longer than normal. The new method does away with those problems as instead I'll be there, staying up all night if necessary to get better results. Also managed to cut the number of samples in half overall, which means that it's cheaper to analyse the results as fewer samples need to be cupped (tasted). It's been good to get stuck into something though and feel like I'm actually some help, rather than just tagging along! Visited another washing station on Friday, to mark some trees so that farmers keep the berries the pick from them separate so we can estimate yields in different areas. I did point out that it would seem easier if we just asked farmers how much money they earnt from their crop and how much each washing station processed in a year, but apparently they don't want to say as they might end up paying more tax. Visiting a couple more this week as we need to get them done before the harvest begins (which should be soon).

Met a German guy at a party in the week who is working on trying to compost human shit into fertiliser. He was very proud about experimenting with his own waste, apparently if you look after it right, it reaches 50C and everything nasty is killed and it doesn't smell.

Spent the weekend in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, sampling various nightclubs. Found 5000 francs (£5) on the floor in the first one which made me a happy bunny, especially as it paid for double tequilas for me and my Panamanian friend. Saturday morning was the muganda, which is when all the shops are closed and everyone is supposed to do community work, but it seems to be a good excuse for everyone to party hard the night before and then stay in bed until the afternoon. It's very nice being in a country where even though you are supposed to check out of your hotel room at 10, you can stay in bed until 12 without it being a problem.

Still haven't got my house sorted... currently in negotiations to get the landlord to buy a fridge (well you wouldn't want a warm beer would ya?) but, fingers crossed, next week, it will be sorted. Learnt some more important Kinyarwandan this week - icupa rimwe ryishe umugabo inyanza - which means - one beer killed a man in Nyanza. Unfortunately it means we always have to have at least two beers, something which I am certainly not accustomed to in England, where of course, we have a strict maximum limit of one beer per day. Some local customs just have to be adhered to though don't they!

That's all for now folks. The coffee is still up for grabs btw, the fact that my fix was negated by the shower head being replaced should be a pretty good clue.

Hello!

So I'm in Rwanda for the next five months or so, and instead of emailing everyone the same thing, it seems like a good idea to start a blog instead. First, I should explain the name, mzungu means foreigner in kinyarwandan and I'm mainly working on projects to do with coffee, so cafemzungu seems as sensible as anything else I could think of. This is going to be a bit of a monster post to start off....

I'm living in Butare, which is in the South of Rwanda and it is the second city. At the moment I'm living in the uruhongore, which apparently translates as the cowshed. It's pretty basic but it's has a roof, running water, a door that locks, a bed, a mosquito net and only costs £5 a night, so I can't complain. The toilet doesn't flush and before I fixed it with my shoelace, the shower was pretty useless. (If an anyone can work out how you can fix a shower with a shoelace, I'll bring you back a kilo of coffee) I should be moving into a house later this week which will only cost £2 a day which will be good. It doesn't have a kitchen, which is slightly problematic, but hopefully I can sort out a gas stove and a barbecue.

I'm working (unpaid) with a USAID project called SPREAD which is an acronym for something like sustaining partnerships, something something and development (google 'spread rwanda'). They have various projects in both agriculture and healthcare, but I'm working on a few things to do with coffee, in particular trying to improve the quality. If like me two weeks ago you've never thought about coffee production, then search for 'maraba coffee' and 'coffee processing' on Wikipedia and you'll get some idea of what's involved. The first thing I'm working on is an experiment where we will vary how long the coffee is 'fermented' (it's not really fermentation, but that's what it's called). Coffee beans are basically the seeds of a berry, and we'll be testing how the quality of coffee is affected depending on how long the beans are left sitting in a tank after they have been removed from the berry, but before they have been washed. It's probably going to involve staying up all night at the processing centers when we sample the beans which will be... interesting... but we should hopefully get some good results which should allow the processing to be refined in future years. There are other projects to do with composting of the coffee waste and organic pest control, but I'll probably work more on these once the harvest is over (it starts in the next few weeks and lasts until the start of June or so).

The Rwandan landscape is incredible – it makes the west country seem flat in comparison! It's called the country of a thousand hills, but apparently that is a poor translation and it should be thousands and thousands of hills. It makes driving anywhere very time consuming, particularly as a lot of the roads aren't in a particularly great condition. To give you some idea of what I mean, even though Rwanda is about the same size as Northern Ireland, it would probably take about ten hours to drive from the far south-west to the north-east. We drove through the Ngunwe national park this weekend which was absolutely amazing. It's some of the most pristine rainforest left in Eastern Africa and it's easy to see why as the slopes are over 45 degrees in most places. Annoyingly it costs $50 to go for treks in the park, but considering it costs $500 to see the gorillas it doesn't seem so bad. I'll try to find out if I can tag along with some researchers from the university in Butare at some point too. We drove through to visit a coffee washing station in the south-west of Rwanda, near the border with the DRC. It was good to finally get out and see some coffee shrubs, as well as all the other crops that Rwandans grow. They are pretty damn clever at farming, nearly all their crops are intercropped, so for example mixing bananas, beans and cassava all together which helps everything grow better. I think I counted up to five crops together in some places.

My Kinyarwandan vocabulary is slowly growing, it's pretty difficult to learn as it is pretty much nothing like European languages, but hopefully in a few months I'll be able to say something remotely useful to farmers. Fortunately a lot of people in Butare speak English and or French, so even with my rudimentary French I can get by.

Unfortunately for the moment, this blog is going to have to remain illustration-less. The internet is pretty temperamental here and ~10kbps at best! If I find a better connection sometime then I'll try to add a few photos for your perusal.

That's all for now, next time you're in Tesco, be sure to pick up some Rwandan coffee!