The Road to Kibungo

My new boss Valence, the District Education Officer, came to collect us at Amani Guest House in the afternoon, complete with driver, to take us to our new home in Kibungo two hours to the south east of Kigali. Chauffeur driving sounds grander than the reality. The car was a beat up old Corolla and Stella and I were in the back, legs scrunched up and piled high with bags.

Our house

In failing light we reached our abode, a large if rather dingy house hidden behind a wall on the main street leading into Kibungo. Unfortunately both the power and water were off and the place hadn't been cleaned. Oh, and there was no bed. But apart from that there was nothing to complain about (although we did and stayed in a hotel for the next two nights while things got sorted out!). There were also several men loafing about when we arrived and it turned out that one of them came with the house - a bit like inheriting an old chest of drawers left in the spare room. House guards are common in Rwanda and it turned out this fellow had been looking after the house for the two months it had been empty OR rather that the real house guard had fallen off his bike and hurt his foot and the new bloke had stepped into the breach to help out for the last few days only. You know how complicated these stories can get in strange lands with unknown languages badly translated. Suffice to say it was a difficult situation with Joseph living in a outhouse behind the kitchen and carrying out his 'guard' duties mostly from a horizontal position on his mattress.

Where to get a mattress when you come to visit

We escaped to the local hotel where our bedroom pleasingly came with a mosquito net. Even so, I still managed to spend half the night hitting my face imagining that the mozzies, outside the net, were in fact inside. Rwandan coffee is excellent and two strong cups with stale bread and jam were fortification enough for a sally into the throbbing centre of the one horse town. Almost immediately we saw the strangest thing. Muscular men in pink and orange uniforms were marching, two by two, along the main street each swinging a large axe or club in their free hand, fingers of the other loosely intertwined with their buddy's in that friendly male to male African way. These were prisoners from one of two nearby jails out on a work assignment and as far as I could see without a single guard supervising them.

Typical street scene

Now this might be considered a very enlightened (or a very daft) policy. The message seems to be, not only have confidence in the reformative powers of your criminals but push their dark side to the limit by arming them with dangerous weaponry in a busy shopping street. I believe the pink uniform policy comes from South Africa where the wearing of feminine colours by hardened male criminals has apparently had a positive effect on reducing their rage. A colleague said that you can get away with such a liberal policy in Rwanda because the country is so small and crowded that prisoners can easily be captured if they do decide to go on the run.

Lovely market fruit seller

When we finally got into our house, now with all the basic accoutrements for simple living (minus a fridge in case you are wondering), we discovered to our shock that the second town prison, this one solely for bent coppers, was just across the road. Policemen, it appears, are not reformed by marching along the streets in coloured uniforms gaily waving axes. Instead, their rehabilitation involves getting up before 5 o'clock, then chanting discordantly and banging on drums until about the time most normal people wake up (when they probably go back to bed and have a good sleep). Quite the way to win hearts and minds. Earplugs are now compulsory early morning headwear and sit in readiness between our pillows next to the torch, the eye mask and the bottle of water - inside our mosquito net. It's like being on a permanent camping holiday.

The nightly shroud

On weekends we even get a special noise bonus. The Evangelical Restoration Church is directly behind the house. Saturday is rehearsal day and, as I write, I can hear the preacher hyping himself up into the microphone to get his voice into ecstatic trim for tomorrow's day long hallelujahs. (The Jehovahs two houses along, by comparison, seem quite quiet - maybe they've given up on boisterous invocation after their last, predicted apocalypse failed to materialise). As a youth I used to think that a one-hour church service was hard going - saved only by fits of giggling under the pews - but even standard Protestant and Catholic services here can go for three to four hours. I was met with perplexity when, in Kigali, I suggested meeting a Rwandan couple socially on a Sunday morning. "But won't you be attending church," he exclaimed. I resisted the temptation to say that I was a practitioner in the Church of Down Under and that unfortunately there were no suitable places of worship in the vicinity that accorded with my strange antipodean belief system and its cult of the Big Koala. "No" was the best I could come up with.

Reunited once again

I went out to get some Blue Band to put on our bread. When you see rows of it sitting on dusty hot shelves you do wonder what's in it and I would tell you but for the fact that I don't have a magnifying glass with me. Vitamins is the only word I can read - repeatedly. It must be chock full of them. There may be little refrigeration but the Blue Band doesn't seem to care which could be part of the reason that it's no longer found in western supermarkets. But, hey, we're still alive and looking at the container brings back so many childhood memories of other culinary delights such as tripe and black pudding (a kind of sausage to the uninitiated). Quaker oats from Fife is another one that pops up here in the oddest of places. Don't be surprised to find it in the ironmonger's, local bar or sewing machine shop. It's what I have for breakfast.

Packed with goodness

On the way home with my loot I was nearly knocked down by a herd of holies obviously late for an important vigil. (Should the collective noun be a Habit of Nuns?) There could be real tourist potential in Kibungo with a Running of the Nuns event similar to Pamplona's famous bull run.

House from the front with usual onlookers

It was 6 p.m. when I approached the house.

A little boy said (as many do): "Good morning"
I replied: "Hello" (not wanting to correct him)
He responded: "Very well thank you, and you"

I had broken the rote code by not saying, "How are you?" There is clearly much work to be done and I ought to tell you soon a bit about the reason I am actually here. But before that I'll give you some good news. The District Education Officer and I have become friends. We've started holding hands.