Moving on

After just over a year of a moderately successful relationship with this blog, I have decided to run it from a different page, which looks much nicer and is much easier to use. It will allow you to subscribe to it and be updated if I post a new blog as well as lots of other nifty things. I also promise to update it more regularly, which shouldn't be a problem if it's as easy to use as Sean says it is... There are lots of interesting things happening out here, so it would be great if you would like to join me.

If you're still interested in reading about my trip, please go to www.afishcalledrwanda.com and sign up to be a subscriber.

Thanks and goodbye blogspot

Plane terrific

Last Friday saw around 80 boys, 10 ROP staff members, Sean and I making our way to Kigali International Airport for our long-awaited trip to the planes.

The smaller boys have been asking me to arrange a trip to the airport for months and last week we finally managed it. The process was actually a lot easier than I'd expected and we were quickly accepted by the duty manager.

The boys are fascinated by planes and when I give them paper and pencils, I'm often handed back paper covered with drawings of planes or helicopters. We are located a few miles from the end of the airport runway and we often see the planes soaring above us, so maybe that's where the interest comes from.

We told the boys a few days before the trip what we were going to do. The announcement was only slightly marred by the fact when I asked them to guess where we were going, they all thought I had arranged a trip to America. 

 We were told the boys had to be clean and well behaved on the visit, and they really did us proud. When Sean and I arrived early on Friday morning we found them all lined up and dressed in their very best clothes, with proper leather shoes (instead of their usual foam-ey sandals), which were a very generous Christmas present from some Polish volunteers. They looked great.

The smaller boys were matched up with older ones in a bid to maintain order and we made the 15 minute walk to Kanombe to reach the buses. The boys seemed to enjoy being on a bus as much as being at the airport, and whooped and sang the whole way, heads poking dangerously through windows.

When we reached the airport we had to go through security before being taken out to the planes. We reached a large cargo plane that is now grounded and the boys wandered around happily, as Sean gave them a talk about how aeroplanes work. They seemed surprised at how large it was and tapped away at various parts of it. A helicopter parked nearby was also a source of fascination for them. Then a Kenya Airways plane took off right beside us and the boys were enraptured. (If you want technical details about the planes you might want to look here www.ropstories.org).

We didn't get to go inside an actual plane, which was a huge disappointment for everyone. Apparently to open the door of a plane requires an engine to be turned on, which requires some sort of special procedure to be gone through. But the trip was pretty well loved otherwise. 

That afternoon as we sat in one of the back fields watching some of the boys play football, the boys would excitedly point and stare every time a plane went by. So I think they enjoyed the morning.

 

Newbies

 

There's been a shameful lack of blogging on my part of late. Since Sean and I arrived back from the States in January things have been pretty frantic trying to enrol all of our boys in various schools and getting to grips with the 20 or so new boys who joined the Centre over Christmas.

 Impromptu drawing session in the office

They are all aged around 10 and under and are quite a handful. I thought that trying to organise our youngest boys during activities and art classes was hard work before this new lot arrived, but it turns out I had no idea how difficult it can be to entertain and keep an eye on dozens on frantic youngsters, all desperate to be included at every step, terrified of being left out and keen to have their creations approved. All without the benefit of a common language, except the regularly used thumbs-up and a smile. I also have to keep a sharp eye on the materials that we're using because things have a habit of disappearing…crayons, scissors and pencil sharpeners seem to be most popular amongst my light-fingered little friends.

Making masks

But despite the hard work, these boys are great. I sometimes hesitate to write on this blog because I do struggle with the things I see and experience here in Rwanda, and I'm wary of making all my entries rather miserable and full of my experiences of "white middle class guilt", as my friend Damian is fond of describing this excursion of mine. But forgetting for a while the sad situations these terribly young boys have come from, and taking them just as they are, they are extremely fun, lively, cheeky, ingenious and witty people to be around. We still have a large number of older boys at the Centre who study at secondary school, but since Christmas it has undoubtedly become a much younger place. It's nice to see the younger boys who have been with us a while, now assuming roles as the wise leaders of this new "small boys gang". The bored youngsters who used to hang around Sean and I as soon as our bicycles pulled up at the gates, no longer need us as they have a whole group of new friends to play with. It's lovely to watch them play football with whatever they can find (plastic bags rolled tightly together, rocks, someone's shoe) or somehow create a card game out of the ragged remains of a no longer full pack of playing cards. There are some quarrels as you'd expect, but largely they look after each other.

 Showing off their home-made flags

The youngest boys aren't always so good on hygiene though, and our newest addition to the ROP team has already started to turn this around. We employed Louise as a full-time caretaker in January so that she would be able to keep a close eye on these new, small boys and to teach them how to be clean. Every afternoon a handful of boys can be seen, shirts off, outside her office cleaning themselves with a bucket and soap, diligently going under fingernails and behind ears. After washing they all apply a Vaseline-type cream to keep themselves moisturised before rushing off, heads still shiny from the lotion, to resume their games. She seems to be doing well and we hope that soon the boys will start to see her as a mother figure.

 The boys have always had a deep interest in airports and aeroplanes because of the Centre's proximity to the airport. And next week we have arranged a surprise trip for all the boys to visit Kigali airport to see what it looks like close-up, and hopefully see the inside of a plane too. I'll keep you posted.

An attack

I don't know if the twitching of that man's feet were his dying movements as he lay on the tarmac or if they managed to save him after that, but I know that after I saw them jerking around for a while, he stopped moving completely. And he was silent. Even during the twitching phase, I didn't hear him scream or groan or whimper. He just lay there, the thick, shockingly bright blood slowly oozing out of wounds on his stomach and chest. Before last night I wouldn't have thought the victim of a grenade attack would look like that: I'd think that the wounds would have to be large and gaping and that the victim would be screaming. But there he was, about a minute after the grenade was thrown just lying there, perhaps struggling to take in his last few breaths, perhaps slowly dying.

Some police and bystanders lifted him up awkwardly by his feet and underarms and put him on the backseat of a taxi. He was limp. When they lifted him up small streams of blood trickled away from where he had been lying down the slope. I thought about whether the taxi driver was concerned about his backseat becoming blood stained and whether he would be compensated by someone. I think he probably was and that no he wouldn't be. I stared at the blood running away and wondered if it was still warm. I stared for longer than I should have, another of the nosey bystanders. And I tried for longer than I should have to catch a glimpse of the man in the back of the car. When I eventually did move away, I turned around and saw Sean staring at something behind me. While I had been watching one victim, another – equally limp – had been carried right past me and was being put on the back of a police truck. This one had had his feet bound together with something white, maybe so it would be easier to get him into the truck, or maybe because he was already dead.

There were no ambulances, and stranger still, no noise. The whole experience had started with a huge bang though. One that was too loud and too deep to be anything other than a grenade or maybe a canon. The bus Sean and I were travelling home on at 7pm was just pulling into Giporoso bus station in Remera (the stop nearest to our house) and we were preparing to get off when we heard the bang. A second or two of reflection and I think we both realised that there couldn't be an innocent explanation for the noise. I looked outside the window and saw a woman running away from the direction of the noise, and a few police officers running towards it. But that was it. Everyone else seemed to be carrying on as normal. The bus conductors, feisty as ever, were still trying to usher people on to their buses, and the motorbike taxi drivers were still just sitting there, leaning on their handlebars.  

We paid our conductor and, still wondering what had just happened, walked 20 yards or so in the direction of the bang. As we turned the corner things still felt normal: there were cars, buses and pedestrians everywhere as usual, and everyone seemed remarkably calm considering they had escaped the attack by a matter of metres and seconds. And there was still no sign of the grenade, until I spotted the twitching feet.

I found out this morning that two people died and 26 were injured after the grenade was thrown from a motorbike. There have been grenade attacks before in Kigali, but not for months and never one so close to home for me. It's strange to be caught up in such a big event, but for everything other than perhaps a minute of it to have felt so normal. Of course if it had been a few minutes later, if the motorbike had been caught in a bit more traffic, it could have hit us. We were mulling over which bar to go to for dinner and had we decided on Chez Guinness, we would have walked up that road. But it wasn't us, it was someone else who, like us, was probably just on his way home from work on Friday night.

A whole year later

December was a busy month in Rwanda. We said a teary farewell to Anna and Lou who brought a breath of fresh air to dusty Rwanda, did so much brilliant work with the boys and who were also a huge, lovely slice of home for me.

They also bought a fantastic amount of art materials with them, all donated by art shops in Brighton and Sussex. Here are Kazungu and Amusa showing off a small selection of the goodies. Look at their little faces.

Here they are putting the finishing touches to the ROP logo in the dining room. It looks great and the boys are very proud of it.

And here's Lou being hijacked in the local market by bead-selling ladies

Here we are after painting one of the boys' dormitories

And here we are with some friends

Around eight of our older boys who have completed their secondary education were graduated and we had a big celebration to send them off. This is Katonda, one of the graduated boys, in his flashy sunglasses. There was dancing and a big feast after the ceremony, and, thanks to Anna and Lou, we slaughtered two goats for the boys to eat.

An idea my dad came up with to get the boys using their new-found art skills to make Christmas cards for him went down really well. The boys carefully made their cards using glitter, glue and whatever else they could find and we sent the finished cards back to the UK with Anna and Lou. Dad sent money for each boy who made a card and the day before we left for the States, we had them line up and called them in one-by-one to give them their hard-earned cash. (The first kid is the famous Frank Lampard, and check out Said's homemade sunglasses in the next photo.)

What you can't see in these photos is the mad scrum outside the door of boys who couldn't wait to get their hands on a 500 Rwf note (about 70p), and the boys who strutted around afterwards gleefully showing off their earnings to the boys who rued the day they thought they were too cool to take part in a Christmas card-making project. The younger boys you see here couldn't actually sign their name in the accounting book so just did little squiggles.


We tentatively opened the ROP library up to the boys for the first time. The first day went remarkably well, with boys sitting quietly drawing, reading or helping each other to learn English. It was a really nice thing to see.

Anna and Lou bought balloons for the boys on their last day, which led to much joy and then disappointment when they all popped.

As a reward and an incentive for the future, we took the highest achieving boys in each school class out for lunch in town. It was a fairly standard Rwandan buffet restaurant but the boys rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to eat this kind of food and they were very excited. We all got the bus together before filing into the restaurant. We had told the boys to be as smart as possible, so they all borrowed clothes from each other so that each boy had on a smart shirt and looked his very best. They lined up to get their food before tucking in. They all behaved extremely well and I was proud of them.

This is Emmanuel, he's aged about 10/11. He only joined the Centre about four months ago and hadn't been to school before but he is already the top of his class. He's very popular around the Centre and is a lively, cheeky little thing (despite his sad background where he saw his father murder his mother in their house). Because of that he seems much older than his years and I can't help but think of him as a mini-adult. But when we took him out of the context of the orphanage and I saw his little legs swinging on his too-large chair and him struggling to use his knife and fork, it suddenly struck me just how young and vulnerable he is.

The boys were also treated to a Fanta each and a chocolate bar, a huge treat. This anecdote will tell you a lot about the boys at the Centre: most of them didn't eat their chocolate bars right away, but took them back to the Centre to share with their friends so they could all sample this new taste.


This is a storm brewing, as seen from a roof-top bar we like to go to

And this is a picture of two boys who have really made a big impact on me.

Amahoro Island

Because we thought we deserved a treat and in a bid to show Anna and Lou some of Rwanda's spectacular scenery, we took a weekend trip to Amahoro Island in Lake Kivu without flatmate, Cat. Amahoro means peace in Kinyarwanda and this teeny, tiny island in the middle of a fantastically serene and beautiful lake, was peaceful indeed.

About a 20-minute boat ride from the town of Kibuye, Amahoro is nestled in between around five other islands, one of which is called Napolean's hat because of its symmetry and shape. 

When we stepped off the boat onto the golden sand there was one other tourist there having a drink. But she quickly left and we had the island to ourselves for two whole days, apart from the occasional visiting boat and a baptism which took place on Sunday afternoon (!).

We slept in small tents, played badminton, ate fresh fish, drank beer and played cards and spotted all kinds of animals on the island and in its waters, from otters (both dead and alive) to tarantulas (I think anyway) and the most colourful birds I've ever seen in my life. Then some kids who live on the island lent us their surf board and we spent hours trying to stand on it and dive off, while also getting pretty sunburnt backs in the process.