What's going on

Well, this week I read that the government is committed to planting 44 million trees next year, and that the target of 30% forest cover will be reached within three years. Of course, the trees are small, but this is still an astonishing goal and I have no doubt that it will be met.

I’ve seen how it's done. A few weeks ago there was ‘umuganda’, a collective work party on the slopes below the memorial centre. All the employees of an organization arrived (with a woefully inadequate number of shovels and hoes) and spread out on the slope to dig holes. We went out to help, although there was a lot of standing around due to the shortage of implements, and seeing that I was about twice the age of everyone there, I sat in the shade of an existing tree and without any guilt just observed the activity. On the following weekend, the trees came and the people came again and planted them.

Two people have told me recently that the rains had been greatly diminished but in recent years have returned because of tree planting. Whether it is true or not (and currently the east suffers drought) people’s minds are making important connections.

And today it rained. A twenty-minute magnificent downpour preceded by a rising wind and a darkening sky, the trees swaying and the water coming horizontally onto my porch, soaking my bare hot legs with coolness.

I read that the Rwandan Environment Authority is conducting a two day training with Rwandan police personnel on environmental issues so that they can sensitive the population related to pollution of water bodies, lack of waste management and encroachment on wetlands. Two days isn’t much but it’s more than I’ve heard about at home.

Speaking of wetlands, a UK consultant to the Ministry of Agriculture, tells me about the reclamation of wetlands for rice farming and how dams and water channels are being built. My knee jerk environmental response, why tamper with the marshes, is moderated by her telling me that the reclamation includes tree planting on the shorelines. The degraded and eroded hills fill the marshes with silt and perhaps the reclamation, while not wilderness, will support quite a rich diversity of life, perhaps more than is there now.

Rwanda isn’t much of a wilderness anyway; the whole country is gardens so maybe aim for most beautiful garden possible?

And this is a step towards Rwanda’s determination to feed itself. This consultant works with rice farmers in the south and before work shopping agricultural issues and processes, she puts them in small groups and asks them to come up with three things that they think are going well in their lives. What they say: we have security, we have enough to eat and we are working together.

Hungry warring people don’t do much for the environment, that’s for sure. Some Congolese gorillas were brought to Rwanda for safety but I think a couple of them have been airlifted home.

Back to the marshes - another part of my mind wonders if farming the marshes is also a desire to forget what happened in the marshes during the genocide, the hunted spending days up to their necks in mud, the hunters thrashing through the papyrus in search of prey.

But forgetting isn’t on the mind of the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide Commission (CNLG). This week they announced a partnership with a western university to implement a technology that will preserve genocide remains for up to 150 years. In addition to preservation, this technology, some sort of sophisticated scanning will be able to tell how people were killed, whether they fought back, what they went through before being killed. When I read this, even though I work at the genocide memorial centre, part of me thinks, let’s just bury these bones.

And yet, last week I was at Murambi and I visited the bodies and the two tiny children with feet crossed in that foetal manner, on a table with flowers and a poem, stunned me into an awed and respectful silence.

CNLG’s preservation machines will focus on the main genocide memorial sites so that will include the rooms full of bodies at Murambi but I don’t know to know anything more about these babies.

And back at the memorial centre, there’s been much hustle and bustle because next Friday is the official opening of the National Genocide Archive of Rwanda, a digital resource of testimony and imagery. The memorial centre has been collecting testimony of survivors, rescuers and perpetrators since its beginnings six years ago, and now this has become a digital archive.

It was world AIDS day this week, and a big campaign for condom use and condom machines instilled in hotels and public places. The National AIDS Control Commission announces a plan circumcising 2 million men by 2012 as research suggests some effectiveness in reducing transmission. I was surprised to read that the infection rate in Kigali is over 7%, although much lower in the rest of the country.

It was December 1st four years ago when I first arrived in Africa (not counting my long ago conception in a Kenyan farmhouse) and stumbled into Nairobi’s world AIDS day activities where a marching band of boys with t-shirts saying ‘long haul truckers orphan band’ brought tears to my eyes. I’ve been wearing my t-shirt from Kenya this week, the one that says ‘a world without AIDS is possible’ across the front.

Speaking of Kenya, we’re going there for two weeks in January, so I wasn’t happy to read about a Rwandan truck driver who got in a minor accident with a bus in western Kenya. The bus driver hit him with a metal bar and the passengers on the bus beat him to death. That wouldn't happen here. He left seven children.

And the international press has quieted down on the UN  report of Rwanda led atrocities in post genocide years in Congo  but the issue festers under the surface and Rwanda continues to be a place that evokes both fears of repression and hopes for peace.

I read a couple of weeks ago what the UN pledged at a conference on the ‘role of security agents in ending violence against women’ (there’s a lot of conferences here),  to increase their support “to keep her a place of peace, a place of security and a place of harmony for all girls, boys, men and women.” Perhaps not surprising that the UN has ambivalent responses to Rwanda.

Rwanda also recently got accolades from a big multi faith event in London (I think) attended by 50,000 people for ‘ensuring harmonious co-existence between Christians and Muslims.”

This place and its contradictions are really so mind-boggling that I think I’ll have to sit under one of those trees, no matter how big, and do some serious contemplation. I’ll sit under one of the indigenous ones, I think, and watch the people passing by and the young soldiers in camouflage uniform standing motionless with their fingers on the triggers under the trees across the street. I’ll have to lean my back against one of stone walls that line city streets and try to be still enough and big enough to hold all of it. I’ll be sitting for sometime and I’ll let you know what comes of it.