We left Monday morning at 6:30 AM from Kigali to Butare. No problem for me as I had been up since 4:30 - still jet lagged.
We headed out for the drive to Kigali in one of the T-S pickup trucks. Rwanda is so orderly and clean compared to Kenya. Apparently, they have outlawed plastic bags here - a huge source of trash in Kenya. The streets look like they were paved last week and theres no traffic. They even have stop lights here and people pay attention to them. Apparently, Rwandans practice a thing called Muganda. On the last Saturday of each month, it is illegal to drive from 8 AM to 12 PM. At this time, instead people are encouraged to clean up there properties and surroundings. It makes a big difference. Also, something I started to notice is that no one was asking me for money, or even staring at my whiteness. Another big annoyance in Kenya.
The drive to Butare was beautiful. Rwanda is very green, and extremely hilly. Along the way we passed at least 1 genocide memorial. Later we drove along the edge of a cliff. In the valley below, my boss told me that the people working in the fields were all prisoners. She said the ones in orange were convicted genocide murderers, and the ones in pink had not seen trial yet.
The country is beautiful, clean and the people are nice, yet the word genocide is never far from a foreigners lips when the word Rwanda comes up.
Monday and Tuesday we started the coffee agronomy trainings. I am basically just helping out my boss, even though I know nothing about coffee. In fact, she had to point out to me on the way to Butare what a coffee tree even looked like. I have learned a lot in the past 2 days and should be an expert by the time this 6 months is over. This afternoon we went to the field and practiced some of the techniques we had learned on real coffee trees such as pruning, fertilizing and rejuvenating. The goal of these trainings is to disseminate coffee agronomy expertise to local farmers.
We headed out for the drive to Kigali in one of the T-S pickup trucks. Rwanda is so orderly and clean compared to Kenya. Apparently, they have outlawed plastic bags here - a huge source of trash in Kenya. The streets look like they were paved last week and theres no traffic. They even have stop lights here and people pay attention to them. Apparently, Rwandans practice a thing called Muganda. On the last Saturday of each month, it is illegal to drive from 8 AM to 12 PM. At this time, instead people are encouraged to clean up there properties and surroundings. It makes a big difference. Also, something I started to notice is that no one was asking me for money, or even staring at my whiteness. Another big annoyance in Kenya.
The drive to Butare was beautiful. Rwanda is very green, and extremely hilly. Along the way we passed at least 1 genocide memorial. Later we drove along the edge of a cliff. In the valley below, my boss told me that the people working in the fields were all prisoners. She said the ones in orange were convicted genocide murderers, and the ones in pink had not seen trial yet.
The country is beautiful, clean and the people are nice, yet the word genocide is never far from a foreigners lips when the word Rwanda comes up.
Monday and Tuesday we started the coffee agronomy trainings. I am basically just helping out my boss, even though I know nothing about coffee. In fact, she had to point out to me on the way to Butare what a coffee tree even looked like. I have learned a lot in the past 2 days and should be an expert by the time this 6 months is over. This afternoon we went to the field and practiced some of the techniques we had learned on real coffee trees such as pruning, fertilizing and rejuvenating. The goal of these trainings is to disseminate coffee agronomy expertise to local farmers.
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Coffee tree on a plantation at a Rwandan Government Research Station (ISAR)
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Learning how to rejuvenate a coffee tree
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