RWANDA, August 2006

Roger and Claire report on their trip…

Soon, and perhaps already when the Newsletter goes to press, we will be welcoming Bishop Venuste of Butare among us for his Sabbatical, benefiting from our City’s famous Theological Faculty, like Bishop Jered of Shyogwe before him.

This follows a summer when contacts between our Chaplaincy and these two South Rwandan Dioceses were further deepened with TRIPLE representation of Strasbourg in David Dale’s Group of 10, under Christians Aware auspices, over a memorable 2-week visit, made all the more so by David‘s sense of fun, the bonhomie of the whole group and the special care and attention accorded us by our two Bishops..

A big plus was the fact that the age-spread - compared with last November when Barney Milligan and I were there - was much widened and rejuvenated, with Claire and I agreeing (with some needless trepidation!) to act ‘in loco parentis’ to 16-year-old Nick Cartwright, our young blond giant. His report, in this Newsletter, benefits from all the freshness of vision and enthusiasm those who know him would expect, and which delighted our interlocutors on the spot. It is true that the Rwandan people are wonderful and cannot do enough to look after one as well as they are able and are so welcoming. Also the group’s younger members (we had 2 other teenagers) were able get their hands dirty on a mud-brick school-building project. We were also taken to see the Butare Hospital (one of our group was a nurse) and the University, and accompanied to the market, which has to be seen to be believed, selling all the most unlikely things imaginable.

It therefore befits our generation, we felt, to leave you with young Nick’s impressions while limiting ourselves to a few remarks, especially since we were distributing our Chaplaincy’s One World Group’s funds, focussing on Cows (whose sheer beauty surely deserves illustration - see below) and Health Dispensaries.

Where cows are concerned, we could understand some donor scepticism (in the light of a past experience) about which it was explained to us on our enquiry that ‘our cow’ had been ‘privatised’ and given to a villager, its calf being given to another, and so on until 10 families had cows from our one! each benefiting of course from the sale of high demand products, milk and manure But we, on the spot, were convinced of the importance – often stressed by Venuste and others - of Rwanda’s ‘Cow Culture’. It seems fitting that, as the successor of the former Kings who owned all cows (while allowing them to roam freely for the benefit of all their subjects), President Kagame takes a close personal interest, even entrusting improvement of the breed to his own élite Ministry of Defence (!). Today, bred to increase milk-yield, they are truly in the front line in the war against malnutrition, explaining the burst of applause we experienced in the under-nourished, over-populated parish of Gisanze, when Pastor Vincent and his flock learnt that one of these beauties would be coming their way!

The women in thevillage greatly improved Claire’s basket-weaving skills - these baskets often being made simply from unravelled plastic sacks. It can take up to 4 months to complete one basket.

The villagers are themselves constructing the ‘chalet’ to receive Jersey Lily (why not? though she will also have a Kinyarwandan name) and Pastor Vincent, like Venuste, understands, and will be constantly prompted as to the importance we attach to follow-up to this health-enhancing project. This should go hand-in hand with building a Dispensary, as the first stage of a Health Centre at Gisanze, which as previous visitors from Strasbourg to the parish will bear witness, is one of Venuste’s top priorities. We therefore took the parallel initiative of investing approximately one quarter of the One World Group’s money in basic medicines recommended by Médecins Sans Frontières (painkillers, anti-dehydration tablets, anti-inflammatories etc).

We are now collecting on our own initiative for the building of a Dispensary there, on the lines of David Dale’s admirably concrete specifications (appended), and we will be taking the liberty of reminding the congregation and its One World Group about this from time to time. It was particularly hard to say no to young people unable to complete even secondary education let alone university

- like Jacquie, who got up at dawn to heat our water and get our copious breakfast every day in Butare, who shyly requested money to pay for her university training, a mere £150 p.a. for three years. Getting any meals in Rwanda represents much more work than we here imagine!

She’s the one , mon colonel!

Why was the Jersey cross ?.............................about being cross-bred with big-horned

traditional African cattle (here admired cautiously by Canon David Dale) to produce 40- times higher milk yield!