Mushubati Mountain and Hyachinth's family
on Geri Skeen (Rwanda), 29/Mar/2011 07:43, 34 days ago
I set off for the hamlet of Gifumba, remembering to take my camera as I met a woman there last week, Hyacinth, who asked me to bring my camera next time to take her picture. I walked past Hyacinth’s house, thinking I’d walk part-way up Mushubati, the biggest hillside you can see from Gitarama, and call in on my way back, but her son Felicien was just coming out as I walked past so he invited me in. I said hello to Hyacinth and we agreed I’d continue my walk and call in on my way back. Felicien offered to accompany me. We walked up the valley, followed the stream to its source and then cut steeply up through an area where people were panning with plastic bowls for minerals. There was no longer a path to follow. Felicien was a real gentleman, giving me a hand up when I needed it, greeting people as we went and explaining why the strange white woman wanted to go up the hillside. We reached the summit, where we met a track through an alpine-feeling area of sparsely growing pine trees which slowly took us back down to Gifumba by a route Felicien sometimes uses to take their two one-year-old cows up to pasture.Back at their house one of Felicien’s brothers was preparing a marrow and a cabbage for their meal. Hyacinth soon turned up along with her husband and another of Felicien’s brothers. Those five make up the household. The three brothers are all in their twenties. There is another brother and two sisters who live elsewhere now, one of the sisters being a secondary school teacher with two children of her own.I brought out my camera and asked each person’s permission to take their photo. Here’s the vegetable-chopping brother with his mother Hyacinth behind him:On the table is the flat woven dish on which he chopped the vegetables, as we would use a chopping board. The locally made table and several uncomfortable locally made chairs form the only furniture in this, the family’s living room. The room is rather less than 2 metres by 4 metres. The family, like most Rwandans, is Catholic and on the wall are a picture of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; partly overlapping it a second picture of Jesus and Mary; and a framed photograph of the daughter who is a teacher. Hard to see on the wall behind Hyacinth are pictures of the last and current popes, just next to the small high shuttered window which is the only window in the room. The door is open in daytime so there is plenty of light in the room. The floor is of fired bricks, now worn and some of them a bit out of place. Hyacinth is barefoot both inside the house and when she goes out. The rest of the family all wear shoes of one sort or another e.g. Felicien wore flip flops to take me up the mountain. Flip flops are the most common footwear here but people wear all sorts of second hand shoes bought in the market, or else go barefoot.Here is vegetable-chopping brother again after I gave him permission to smile:Most of the rooms in the house are built round a small central courtyard: the living room, the kitchen, the cow-shed, and a bedroom. You pass through the living room to get to what I guess are another two bedrooms.Here is the third brother:You can see the wooden lintel over the door where the mud facing over the unfired home-made bricks has eroded.Here are Hyacinth and her husband posing in the courtyard:Felicien wanted to be photographed at his bedroom door. Notice the tee-shirt urging the world’s rich nations not to forget their promises to the poor:Then before I could stop him, he whipped off the tee-shirt for a photo of his torso. Here instead for public viewing is my favourite photo of him but girls, if you want to see more of a well-brought-up subsistence farmer, just let me know.Felicien doesn’t have much prospect of becoming more than a subsistence farmer. He completed secondary school but his grades were too low for university. He is allowed to retake his exams. However, his schooling was all in French and the language of teaching has just switched to English. So if he retook his exams, he would have to do so in English and has no chance of improving his grades in that language. Felicien offered to go and buy me a Fanta. As a Fanta costs 250 or 300Rwf and a labourer’s daily pay is 500 to 1,000Rwf, I offered to pay for drinks, hoping that wasn’t impolite. Felicien accepted a 1,000Rwf note, went off carrying a plastic container and was soon back with a Fanta for me and the plastic container filled with banana beer. Felicien tried to lever the lid off the Fanta against the table edge but finally resorted to using his teeth, despite my protestations. Everyone else shared the banana beer.Father showed me a piece of paper on which was written the daughter-who-is-a teacher’s mobile phone number. I put it into my phone and suggested we give her a ring. Felicien spoke to her first, then I spoke to her in English, then both her parents spoke to her. Hyacinth said wistfully she wished she had a phone so she could keep in touch with her daughter (though she only lives 4km away). Father said it felt like a‘fete’. Oh, by the way, they all speak pretty good French. Hyacinth used to be house-keeper for a Belgian family and everyone learnt it in school. Felicien went off to change into a fresh shirt and trousers and then said it was time to go.  Vegetable-chopping brother went off to the kitchen to cook - he would be cooking on charcoal or wood - no electricity or running water in houses like these. Father cut two big marrows for me though I asked if I could just take the small one, which pretty much filled my backpack. Felicien accompanied me back to Gitarama, carrying my backpack for me, and then went off to see some friends. I took the marrow home to photograph: