Beer and milk lead to strange encounters
on Melissa Hipkins (Rwanda), 23/Aug/2011 07:25, 34 days ago
Last week we had a tragedy in the town. The Monday of our arrival back from Kenya was a bank holiday, celebrating The Assumption. Many of the local church groups take this opportunity to visit other churches or shrines to take part in ceremonies and services. In order to make this a community experience, and bearing in mind car ownership is very limited, it is common for groups to hire an ATRACO (Association des Transport en Commun) van or matatu to make the journey.I should explain that public transport for the vast majority, including us, is by bus. They divide themselves into Coasters or Atracos. Coasters look pretty bus like and despite the inconvenience of the aisle being regularly blocked by the supplementary seats that unfold into it, they provide a degree of comfort in that the seats are not too close to the ones in front and there is good headroom and ventilation. Depending on the design, Coasters can seat about 25 all up and it’s a rare bus that does not have its full complement of bums on seats. The Atracos however are Toyota Hiace vans about a third the size of the Coasters but with 18 passengers and the driver jammed into the diminutive seats. Getting in and out of Atracos is not for the overweight or the unsupple. We use them when we have to, being just about tolerable for short journeys or where there is no alternative. I cannot understand their attraction, it’s not as though the fare is less for being so discomforted, but they are the most numerous form of public transport for long and short journeys.It was in one of these Atracos that the church group came to grief. During a sharp descent the brakes failed and it collided with a tree. 2 were killed and about 10 others ended up in Butare hospital. The injuries will have been made worse by the absence of seat belts. Even in the few buses that have belts they are seldom used reflecting a lack of belief that restraint is any use; drivers of buses all have seat belts but only pretend to use them during police checks, they come straight off once surveillance is over.It has long been a bit of a mystery to us as to how death is managed in Rwanda. Apart from the mass graves that each town or community uses as a focus for the remembrance of the genocide the only visible graves or cemeteries are those in which priests or nuns of the Catholic Church are elaborately interred. Occasionally we see a wicker bier carried shoulder high by four men going along the road. It is only if we see hands clinging to the lip or a head bobbing above the side of the bier that we know it is a casualty off to the hospital and not a corpse on the way to a funeral. Burials take place very soon after death; it’s not unusual for the interment to happen on the same day. Graves are dug in cemeteries; in Nyanza there’s one very close to the football stadium but it is not given prominence. In smaller communities it is common for burials to take place within the compound of the family house, but this is being actively discouraged by the authorities.The two fatalities, both women, lived not far away along our road. On the Tuesday, the day after the incident, I had to go into town to get more beer and passed by a line of parked cars and Atracos outside the family house. It didn’t take much to see that the funeral preparations were reaching a climax and as I thought it best to let them get all settled before my journey home, I decided to call in to Zebounissa for half an hour. We discussed what had happened and of course she had known both the victims, in particular thewoman whose funeral was today. We are used to the tradition where nothing controversial is brought up in the remembrance of those recently dead, but Zebounissa had nothing good to say about her. It was her opinion that most of her acquaintances would be glad to see the back of her and she went on tomake some startling allegations of her conduct during and after the genocide.I thought I had timed things well but on my return I and my crate of beer became entangled not only in the crowd of mourners leaving the house for the journey to the church but the press of interested bystanders. The motor hearse chose that moment to emerge, flashing blue lights, and manoeuvred around the parked cars in the narrow road followed by the procession of principal mourners. We met on the brow of the hill; I trying to disassociate myself from the incongruity of my procession with the beer and they trying to maintain the dignity of the occasion while a casually dressed muzungu was forced to squeeze past.Jacky came to visit us at the weekend complete with her baby of just 2 months. It is still quite small for such an age so it may well have been a bit premature. One Monday in late June we had a call from Z to say Jacky wasn’t feeling too well and had decided to go to hospital and she wouldn’t be in. She was still due to be working for us until the end of that month as the baby wasn’t expected until early August. By the next day we had heard the news of her delivery and that she had had a boy, Kevin. Doesn’t sound very Rwandan but he’s on the Saint’s calendar, June 3. About a week later I went over to Z’s house with Jacky’s wages and the things she had left with us and there they both were looking happy and healthy. Somehow in the time between Friday, when we last saw her before the birth and nowshe had had her hair braided; that together with the mum’s outfit of headscarf, floral dress and wraparound to carry the infant gave her a more mature look. When we saw her last Saturday she seemed to have taken to motherhood in a big way, and considering she’s on her own she’s being very positive. We have asked her to come back and work for us from the beginning of September for 3 days a week albeit it will be only for a couple of months. I admire her spirit and she is in need of the money far more than Bertine.I go tomorrow back up to Gisenyi to do a second week among the herds that supply milk to Kivu Dairy. The first week was spent mainly trying to understand what routines are in place and seeing if there are any constraints to improving the quality. The problem is more that the rules of the market keep changing; the principal buyer for an improved quality of milk has cranked up the quality standards to such an extent that opinion is they are looking for an excuse to refuse all milk without being seen to break their contracts. The economics depend very much on using the premium price to allow for a price differential for improved quality. Without a significant incentive, getting and retaining a change in routine will be difficult.Originally, all the milk was to have been sold to this major processor for conversion to UHT, for which use milk must be of good quality. Once their quality requirements became more stringent, a new market had to be sought; initially it could be sold in Kigali on what’s euphemistically called the secondary market (there’s no tertiary, so if it looks white, it’s in) but the transportation costs and the fluctuations in the daily price made it impossible to sustain a price for farmers above that they can get locally.Kivu Dairy is just across the border from the DRC and here there is an unsatisfied demand for a fermented milk product called ikivuguto. From the dairy supplying processors who make it, it is but a short step to make it at the dairy ourselves. For a successful drink to be made, the milk must be pasteurised and then incubated with a specific culture. For the moment in the absence of pasteuriser or temperature controlled incubator, Kivu dairy is rolling it off by standing several milk churns in a bath of water heated by charcoal. I’m assured that the kit for a more streamlined production will not be long in coming. It does not require any special quality milk to make something very acceptable to the Congolese, the main consumers. But if all the production is turned towards this end there is no real need to encourage the farmers to change the habit of generations to produce a milk of better quality. I have no particular qualms if the lack of cleanliness of the udder or the milkers’ hands continues; there are no patent welfare issues with the cows brought about by the present practices. The farmers would benefit fromincreased volume if they could control mastitis and reduce long term udder infections but to be able to demonstrate convincingly those advantages to farmers would take years.