The rains cometh?
on Melissa Hipkins (Rwanda), 13/Sep/2010 07:03, 34 days ago
It looks as though the rains have begun, but they may be a bit early according to precedent. Late September or early October is more usual. Nonetheless, 2 months without rain is quite long enough. The dust, as in Quentin Crisp's flat, had got only so deep and then had appeared to stop accumulating. What has been obvious is that the ditches at the side of the road have filled over the months with litter and rubbish, almost choking them. We had an inkling that the weather had begun to change when we came back from Kigali last weekend and the bottoms of the ditches were damp but the detritus was still there. A measure of the strength of the rain over the past week; the ditches have been scoured clean.Another measure was that we were without electricity for 48 hours. It went off just as this major storm began at about 4 in the afternoon; there was a fair bit of lightning just overhead and some powerful gusts but nothing extraordinary. Normally the power goes off for no more than 2-3 hours but by morning we guessed it was a bit more serious. Melissa discovered the cause on her way by moto to a school she was visiting that morning. The extreme two wooden poles of the row at the end of our road had been blown down. The fact that both poles had long been the restaurant of choice for the local termites meant that it had been lucky they had not toppled before when the road could have been full of people. Replacement poles have been lying in readiness at the roadside for the last 5 months. Perhaps it's because the end of the line supplies the baby clinic near the hospital that the repairs only took 48 hours.48 hours was enough to unstick us and our increasing reliance on the fridge for storage of our cooked food. The first 24 hours we could weather but after that the meals for the next 3 days had begun to bubble. There was no evil smell but the fact that gas was being generated and the local hospital has no great reputation in an emergency led me to dump the lot. You all would expect put it in the bin but that's out here, there are no bins. Jacky's refuse disposal service is OK for inert stuff; I did not want to be responsible for poisoning livestock or anyone prepared to take a chance with seemingly edible food, so it went down the lav.The onset of a change in the weather has prompted me to attempt the sowing of seeds again. We had limited success with the first growing period; you can't really talk of seasons. The herbs have all done well, the basil in particular; it has even survived long enough to produce good looking seed something it never does in England or in France. The sweet corn were a total failure but I think the seed got damp in transit. Courgettes grew but only finger size and were plagued with an insect that bored into the fruit and stunted them severely. The carrots have done really well and with the bonus that there seems to be no carrot root fly here so all the carrot can be enjoyed. I have sown courgette and sweet corn and checking if the coriander has managed to self-sow. The room for cultivation is very limited but it is more secure from the browsing goats that have free run of the patch that Aphrodise has allowed me to use.It was PK's inauguration for his second term as president on Monday– hence a public holiday. This week is the end of Ramadan but the exact day of Eid appears to be a state secret. That will be a holiday also but whether it's Thursday or Friday we'll have to see. Public holidays are usually announced the evening before on the radio. As there is no English versionbroadcast we have to rely on a grape vine to know when to stay in bed. In view of the disrupted week I chose not to go back to ISAE until later to continue the training on the scanner.The first week went well and I think everyone is convinced it's going to be a very useful tool for clinical use as well as teaching. The first morning was passed puzzling out how it all went together. Then someone discovered the manual that had been left in the packaging during its unwrapping last week before I arrived. It's very sophisticated compared with the scanner I used to use in practice. It took a little time to get into the swing of scanning after a 2 year break but this machine made it all quite easy.The biggest problem in training the staff who want to use it or teach with it is the lack of cows on the college farm; there are only about 25 in total and they seem to be always scattered over the hill side when you need them. The paucity of the most elementary handling facilities really begins to become significant. It takes 60-90 minutes to assemble about a dozen cows and guide them into the back of the handling race. They know what's up and are mostly unwilling to play ball. I may have said before but there is no pen of any sort to confine these cattle while we chivvy them into the race. You get two in and then it's a sprint around the college buildings gathering up a few more. Very frustrating.When at last they are in a position to be examined we have come up with some good examples of the standard conditions seen in most cows and some surprises were made on cows thought to be pregnant and vice versa.Melanie has taken up with Moses, a signer for the deaf who has a Ugandan father and Rwandan mother. He spent his formative years in Uganda and would qualify for dual nationality but has not chosen that option and remains Ugandan. At the moment Moses works for RNUD, or the Rwanda National Union for the Deaf. Rwanda has taken a pretty enlightened stance on access for the deaf and Moses was chosen to interpret for the president's speech on television at his inauguration. There was much rushing about the weekend before the investiture trying to get all the necessary paperwork in place so he could widen the potential audience for the president. But as often happens here, it all came to nothing and the speech was made without Moses at his side. Nevertheless, Moses was interviewed by various foreign television stations about the perceived advance in Rwanda's attitude towards disability and he has been offered a permanent job on RTV as interpreter for the deaf.Our visit to Nyungwe forest to see the chimpanzees was not without incident. It had been planned for the weekend after our return from Ethiopia. Accompanying us was Dorothy who had been with us to Tanzania and will be returning to the UK in October and a friend of hers from Bristol, Lynne.It's a long way to Nyungwe and the bus doesn't usually stop at Nyanza even though it goes past the door, so Melissa had reserved tickets for the bus a few days before when she was in Kigali. We had to be at the road junction in good time in order catch the bus-once missed there was not another one for days. In addition to booking the seats, she had had the option of reserving places as well. This is an unheard of luxury; seats are normally on a first come first get the comfy seats basis. It's always bad news when the bus is fully booked and late as there is a total loss of order and dignity as passengers literally scrum to board the bus first. Usually they don't have the gumption to let the arriving passengers off first so it's a heaving chaos.We were pushing our luck by boarding relatively far on in the bus's journey and indeed our seats had been taken even though Dorothy had done her damnedest to keep them free. It took the best part of 15 minutes to persuade the couple occupying them to move even with the driver weighing in and the other passengers getting thoroughly fed up with the whole affair. Places as well as seats had been reserved for the journey home, but when it was obviously going to involve same rigmarole and delay, we settled for the bucket seats in the middle and kept quiet.Chimpanzees nest overnight in trees, begin the day with a bit of light feeding and social interaction and then about mid-morning descend to the forest floor and move off at a fair lick to a different part of the forest. The aim of our visit was to see them in a relatively fixed place before they became impossible to follow in the undergrowth. This meant a very early start to get to their roost and allow us reasonable observation time. A 4.30 a.m. departure was set to give us time to be driven close to where we should begin the trail through the forest. Dorothy is about our age and asthmatic and has extreme difficulty maintaining any pace up hill and it was only the prospect of a short trek that made her think this was practical.We had booked our driver on the recommendation of a reliable friend. He had said that his vehicle was in for repair but that he had a replacement and in view of this he needed another $25.00 on top of his agreed fee. We were not best pleased when we saw that we had to squeeze into an ordinary and pretty old Toyota Carina saloon. With 3 in the back we went off to meet the guide who would take us to the area the chimps had been last seen once the car journey was complete. The guide was waiting for us at the visitor centre some distance from the village nearest the chimps and we assumed he would have his own vehicle, but no!-he had to bunk in with us. So now with 4 in the back we began to make the descent to the village close to the start of the trail.Once on this road, the inadequacy of the substitute car became apparent. The road into the village is normally used by villagers on foot to and from market and by rangers in 4x4s. There were deep ruts and many loose rocks on its surface and even with progress at less than walking pace all of us winced at the noise of the floor pan being scraped and had the unpleasant sensation under our feet of the metal flexing upwards in response to the rocks rolling underneath. The car couldn't stand much more and even with us getting out to relieve the weight in the back, we could still walk faster than the car. The inevitable did not have long to wait-it nosed into a trough across the road, the sump lifted the wheels clear of the ground and we could neither go forward nor back.We had no option but to continue on foot. The driver, now thoroughly out of favour, stayed with the car to puzzle out its recovery. At various times we had tried to get an estimate of the time or distance left before the village but they were vague in the extreme. We began to follow the course of the road but the guide, while acknowledging the ease of the surface felt that the distance along the road was too great compared with the straight- down-the-hillside approach. This was a bare mud path used by the villagers. In places it was treacherously greasy and very steep. I find going down hill just as tiring as ascending and we had about 1500 feet to descend. With frequent stops and a lot of helping each other we made it to the village in just over an hour. A breakfast stop was absolutely essential making it about 9.00 before we were in a position to begin the trek proper.Assessing the likelihood of us all getting to the known position of the apes, the guide chose to split us into 2 groups to give at least some of us a chance of seeing them. Melissa and I went in the first group and had mounting difficulty in keeping up with the guide's metronomic pace. Conditions on the ground got worse as we zeroed in on their reported position with the help of spotters. We did not expect Dorothy to be able to deal with the relentlessness of pace and the increasing gradient. It took us a further hour to be in the position to see 3 chimps far up in the canopy. Others could be heard in the vicinity but this small group obliged us by staying put long enough to get a good view of them with binoculars and camera.They stayed for a further 30-40 minutes but eventually even by their moving a short distance through the tree tops they were lost to sight. 10 minutes later, to our utter amazement and delight Dorothy, looking thoroughly exhausted, came along the trail with Lynne. She was devastated to have missed them but we were astonished that she had made it that far; she had really pushed herself certainly beyond what she had thought herself capable. The killer was that we had to walk all the way back to the road in order to get out; no replacement car could get down the track to drive us out. It was about 2000 ft of climbing to have to do but we had all day to do it.We regained the main road at 3.00. The car had somehow been released and was close by to take us back to the visitor centre. The serious fun began when the driver expected to be paid. I retired a safe distance while he wilted under the combination of Melissa and Dorothy. To be fair, he maintained that he'd given us excellent service and that he deserved to be paid the full amount. He could see no grounds for any form of apology or refund. With that sort of attitude he earned the mauling he got in full earshot of the other guides and rangers.The good news is that as the tale became more widely known, Dorothy and Lynne had the offer of another chance to see the chimpanzees the next day even though it meant officially the party was overbooked. In view of the circumstances, everyone in the tourist office felt they could stretch a point. We had to get back that day so we had no chance to see them after their second much more successful and less stressful encounter but word got back that they had had a very worthwhile experience.