Part II!

Hello again!

Time for a much-delayed update from Butare, Rwanda! I’m into the last two weeks of my internship here, and I have a feeling that the last push to get things done will result in many good things all smushed into relatively few days. The following is structured (for my benefit, really) as a sort of reflection on the experience thus far.

GOALS
As most experienced ‘development’/aid/volunteer workers—experienced, I am not—know, the goals you set in the first week of working in an organization are often too ambitious to be realized. I have had to scale down my expectations of myself and others over the course of this internship, but I’ll try to account for some of the successes and ongoing projects of the past several weeks.

SUCCESSES
Since I began my internship with Rwanda Village Concept Project on May 7, 2009, I’ve completed a number of my aforementioned goals, and many others are ongoing. For brevity’s sake, I’ll detail the major projects completed thus far.

For EPN:
• I wrote an article for EPN’s newsletter, describing my experience
• I continue to report back to EPN weekly (when internet access allows), and have written for this blog (perhaps not as regularly as is preferable, it seems!)
• I continue to collect receipts, photographs, etc as the project goes on.
• The evaluation is an ongoing process; I’ve interviewed the RVCP framers of the project, and have recently finished conducting formal interviews of several members of the women’s beekeeping cooperative (RWA).

For RVCP:
• I designed and implemented a management-training workshop. It was held on June 27, 2009. In addition to RVCP’s board, two other RVCP International Participants attended the workshop and their feedback was very useful; they deemed the workshop a success.
• I assisted in designing an implementing a nutrition workshop. This was a full-day endeavour, teaching basic nutrition—in an interactive format—to 70 foster mothers of L.L.C.C.M., the orphan centre that RVCP works with. There was a lot of field research preceding the workshop, including designing a baseline survey in order to assess the current nutritional needs and status of the women we would be working with.
• I’ve attended countless ceremonies, workshops, and inaugurations of new projects (Rwanda loves formalities)
• I am currently working on the English teaching manual for the pyramid teaching sessions. Unfortunately, due to the timing of the holiday for secondary schools, the teaching sessions will begin after I’ve left Rwanda. Regardless, I think this is one area to which I can contribute very tangible knowledge, and am looking forward to collaborating with RVCP’s new international participants from Britain on this particular project.
• As mentioned previously, the evaluation is for the benefit of both EPN and RVCP, and it is ongoing.
• As the longest-term RVCP volunteer this summer, I have had the unexpected pleasure of acting as a sort of ‘liaison’ for RVCP, introducing new International Participants to Rwanda and RVCP. Maybe it’s not really work—it’s been a fun ‘duty’—but it sure is time-consuming!

For RWA:
• I continue to visit the beekeeping site weekly and assist with beekeeping activities. I’ve found that a large part of my participation there is not so much the actual physical work, but rather showing interest in the women and their work.
• I continue to administer funding from EPN, especially by buying materials in Kigali and Butare.
• Assisted in the election of the new board.
• In the midst of organizing the cooperative management sessions, scheduled for two days later this week.

UPCOMING
Working with RVCP has been a very mixed experience. I fully recognize that everyone involved, including me, could better manage many of the problems RVCP faces. There are good days and bad days, and I try not to let my natural tendencies toward impatience and micro-managing get the better of me.
I’m truly looking forward to compiling the information I’ve amassed about RVCP and this project into the final evaluation. I feel that I have learned a lot about Rwanda, international aid work, NGOs, and this particular organization/project. One benefit of having lost nearly the whole month of May to the exam schedule was that I was able to do a lot of informal learning before beginning actual work.
I think the vast majority of my (tangible) work for this internship will actually be completed in the coming two weeks, and I’m eagerly anticipating the process and the feeling of accomplishment.

Year Two!

Hello everyone!

My name is Sarah Woolf and I am End Poverty Now’s intern in Butare, Rwanda, working with RVCP, for summer 2009. I have been in Rwanda for a little over three weeks now, and am excited by the work that lies ahead in the next couple months.

I’d like to thank Alyx for the excellent work she did last year, and for all the help she’s given me in my transition into this job!

 

My job this year, while still working with the lovely women of the Rwandan Widows’ Association, will be quite different from the work Alyx did last year. As the past blog posts have indicated, last year involved a lot of on-the-ground work: buying materials, training the women, building houses, etc. The project has now been up and running for over a year now, and there is little for me to do in the way of manual labour—shucks! I hope to go to the beekeeping site (outside Nyakagezi village) at least once a week, usually on Saturdays when the women work there, and maybe there will be more opportunities with the upcoming harvest. My main task on this project is to develop a sound business plan. I’ve met with Jean-Claude, the Co-Ordinator of RVCP (taking over from Hovaire), and I outlined the order I would like to do things in:

1. Collect all of RVCP’s information on the project. This will be easier said than done, as organization and accessible information are not exactly RVCP’s strong suits. I want to read up on this project, and on other beekeeping cooperatives in the area, as much as possible before I…
2. Design an evaluation. There are two other International Participants at RVCP, one of whom has a wealth of experience in monitoring and baseline evaluations. With her help, I’ll design an evaluation of the project so far; hopefully this evaluation can be used as a template for some of the other Income Generation projects currently running at RVCP.
3. Administer the evaluation.
4. Business Plan. As a microfinance project, the point is for the women (RWA) to be autonomous, running a sustainable project—independent of EPN’s money—as soon as possible. It is not in the best interest of RWA, EPN or RVCP, for the project to be on EPN’s dime longer than necessary. As such, my goal is to construct a long-term business plan, researching new markets for the honey and accounting for ways in which RWA will need to reinvest their own profits in order to eventually expand their capacity (which seems to be their desire).
5. Co-operative management training. Part of EPN’s budget stipulates an amount for training the women of RWA in “skill-building capacity such as leadership training, project management”. I will be working with Sam, project head of Income Generation (Mushuru’s successor).

 

In the meantime, I will be keeping busy helping RVCP with other projects:

1. Management training for RVCP. One thing I am particularly interested in is organizational effectiveness and internal processes—as it stands, RVCP is very centralized, unorganized, and laden with hierarchies. Many of the International Participants (IPs), past and present, believe that much more could be done if the newer members, of which there are many, were actually allowed to do stuff. I’m currently planning a management training workshop, mostly on effective delegation, for the program heads, plus Jean-Claude and Vincent, the vice coordinator.
2. Pyramid Project: one of the other six projects (Income Generation, Pyramid, Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Hygiene, Initiatives), this deals with the intersection between gender and HIV/AIDS. I can’t say I know that much about HIV/AIDS, but gender studies (well, feminist theory) is my “specialty”, so I really look forward to working on this—I gather it is a project that doesn’t get as much support as is required. Right now I’m working on designing/writing the English teaching manual for Sex Ed sessions taught in local secondary schools by RVCP members. This is going to be an interesting endeavour, largely because, as a Canadian and a Women’s Studies students, I have very particular ideals about ‘gender empowerment’ (a buzzword in the Kagame government). It will be a challenge to work with Rwandan values and heteronormativity; the program will also be tailored to the limited sex education received in Rwandan schools. I will hopefully also take part in these teaching sessions, but I think the British volunteer group BVDA, who will be working with RVCP here in July, will be doing a lot of this. I’m also interested to see what Pyramid might be able to do, aside from these teaching sessions.
3. Income Generation: the bee-keeping project is the most successful of all the IG projects, and I hope that through its evaluation, more lessons can be learned to benefit the other projects; again, hopefully the evaluation can be used as a template for future assessments of IG projects,
4. Organizational status: Both the bee-keeping project and RVCP are undergoing organizational changes. For the RWA, this means the transition into a government-recognized cooperative; for RVCP, the transition from student group to government-recognized NGO. I’m interested in both these endeavours (which seem to be kind of stalled) and might be able to help push them along.
5. LLCCM: One of the main initiatives of RVCP is support for the LLCCM orphan center (“Let the Little Children Come to Me”). I’ve now visited twice, and am quite interested in helping there, whenever possible. Unfortunately for me, the children visit the center on Saturday mornings, when I’m at the beekeeping site. However, Lindsey, one of the IPs is working on a nutrition program, and we recently conducted interviews with some of the foster mothers; this looks promising.

 

Additionally, I’ll of course be in regular contact with EPN, writing blog posts and an article for the newsletter to keep everyone in Montreal and Canada updated on progress—more pictures to come soon! I’m very excited and happy to be here, and look forward to the coming months. Now, off to the weekly RVCP general meeting!

Busy Bees

Hello to everybody! I am sorry for the delay in updates, but here is what is going on at the project as of late.

It has been a very busy few weeks with the busiest week to come. We are nearing the end of the second installment and are in the midst of making budget preparations for the third installment. The second and third houses are finished and are full of traditional hives which will be transferred into the modern hives next week.

Ok. Well maybe finished is an overstatement. This seems to be the ongoing joke of the year in RVCP since it appears that the houses will never be fully finished. For example, when we finished the first house we were told by the trainer we would have to build three houses total. Then, when we finally finished the second and third houses Hovaire (the national coordinator of RVCP) visited a bee keeping site and realized that we would have to put either mud or metal around the houses to protect them from thieves or vandalism. Even though there is one man, Emmanuel, who has been permitted into the Widowers Association as a guard to watch the houses he is not capable of seeing the houses perfectly, especially at night. This is the way it goes I suppose. Now we are getting ready to start preparing the houses with mud or metal for protection and we will see what new challenge comes up once we are done with that!! Either way though the houses look great (with the exception of a little erosion happening with the soil surrounding the houses due to the extended rainy season) and what is important is that the hives will soon be in the houses and bees will be fleeting about pollinating flowers and inadvertently helping create income for this widows association.

So, despite the houses not being quite finished, we will be getting hives soon. However, to do this a trainer will be brought in to help the women with the transition as well as hold another information session about how to care for the new hives with the women. Everybody is excited about the arrival of the modern hives as this will mean the production of honey and a really great start to the creation of honey.

Over the next few days Mushuru(the head of the income generation mico-project in RVCP) and I will be going to Kigali to buy some more needed bee materials, meet with the trainer and learn how bee hives are made. This should be some really exciting and valuable information that we can pass onto the women.

Over the next few weeks I will be doing some profiling with the women to learn more about them and their lives. They are such phenomenal and inspirational women I hope that you will read their stories with as much interest as I do. One interesting thing about this group is that some of the women have had their husbands imprisoned for committing acts of genocide, and others have lost their husbands to the genocide. This certainly makes the dynamics of the group very unique since some women may be working next to women whose husbands killed their husbands. However, this is one of the endeavors of this project, is to unite all the women, no matter what their background or social situation, to create friendships and bonds and be there to support each other. Everyday there are new laughs to share with the women and new things to learn from them. They are truly inspirational to be working with, and maybe I will just have to take one of them up on their offer to marry one of their sons.

On another note, we are also going to be creating the sign for End Poverty Now to put out in front of the project. If anybody has any good ideas of what to do for the sign to give it a creative spin feel free to leave a comment and let me know!! Rwanda is certainly into formalities, but right now we are thinking about making a sign with a bee in the corner or something along these lines. But, certainly the floor is open for discussion.

Updates on how the honey making is going to come soon. I also apologize for the lack of photos. It is quite difficult to upload pictures with such a lack of internet connection here, but I will continue to try and get some pictures your way!

Murakoze

Due to some techinical difficulties this blog is going up quite a few days late... so, the timing is just a little bit off.

Yesterday I went to the project for the first time. It is in such a wonderful and beautiful place. One might say an enchanted forest (which looks spookily similar to the temperate costal rainforest of BC) in the middle of hills which stretch on seemingly forever.

This blog posting will account for what all we did on this first day at the poject, how it is going, what it looks like... but I must also recount for you two legends. These are almost irrelevant, and will not provide any factual information about the project. However, I think it is important to also be adding important aspects of the Rwandan culture to this blog, so that you, the reader, may also partake in my experiences of learning about the wonders of this culture.

The first legend was being joked about by the women while they were hoeing today. Mushuru, the RVCP coordinator of this project begged me not to write down this story, but I told him I must. So Mushuru, if you read this, I am sorry.

There is an old Rwandan myth that men used to enforce in the olden day about the making of honey. Men, to protect their monopoly on beekeeping from women, used to say that if women were beekeepers then the bees would run away from the women and leave their hives. This made it so women were not allowed to do any bee-keeping, and kept them away from being able to make any income in this way. I guess what I liked most about the fact that the women were continuing with this project (despite the existence of this legend) is that it shows even more empowerment to these widows then would be percieved from the naked eye. It just made me really happy that these women were so excited to work so hard for a project that is traditionally only for men.

The second legend is one about the mountain, nagachecheru, where the project is. The houses for the hives are very very high up. In fact, it is like being near the top of the Nagachecheru mountain which is just outside of the Muhonguey, well, you can at least see the top...

This legend makes the storyteller in me very happy...

There once was a women who lived on the top of the Nagachecheru mountain. She was very well of, and controled the mountain. You could even say she was the queen of this mountain. One day, the King decided that he wanted to have control of Nagachecheru mountain, so he sent all of his soldiers to attack the woman and take her mountain for his own. However, this woman was also great with magic. She trained a magical snake to protect her and attack the king's soldiers. So, when the soldiers went to attack the mountain the woman sent down her magical snake who ate all the king's soldiers.

Disappointed about his loss, the King tried to think of a plan of what to do so that he could get revenge on the woman. He sent her many many goats, presenting them as a peace offering. However, the goats began eating the forest. And as the forest was being eaten, the snake followed the forest. Then without the protection of her magical snake the woman the King was easily able to attack and take her mountain.

Now the forest, the forest where the houses for the bee keeping project are being build, is said to be an artificial forest.

The project is going extremely well. The women were so wonderful to greet and work with. There is already one house built, and the second house was given it's metal roof today. The big project the women worked on today was hoeing the land for the third house to make it even. This ended up being a phenomenal bonding experience, at least for me, as we hoed all together. I learned some new Kinrwanda words as we gusiza (flattened the land), worked around a mighty deep rooted tree in the middle of the land, eventually pushed it over and then down the hill to screams of joy and dancing. I'm sure clearning some land was nothing interesting for these women who have done this for their entire lives, but for me it was such a wonderful experience to get to do some good old fashioned manual labour and then get to admire the work when it was done. Even the blisters are worth it!

The second instalment should be coming in through so we will be adding the metal roofs and then building the next house next week. The women only come to the project twice a week because, of course, they are also heads of households and have to go and take care of their many many children. I spoke more with two of the women on the walk home today, both were 35 and had three to four children each. Many of the women looked between 25-40, but I have a very hard time being able to tell in Africa. There was one women who did not look much older than maybe between 21 and 23. I can't imagine being a 23 year old with not only children but also no husband. I don't know how many of the women have babies, but there was only one (extremely) cute baby at the project, who slept soundly on his mothers back while she hoed.

The hives will be coming in hopefully some time by the end of the month. All the women are extremely excited and came to the project wearing their fancy bee protecting hats, even though there were no bees to be protected from at this point. Their greetings were extremely warm and welcoming. It's hard to tell if it's the Canadians who are more excited about this project or these women. They kept saying marakoze! marakoze! (Thank you! Thank you!) to which I would respond with Hoya (no)! Marakoze! Marakoze! Everyone is so excited, you can really tell how much effort and hope is being put into this project, and I definitely think it will succeed. It makes me feel very

honored and slightly guilty to be the representative of End Poverty Now because there are so many compliments people are making, and I get to be the one hearing them all first hand. Nevertheless, I am very excited to be showing this project to you from so far away.

Nothing Starts Small...

Amekuru – or as we might say in Canada, “how are you?”

The project is full ahead, and things seem to be going very well. The Rwanda Village Concept Project (RVCP) team is a group of fantastic medical students who are extremely dedicated to their projects. Rwanda itself is more wonderful then one could imagine; with large hills of green and forests greener then those in British Columbia, if that is possile!

As of now I have not yet gone to the project but I will be going this Thursday and will have another report to issue then. However, I can give a basic outline of how the project is going, some challenges that are arising and the goals for the project.

The project was started in about February with the first installment coming in. Since then the women have been trained in how to keep and care for the bee hives, as well as how to extract the honey – although without any machinery, so they will have to be quickly retrained at some point when the money for the honey extractor comes in. However, as far as I can tell they are all excited about the project. They have built one of the houses to protect the hives already, and today we bought metal sheets to make the roofs for the other two houses.

This was one of the early unforeseen problems the project ran into. The budget was made out to build only 1 house, but the honey expert explained that for the amount of hives they wished to have (30 in total) they would need 3 houses. So the budget quickly ran out, and now they have to build the other two. Unfortunately, today when we went to buy the other sheets of metal we found out that with the common price influxes in Rwanda the price has gone up from 5600RFr (about 11US$ a sheet) to 7000RFr (about 12.75$)! This is a huge difference to the budgeted price, but alas, these things happen. We were lucky enough to convince the seller to mark the price down to 6900RFr for us, but that was the best offer he could give.

Nevertheless, on Thursday we will bring these sheets to the project and begin the fun process of building the next two houses!! Then the exciting things happen and we get to buy the actual hives! Through various complicated miscommunications with too many people I have gotten confused as to whether the hives have to be in by the end of May or the season is over, or whether they have to be in at the beginning of May because that is when the rainy season ends. Either way, the point is to get those hives in by the end of May, and then let them go about their business while the women learn to keep for the bees and process the honey.

One thing I didn’t understand about the project, but go figure, of course I should have guessed, is that I don’t have to go to the project every day. Upon asking why to Hovaire, the director of RVCP he told me matter-of-factly that these women (who are all widows) are the heads of households. So they can only make it to the project once or twice a week and the other days they must care for their families. Of course!! How could I make this mistake?

This just reminded me of how important this project is. These women really have no time to do any kind of income generation of their own because they have children to feed, bathe, a house to care for, water to carry. The list goes on and on. I am really happy that this project will provide something where the women only really have to be on site once or twice a week to make the honey and the other days they can just let the bees go about their business – so to speak.

I wish I could tell you more about the project, but as for now I just don’t know much more hands on things. I can report that things are happening – with a few setbacks, as is to be expected, but nothing too major. The project coordinator Mushuru and I have really hit it off, as well as Hovaire and both of them are very excited about this project also.

For now I will leave you like this – but I will leave you also with some food for thought. Hovaire had the idea of maybe selling the honey in Canada eventually, to increase the income generation of the women. I don’t know how plausible this is, whether they would be making or losing money, or even where to sell the honey. I told Hovaire this would be more of a project for people back in Canada, and maybe when I come home at the end of the summer I will look into it. Nevertheless, I place the seed of this idea in your heads so that maybe if you have suggestions, experience in this area, connections or resources to provide – or even might want to take on this project yourself – that you can help this idea to grow into something wonderful!