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!