Small stories from a big world

  Saturday afternoon. I have just come home from the fruit and vegetable shop. Two heavy shopping bags are strapped to my scooter. I untie the stretchers and drag them one by one to the front door. I unlock the door and kick off my shoes. Whew, now to carry the bags to the kitchen. I walk through the living room and see that Staf the Giraffe has fallen over. Staf is a South African giraffe made of iron wire and beads. Three of those giraffes stand in a row. Staf is the smallest and sometimes a bit unstable. He sometimes falls over when I bump into him. My brain registers it as I walk past it. Staff is on the floor. But he wasn't on the floor when I left. Did I bump into him on my way out? I enter the kitchen. There are two objects on the floor there. The first is a dish of cockroach poison that is otherwise neatly shoved under a rack. It now lies a meter from that spot. There is also a crocheted coaster on the floor. This one is normally lying on my coffee table, in the living ...

"Guess, what I found in Go Green?", is my message to a Belgian colleague in Rwanda. Attached is a picture, the one you see above. Go Green is the shop where I buy almost all my fruits and vegetables. When I was recently here, I just went to the market, as I did in Vietnam. But that didn't last long. The market near here is small and a bit dirty. The produce is often not so good quality either. So I went to Kimironko market. A very big market, which tourists also like to visit. I was a bit overwhelmed there. My bag almost snatched from my hand by someone who wanted to help me carry. Others following close. Since I had no idea of prevailing prices, I couldn't haggle properly, had the feeling I was cheated. On the way home, I thought: not again. Supermarkets are not really an alternative. Most supermarkets here have a very limited fresh food section. Tomatoes, onions, potatoes, papayas and bananas. But not much else. Go Green, then. Nice and easy: not so far, ever...

It is actually far too late when I step out of the door. Another busy day behind me. In the car park, only my bike is left. The night watchman opens the gate for me and I toil up the steep slope. It is dark, but not quite yet. The clouds contrast darkly with the rest of the sky. When I reach the main road, I hear the sound. A loud twittering, croaking. It's hard to describe, but I know what's going on. Time to get off my bike and look up in the safety of the pavement. The sky is dotted with dark, flying animals. They look like birds, but they are not. Bats. There is a large colony African fruit bats that houses in the trees a little further up. If you step past you can smell them. There must be a lot of dung under those trees. During the day they hang quietly down a branch, taking a nap. Well, quiet is not the right word either. There is actually constant movement in that big hanging animal pile. There's always one stretching its wings, not content with its spot under the...

  It is dry here, very dry. It hasn't rained since May. That's normal. If all goes well, the rainy season will start again in September. The grass around my house is barren. The plants in the garden are covered with a layer of sand. I live at a dirt road. Apparently there is a system here in Kigali that works as follows: if residents of a street – not a major traffic artery of course - are willing to invest a substantial amount themselves, the municipality will supplement the cost and pave the street. But that has not happened here as yet. A dirt road, that generates dust, especially in the dry season. An unpaved road is preferable to a bad asphalt road, at least if it is maintained from time to time. A road grader, with some kind of scraper attachment, then repairs the road surface. Moving back and forth across the road the grader removes washboard ridges, potholes and other irregularities. But when a car drives on it, it is automatically followed by a cloud of dust. M...

I have wanted to grow my own papayas for a long time. I undertook several attempts. First, I planted some seeds from a fruit I just ate. No success. Even though I literally looked the plants out of the ground, the seeds remained hidden in the topsoil. A little later, I saw plants germinating on my compost heap. I carefully scooped them out of the heap and planted them neatly in a pot. They didn't like that. They died one after the other. Not a success either. The plan went on ice for a while. Until a few months ago, when I decided to use my compost to enrich the soil in my vegetable garden. A week later, every inch of free space had been taken up by little germinating plants unknown to me. The insight came when those first baby leaves gave way to the more recognisable leaves. Papayas, papayas everywhere. They came as if grass had been sown. So, I weeded and left one here and there to grow big and strong. I transplanted those young plants, about 20 cm high, into the soil, between ...

  Anyone who has ever lived in the sub-tropics or tropics knows them: termites. Small, industrious creatures with shiny heads and pale bodies. They are often mistaken for ants, but they are not even related to those. They make beautiful castles of sand and earth, where the colony -in an ingeniously created microclimate- works and lives in an intricate society. But they are not only found in those beautiful termite mounds. I have a small vegetable garden. There, I grow tomatoes, which are tied up on canes. Those canes get shorter and shorter. Because they get eaten at the bottom, the part that sits into the earth. Hungry termites in action. In big concrete boxes, I also have strawberries, or at least, I try to grow strawberries there. But there are many competitors around. Snails love the unripe fruit. After they have made their move, fruit flies finish their work. Then, when a fruit does escape those predators and shines red between the green leaves, a mouse bird will come an...

(Visual graphic from https://www.kwibuka.rw/)   Good Friday is a day of silence for Christians worldwide, the day when the death of Christ is remembered. This year, Good Friday was on 7 April. Here in Rwanda, 7 April is a day etched in the collective memory. It is the day of the start of the genocide against the Tutsi, 29 years ago now. In 1994 a ruthless massacre took place. The immediate trigger was the shooting down of the plane in which the then president was returning from peace talks. The plane's debris landed in the garden of the presidential villa. However, the cause was much more complex and had its roots in years of abuses, attacks, discrimination, exile, bad governance both before and after the colonial period. On 8 April, 10 Belgian paratroopers were killed. Belgium decided to withdraw its troops from the peacekeeping force that was already here, making the UN peacekeeping mission even more flimsy than before. It opened the door to an unprecedented and very wel...