Today we awoke to unusually cloudy skies but very warm and humid. We walked up to the Compassion project at St Matthews, everywhere was very quiet because today was Umuganda, the community service which everyone participates in on the last Saturday of the month from the president down. Here all the children in the area from Compassion meet. There were nearly 200 children all with a sponsor in the West. They started off with a nutritious meal of the now familiar porridge then Judy showed them one of her stories which is based on Godly Play a very pictorial and reflective way of telling a story designed to make you think. It was the story of creation from Genesis. The children were very attentive and asked very intelligent questions. The they went off to their classes to have health screening and to participate in Umuganda like everybody else in the community.
Mary and Judy helping distribute the porridge
Judy presenting the Godly play
Some of the Compassion children
As we walked back the roads slowly got back to normal as their community work finished we went back to the guest house for a bowel of soup; then Basile, Rob's local water engineer, brought his car and GPS. We went up the road to the forest turning left onto the road that takes you up past Nyamasheke to a Methodist hospital and church by lake Kivu at a place called Kibogora.. Before we could begin work we were treated to a large African buffet by the pastors which took an hour of our precious daylight time. Rob had already surveyed the site and given the data to a graduate student to do an hydrolic study to relieve the flooding problem. However we needed to check it out on the ground and we encountered many changes causing problems as we trekked over the site. The main one being that new houses had been built on potential flood relief ponds and outlets so the only solution was to provide storm tanks that had to be kept empty so that they would fill with a downpour that could then be released slowly into the drainage system. However this proposal was greet with the same enthusiasm by the pastors as an aviator being offered a concrete parachute. It was totally alien to them to spend money on big tanks which could be filled to hold precious rain water for the community used just for flood prevention. So the need for flood relief was hastily reduced to a larger open culvert and the tanks being used for rainwater harvesting. So home we rapidly went as night descended. Strangely we were listening to the English football results, by courtisy of the BBC world service on the car radio.
The view of lake at Kibagora
Rob looking for a possible outfall for the water run off
Rob and Peter discussing the project with the pastors.
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