Kwibuka

Visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali today. It’s the 5^th time I’ve visited, and it is as hard to visit as ever. 

Reading the narrative, the background and the personal stories; seeing the photos, the videos and the artefacts; sitting in a room that has hundreds of photos of individuals who were brutally murdered, or that has glass cabinets full of skulls and bones representing some of the thousands who were killed – it hits you hard, and rightly so. This sort of visit should never be easy. As soon as it becomes that for me, I am a lesser person, and those who died stop being honoured.

But the bit I find hardest from visiting this memorial museum, and it’s a key reflection that stayed with me after the visit to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem as well, is the sadness that humanity seems incapable of learning from the past. 

Why is it that we can all recognise how awful something like the Rwandan genocide was, and yet still countries around the world are carrying out their own versions of it, to greater or lesser extents?

Why is that we can all see just how terrible the outcome can be when one group regards ‘the other’ as anything less than equal, and yet society continues to categorise, to compare and to contrast.

Whether the divisions are based on ethnicity, class, academic achievement, gender, political beliefs, religion, size of feet, colour of hair….. As long as those divisions are allowed to split societies up, then we are all guilty of creating a world where suspicion, mistrust and misuse of power play too high a part.

Oftentimes we label people without even thinking about it, and many times those labels are totally innocuous and don’t have any influence over how we interact with others. But as soon as those labels stop being harmless and start leading to comparative perspectives – that’s the start of a slippery slope that we all need to be aware of.

Outside the Genocide Memorial Museum is a large free-standing sculpture of the word ‘kwibuka’. It means ‘remember’ in Kinyarwandan and is a plea for all to remember the genocide and to learn from it. Long may the remembering, the learning and de-othering take place that little by little our world will become more tolerant, more inclusive, and more willing to celebrate the diversity that makes up humanity.

Ghetto Research Lab - turning waste into gold, and more!

Compost toilets, fish-farming linked to aquaponically grown plants, buildings made from plastic bottles, pavers made from recycled plastic bags, vegetables grown in sacks, and a team of young people all willing to sift through the rubbish of others to achieve all this, as they very much see ‘one person’s rubbish as another person’s gold’.

Today I had the joy of visiting the highly inspirational ‘Ghetto Research Laboratory’, which has been set up by social entrepreneur cum climate change warrior Ticha, in the ghetto area on Kamwokya in Kampala, home to 20,000 people living in various levels of poverty. 

Ticha is in his late 20’s and on graduating from university as a history teacher he failed to get a job so moved back home with his family in Kamwokya. Looking for something to fill his days, he was really bothered by the amount of waste and disease in the community as well as high levels of crime due to a generation of young people who felt ignored, hopeless and trapped into a cycle of poverty.

Ticha was compelled to do something about all these things – to find ways to reduce the waste, create employment, build self-esteem, and engage with the young people. And so the Ghetto Research Lab (GRL) was born.

Today, as he and two of his colleagues showed myself and John round, we got to hear more about the impact that all the projects are making. Women who are now earning enough to put their children through school, thanks to their jobs creating eco-bricks by stuffing plastic waste into plastic bottles. Lads who were living lives of petty crime now building homes and toilet blocks with the eco-bricks. Groups of 500 people who used to have no community toilet anywhere near, so were succumbing to ‘flying toilets’ rather than walking long distances, now able to access good quality toilets nearby. Young people who are learning how to grow vegetables in sacks, and how to farm fish, and the science behind aquaponics and how that can link with recycling the water for the fish tanks. 

We saw a compost loo and the different stages of processing the waste through to getting really top quality compost to help with growing the veg. We saw the pavers that are made from thousands of bits of waste plastic which they melt and mould. We visited all the different aspects of their urban farming. We went inside the house and the toilet block each of which is constructed using about 25,000 eco-bricks each (that is 25,000 bottles not going into landfill or the water systems per building). It was just so inspiring. I came away with so much to think about.

In these days with so much talk about climate change, and moving away from single-use plastic, this was a beautiful project to behold. Set in the heart of an urban slum, with no guaranteed income except for the bits and bobs of money they make through doing jobs for others, or welcoming a local school who want to educate their children – these are a team of people who are pursuing their goal of improving their local environment and community.

The local people are watching and learning and putting the lessons into practice. The wider community is slowly finding out about what is going on. The young people are starting to have a positive purpose and believe in themselves. There is so much here that others can learn, so many examples of how to start with what you have and just get going. 

Yes we are at the stage where we need governments to make big differences as well, but today Ticha and co reminded me that its also about communities coming together and making small but meaningful differences, as we all take on our share of the responsibility to improve this beautiful but fragile world in which we live.

Rain, rain and more rain

It rained last night – a lot, and for a long time.

I think the bullfrogs knew what was coming – I’ve never known them so loud out here – and therefore maybe the locals, on hearing the bullfrog chorus, also knew what to expect. 

But even so, it rained long and it rained hard. And as I lay awake listening to the rain drumming down, my mind wandered to the various conversations that have occurred about rain these past few weeks that I’ve been in Uganda.

-       -  The rains are crazy

-       -  Too much rain

-       - Rains are at the wrong times

-       -  How do we know when it is the right rains for planting our seeds

-        - I’ve lost my bean harvest because it rained for too much

-        - Now is the time to plant beans, but the rains this year are too many

-        - The rains are all wrong because the priests didn’t sacrifice enough cows

-        - Why are the rains so wrong in Uganda

-        - We have to put out extra buckets at night as the holes in the roof are bigger and the rains are more

And so it goes on.

I know we need rain – it’s what keeps the world alive.

And I know sometimes it has to rain long and hard. And the Ugandans know that as well. But over the generations they have settled into a farming cycle that works with the normal pattern of rainy seasons and dry seasons, and what they are noticing, is that that pattern is no longer normal. Gone are the days when they can predict when to plant, and as a result vital foods and vital income is being lost.

It’s the same in many other countries and is a massive conundrum that farmers the world over are having to deal with as a result of climate change. But here in Uganda, where their footprint on the world is actually very small, and where the contribution they have made to climate change is pretty minimal – here the farmers are really struggling.

Yes I knew all this before, none of it is really new to me. Climate change is a daily news item and I fully believe in it – there’s no ‘fake news’ element in it as far as I’m concerned. But when you lie in bed, thinking of all the people you’ve met over the past few days, and the sense of despair that they will be having in the pit of their stomach as they listen to the rain pouring down again – washing the seeds away, coming in through cracks in the walls or holes in the roof – well I guess it brings it all much closer.

My response – what are the extra steps I can take, to reduce my footprint on the world?What more can I do, to try and reduce my carbon emissions and slow down the effects of climate change?

By the way, the irony of saying that whilst sitting in a country where I have had to fly here and back is not lost on me don’t worry – yes I do carbon offset, and am exploring ways to do that even more effectively.