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It is Sunday.
Alphonse warned me that he would not be available during the morning. He would be at Mass, and afterwards he had a few friends to see.
So I have the whole morning to myself.
I decide to use the time to write a little and to take stock of what I have learned over the past few days.
The house where I am staying used to belong to Father Bourguet, a Belgian missionary who arrived in Rwanda in the 1960s.
He died almost four years ago now, in December 2000.
Quite a character, this priest.
He came to settle in Nyakabanda after his break with his bishop had become final. The bishop did not appreciate the priest’s strong social engagement. It risked, he said, leading him away from his spiritual mission.
So Father Bourguet settled on the hill of Nyakabanda.
That must have been in the mid-1960s.
There he founded CARA — the Centre for Rural and Artisan Development.
The aim of the centre was to train young people from the countryside in different trades: carpentry, masonry, sewing, cooking…
At the beginning of the 1970s, a drinking water system was built by an NGO in a nearby village called Gasovu.
The priest sent his most talented students to work with the NGO and try to understand how the system functioned.
Then he asked them to build a second water supply system — but this time on their own.
The project was a success.
Soon a third village came asking them to do the same.
This was 1972.
The initiative gradually grew throughout the 1970s.
Eventually the Rwandan state began to take an interest in the experiment.
Thus, at the beginning of the 1980s, COFORWA was officially created: Compagnons Fontainiers du Rwanda — the Rwandan Water Technicians Association — an organization responsible for developing rural drinking water systems throughout the country.
Towards the end of his life, Father Bourguet slowly withdrew from COFORWA.
His child had grown up and was ready to stand on its own.
Which it did.
The priest himself decided to devote his time once again to CARA, the organization that had originally given birth to COFORWA.
At that time CARA was renamed CARA YAGUINE.
Yaguine was the name of a young Guinean boy who died in the cargo hold of an airplane while trying to reach Europe clandestinely. In his pocket was found a letter addressed to European leaders asking them to help African children gain access to education.
During the events of 1994, Father Bourguet was forced to flee.
But he was one of the first — perhaps even the very first — to return.
He then walked through the countryside, trying to find news of the peasants who had been his friends.
The morning passes.
Alphonse does not appear.
I rummage through old papers lying on the shelves.
There are many religious pamphlets — hardly surprising in a priest’s house.
But there are also a few technical journals.
The priest must have had to educate himself before he could train the young people of the region.
A small booklet of a few pages catches my attention.
It seems to have been written by a Rwandan agronomist from the Nyakabanda district.
It is the title that intrigues me.
“On Our Thousand Hills — Are We Going to Die of Hunger?”
The author sounds the alarm.
Rwanda’s population is growing at an alarming rate.
At the beginning of the 1950s it was barely two million people.
By 1975 it had reached four million — a doubling in twenty-five years.
The next doubling took only sixteen years, with the population reaching eight million by 1991.
Yet Rwanda is a small country.
And a very mountainous one at that, which reduces the amount of usable land even further.
As a result, Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa — nearly ten times the population density of a country like Morocco.
The question posed is therefore simple:
Will Rwanda be able to feed its children in the years to come?
The author suggests several solutions.
The first is obviously limiting births.
But in a country like Rwanda, modern contraception remains largely unrealistic.
The only feasible solution, according to the author, is natural contraception, based on the natural cycles of women.
This would require an extensive campaign of education and awareness.
The second solution involves making better use of the resources available.
To support his argument, the author refers to a study conducted by a Belgian researcher from the University of Namur in 1990-1991:
“Integration of Cattle Breeding into the Intensification of Agricultural Production — The Case of Rwanda.”
The study was carried out in the Nyakabanda region.
It describes an experiment conducted on these hills beginning in the 1970s.
The mayor of the time, worried about growing overpopulation, gathered the villagers and addressed them with these words:
“You have far less land than your parents had.
But you still have some.
Your children, however, will have none.”
Then he turned to one man:
“Mugabo, how many sons do you have?
Show me the kibanza — the plot of land — and the fields you will give them.”
The villagers admitted their fears.
“We wonder how they will manage.”
The mayor then proposed new agricultural methods.
Agriculture and livestock farming needed to be combined.
Organic fertilizers produced by cattle should be developed — cheaper than the chemical fertilizers promoted by certain NGOs.
Rwandans, he said, could feed themselves — provided that everyone worked together.
Everyone agreed.
But the problem remained: it was not fifty farmers who needed to be trained.
Not even five hundred.
It was five thousand.
So how could this be done?
The mayor proposed a simple solution:
Train 50 people, who would each train 50 more, and so on.
Thanks to these new farming methods and this remarkable rural organization, agriculture and livestock farming developed significantly on the hills of Nyakabanda over the next twenty years.
So much so that the experience later served as the basis for a university study in the early 1990s.
When I close the booklet, I notice the publication date:
1992.
On the first page appears a proverb in Kinyarwanda:
“Imana yilirwa ahandi igataha i Rwanda.”
Which means:
“God spends the day elsewhere, but every evening he returns home to Rwanda.”
I cannot help thinking that one evening, apparently, he forgot to come back.
I wonder whether the man whose name appears on the booklet is really its author.
I wonder who whispered these words of wisdom to the mayor in the 1970s.
And I wonder whether the tragedy Rwanda experienced ten years ago might not be a foretaste of what humanity itself may face one day.
One sad conclusion remains:
Some people managed to exploit what was originally a virtue — a methodical organization — for destructive purposes.
In Rwanda, as in Germany.
I look at the photograph placed on the fireplace in front of me.
I silently question Father Bourguet.
But he does not answer.
Evening comes.
I have spent the whole day reading and thinking.
Alphonse, busy elsewhere, only appears briefly to tell me about the plans for the next day.
Goretty calls me.
Dinner is ready.
Night falls.
I light a candle and look at the feast laid out on the oilcloth table.
It seems that Goretty has decided to fatten me up.
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