Friends from afar - Closing of the Rwanda Project 2019

We were told that the people living in the village of Gibobo in the valley in Kibara Cell in Gikomero Sector are particularly isolated.  There is no electricity and no running water.   Internet access is only available, intermittently ,  in certain spots closer to the main road at the top of the valley.   Even radio reception is cut off at the bottom of the valley.  People walk for hours to get their mobile phone charged.  When someone is sick and their mobile phone cannot be connected, they cannot even ask for help.   There are clinics near the main road, but not in the valley.   

In two weeks, we set up 5 solar electrical charging stations, and wired up 150 houses for electricity - for lighting, charging of mobile phones and radios.  We helped the villagers set up 50 small vegetable gardens.  We built 100+ purpose-designed stoves to improve fuel efficiency. We have pretty much covered the whole village of Kibobo in the valley in Kibara Cell. 

At the end, the villagers and the local sector government decided to send us off with a closing ceremony.  There were easily 200+ people there, with a lot of singing and dancing before the short speeches.  The music was heavily rhythmic rather than melodic, and easy to join in, creating a very festive atmosphere.  

One of the special gifts that they gave us and AEE is a big clump of cassava roots.  It is part of the harvest produced from fields that were planted last year. It is given us to symbolise the produce they hope to present to us from the kitchen gardens planted this year.  They also gave us traditional baskets weaved with fibres from grass, tea and coffee.  

The village representative and the local government officer thanked us for the electricity, the improved stoves, and vegetable gardens.  They also mentioned skills and hope that associate with the projects. 

In response, I said to the gathering:

“We bring you greetings from Hong Kong, thousands of kilometres away.  We have to fly in an airplane for 16 hours to get here.  

Thank you for your generosity.  My eldest daughter got married in April.  As a wedding gift,  my wife and I gave her a basket I bought in Rwanda.  Just like those that you gave us today.

When we came here to this valley several years ago, we came down this road over there.  When we saw the green fields, with bananas and other plants, the blue sky, the white clouds and the little stream, we thought to ourselves that we could live here.  

But when we realized that there was no electricity, and no Internet, we thought we could not live here.  At least not until there is electricity.  That is partly why we have worked so hard in the past 5 years to bring electricity to Gikomero.  

While we are working here with you, we are also learning a lot from you.  For us city people it is very hard to walk up and down these steep slopes on both sides of the valley.  Yet you, even the little kids, have no trouble running up and down. We admire you.  

This morning, when we visited a family up the rim of the valley, they were drying fresh peanuts under the sun.  They gave us a bunch of peanuts, fresh from the ground.  I cracked the shells and ate the peanuts directly from the shell.  This kind of experience is very hard to find in cities like Hong Kong.  

We are learning from you how to live in harmony with nature. 

We are going home soon.  But we will remember you.  We hope that you will also remember us.”

Every word came from my heart.  

3-Stone Stoves

When we go camping in the old days, we brought rice, set up the most primitive 3-stone stove and cook rice for food.  Now most people bring their own small but efficient stoves that use natural gas. It is quite shocking to see that most of the hundreds of families in Gikomero Sector in Gazabo District in Kigali City in Rwanda that we have visited are still cooking with primitive 3-stone stoves.

These cannot concentrate the heat in a confined space, cannot reach a very high temperature uniformly, lose a lot of heat, waste a lot of precious energy, take a long time to cook, and generate a lot of polluting and harmful smoke.  

We asked our professors in Building Services Engineering to help the villages design better stoves that are inexpensive, use local materials, and are easy to build.  After much experimentation, they decided on a 10-20 brick model, set using dried mud.  All material can be found locally, and are relatively inexpensive or free.  The key challenge is to design an enclosed space for burning with sufficient ventilation.  

When a housewife tried the new stove for the first time, she lit the fire and then went away to do other house chores, as usual.  When she returned to check on the pot, after the usual allotted amount of time, she was surprised to find that the food was already cooked and was in fact, beginning to burn.   She figured she used only half of the usual amount of wood, and yet the food cooked much faster than before.  Overall, the new stoves are twice as efficient as the old 3-stone models.  The villagers seem happy enough. 

The next challenge is the fuel.  Cooking (and construction of houses) use so much wood that essentially all the trees in the area have been chopped down.  It is increasingly difficult to find wood to burn.  The lost of trees also lead to the lost of top soil, …   Now, if only we can find a way to burn dried banana leaves, corn stalks, sorghum stalks, and other farm by-products efficiently, …

Valley village Kibara

Our main site this year is a village in and around a valley in the Kibara Cell, Gikomero Sector, Gazebo District, Kigali City, Republic of Rwanda.  

As we drove down the valley, the truck carrying our equipment and material such as solar panels, batteries, heavy cables, bricks, fawas cantered at roughly 10 degrees.  One slip, and the truck may end up in the bottom of the valley.  

The bus carrying the students cannot drive down the valley, hence we walk for about  2 kilometres to get down to the valley.  Imagine a long, V shaped valley, covered with green fields of banana, cassava, sorghum, corn, …, doted with small adobe houses.  Complete with a small stream tuning the length of the valley.  It is nothing short of idyllic.  Many would love to live there.  

The really soon hits you.  Kids fletch water from the stream.  

Adults and kids alike carry 20 litre, 10 litre, 5 litre jerry cans up the slope to their homes.  If you are lucky, you have a bicycle to help.  You cannot actually ride the bicycle - the paths are too steep and the water too heavy to paddle.  The wheels of the bicycle serve to reduce the friction of the road - you still have to push very hard while keeping the heavy load balanced on the bike.  Most carry the jerry cans on their heads, even the kids.  Try carrying 20 kilograms, or even 10, on your head for 1-2 kilometers.  It will hurt after a couple hundred meters, if not earlier.  How the 10 year old kids do it is a mystery to me.  

This is the water that they use to wash, give the cow to drink, cook, and drink.  Such is idyllic village life. 

In many places in the world such as Hong Kong, the power lines are considered an eyesore, particularly when you are trying to take photographs of the beautiful nature.  Hence there is no such problem.  You can point your camera in any direction and you will get a perfect photograph.  Blue sky, white clouds and green fields, dotted with small adobe houses.  

But no electricity.  How does one survive these days without water and electricity?

Adobe.  It sounds earthly, almost romantic, to live in a house made of mud.  But the realty is much uglier.  Here the mud is not fired into bricks.  It may not even be formed into a rectangular block and dried under the sun.  It may simply be plastered, wet, onto a frame made of raw tree branches, and allowed to dry.  It begins to flake and fall apart as soon as it starts to dry.  

Cassava is one of the staple foods here.  Cassava may conjure up images of sweet tapioca pudding, bubble tea, and other treats.  Here the cassava is eaten raw, often unwashed.  Or dried, pounded into a powder, and baked into a bland, tasteless cake.  

Such is idyllic village life.  In the 21st century.  How is it different from a hundred, two hundreds ago?  Or even much earlier?

Vegetable Gardens in Kibara

From what we can see in the households and the market, the common diet in the villages in Rwanda consists of a lot of potatoes, cassava, plantain, corn, sorghum, bean, …  Inspired by what we have seen elsewhere, one of our teams is working with our partner, AEE, to help the villagers in Kibara plant small vegetable gardens.  

The villagers certainly know a lot more about farming than our students, and even their teachers. AEE, in fact, has already started some experimental vegetable farming projects in the village.  

What we can do, is to work with AEE to give them a little nudge and help with green vegetables which they may not be familiar with.  

Hence we work with AEE to break the ground at appropriate sites, 

give away tools, 

seeds, manure, …  

The tools, in particular, seem well received. However, changing habits and culture is very hard.  Let us see whether the vegetable garden movement takes hold.  

This vegetable garden project is actually only a part of a larger project on nutrition.  The team has conducted surveys of the villagers and found that the children are lagging in many dimensions of development, such as weight, height, ...  Hence sub-projects such as talks on nutrition, vegetable gardens, cooking classes, etc., to help to improve nutrition, particularly with the children.  

Magnificent Hong Kong People

Hong Kong people pulled off another gigantic protest march against the proposed extradition bill.  When the police responded to the first one with violent suppression, when the government insisted that the people simply misunderstood, when the pro-establishment politicians decided to continue to push through the bill brutally through the legislature, when the government insulted all mothers by claiming to be a mother to the citizens and turned out to be an abusive mother, Hong Kong people decided to march again, in greater numbers, with greater determination, to tell them NO.  

At this great moment, we need to step back and take a longer and broader look at what we are doing.  We are not just demanding the withdrawal of the terrible bill.  We are fighting for a better Hong Kong, with justice, freedom and prosperity.  Even if the establishment delays or withdraws the bill, they may come back with a worse one.   They may continue to turn more oppressive in many other areas.   If we win this fight, it is not the end - there will be more.  If we lose this light, it is also not the end - there will be more.  Our persistence is our best hope for a better future. 

I could not participate in this march because I am in Rwanda, with 3 teams of students working on 3 projects: installing solar panels to generate electricity for 150 households, helping the local village people to build cheap, efficient stoves to improve the cooking, and helping them to plant small vegetable gardens to improve their diet.  

Being in Rwanda gives me another perspective to our struggles in Hong Kong.  In 1994 Rwanda went through a horrible genocide.  The depth of suffering went way beyond what we have suffered in Hong Kong.  Yet the people did not despair.  They punished the killers, then proceed to reconcile the belligerents and rebuild the country.  Today the country is still very poor but growing.  The people are poor but hopeful.  The country is clean, physically and in governance.  They may be materially poor but strong in character and spirit. 

I do not wish to play down the problematic governance and oppressive tendencies in Hong Kong.  But Rwanda does teach me that life is long term.  We should not and cannot not give up in the depth of despair.  Nor should we gloat and be complacent at the moment of apparent victory.  All are in the hands of God, and we should continue to do the right things no matter what happens.  

We are all losers to the violence

It is a great loss for Hong Kong when violence erupted at the end of the Great March on Sunday.  A million people made a peaceful, lawful march to show we disagree with the proposed extradition law.  Whether the government changes the law or not, it is a great demonstration that we care, and are willing to speak up.  It is our greatest moment. 

It is hence a great pity that violence distracted and actually totally sidetracked attention, and gave the government the perfect excuse to start beating up, physically and verbally, the opposition.  We lost a great opportunity, because of the misbehaviour of a few. 

Who were the people who turned violent, and why?  Were they hot headed youths who felt there is no hope in peaceful means?  Were they actually provocateurs who intentionally gave the government the excuse to start beating people up?  What is evident is that some of the police seem all too eager to rush in to beat people up, with overwhelming numbers and weapons.  What honour is there to beat up someone smaller than you are, fewer than you are, while you have the overwhelming, deadly power - tear gas, guns, and more?

The government may feel they have no choice but to push the law through.  They may think they now have an excuse to dismiss the opposition as irrational and violent.   But their brutal, oppressive nature is laid bare.  Whatever little respect the people had for the government is now totally lost.  What remains is intensive disgust and even hatred.  Is that the meaning of victory for the establishment - turning the people into the enemy? Is that how a government should govern?  Is that what we want in our government?  

We are all losers. Everyone.  Except the devil.  Check it out.  Whoever is gloating is the devil.  

As for us: How do we get out of this mess?

Because it is the right thing to do

On June 9, I landed in Hong Kong at 3PM, dropped my bags at home around 4PM, met with some church friends at PolyU at 4:40PM, took a bus to go to Victoria Park, arriving at 5:30PM.  

At 6:00 PM, we exited Victoria Park.  

We inched along Great George Street. 

Hennessy Road.

We went past the offices of a pro-establishment newspaper, with big billboards promoting the Extradition Bill. 

Around 8:30PM, we arrived at the corner of Harcourt Road and Cotten Tree Drive.  We tried but couldn’t get to the Central Government Complex.  So we stopped and went home after dinner.

Why did we come out to march?  Not really because we think our action will induce the government to withdraw the Extradition Bill.  It is simply because it is the right thing to do.  It is just not right to see a patently oppressive act and do not voice our objection.  I do not believe in violent action, but we should at least make our position clear peacefully. That is the least that we can do.  

Service-Learning Cambodia

It is early June, I should be in Cambodia, and indeed I am.  In 2010, we took 20 students here, setting up computers and running computer workshops.  

This year, we took 150 students to Cambodia, and another 60 to Vietnam who will join us at the student forum in Phnom Penh on June 8.  100 students from Cambodia and Vietnam are working with our teams.  A team of 22 teachers from Hong Kong, Philippines and Vietnam are on a teacher development course.  A team of 6 student story tellers from PolyU and Brown U are reporting on the projects.  All together we have ~400 people involved in what we call the Cambodia Summer School on Service-Learning and Leadership. Most will be at the student forum tomorrow at which they will present to each other what they have done and learned.  

They are working at slums, schools, community centres, villages, ...

They are installing solar panels for electricity.  

They are teaching English. 

They are doing health promotion in the villages, and staying in village homes. 

They are setting up bicycles as electricity generators, 

hand-turned generators to drive illuminated world maps, …

They are designing and implementing equipments to enhance a STEM-themed playground for a primary school.  

And a lot more. 

They are learning to work together with students from local universities and NGOs, passing on what they have been trained in, and learning from each other.  

They are learning to understand social issues here in a different language and culture, empathise with people, solving problems with technology and professional knowledge, and be better global citizens.  

This is the cumulation of a whole year’s worth of planning and preparations and highlight of the year for our team.  Well done, team!