A Rwandan Food Diary: Part 3

I've now spoken to several dozen rural Rwandans, who all corroborate the same story-that weather patterns are becoming more and more unpredictable, and that the cost of staple foods is going up and up.
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Today I found myself the laughing stock of an entire Rwandan village. I'd agreed to pose for a photo with an adorable looking piglet, but as soon as I got close it began squealing at a traumatising pitch, and I lurch-hopped away ungracefully with a shrill, panicked yelp.

At this point I was grateful not be getting up-close-and-personal with the pig, because it started urinating forcefully, in terror or perhaps disdain. A chicken defecated on our snapper Will's head shortly afterwards, on a day that was fast morphing into some form of farmyard waste-product roulette.

The piglet belonged to Josephina Mukakayonga, a 35-year-old farmer and a mother of four from Gasuba village in the Nyamagabe district of Southern Rwanda. She'd bought the piglet using a loan from a co-operative savings scheme, which are just one of the simple, sensible and genuinely effective self-help initiatives which Tearfund's partners Moucecore have introduced in impoverished areas throughout the country.

Josephina contributes 100 Rwandan Francs a week to the scheme, which is a big outlay for her, but is less than the 300 RF we've been paying for every small bottle of water out here. While we'd visited some of Moucecore's biggest success stories over the past few days, I knew that we were going to start visiting some increasingly poverty-stricken areas, where their community mobilisation and farm management projects had had less time to take spark.

We headed South towards the historically famine-prone Nyamagabe district, where the soil is problematically acidic and the people are some of the most deprived in the country.

Although Rwanda's GDP has more than doubled since 1994, 60% of the population still live below the poverty line, and I began to worry that my wide-eyed appreciation of the country's progress so far had been quite gallingly naive as I listened to Josephina describing the state of food insecurity that she and her family struggle to cope with on a daily basis.

I've now spoken to several dozen rural Rwandans, who all corroborate the same story-that weather patterns are becoming more and more unpredictable, and that the cost of staple foods is going up and up.

Josephina's bean plants performed less well than hoped last harvest after a period of drought, and her supply has now run out. The price increases mean that she can only afford to buy some for her family if she exchanges agricultural labour for cash, but there's fierce local competition for such jobs.

She's now having to choose between buying food for her children or getting them school supplies. As she told me that she'd already eaten her only real meal of the day, some boiled sweet potatoes, it hit me hard how unjust it was that I'd never, ever had to worry about where my food was coming from, just because of the circumstances of my birth.

And I suspect that if the act of buying a ham sandwich was an inconceivable prospect, I might have acted less pathetically when faced with a live, tiny pig.