We thought we were simply going to complete the water project begun several days before we arrived in Nyakinama village. And we did. But there was more.
In order to see the water delivery system, paid for by Rotary St. Thomas Sunrise—that will now bring the precious commodity from the Mutobo River through Musanze’s reservoir and then down the long road to the Amahoro Integrated Development Program’s (AIDP) orphan center—it had to be nearly done before we arrived.
We were left with the honor of covering the final few feet of pipe and turning on the water for the children for the first time.
But the 10 students who traveled for weeks to get to this moment are no "sissy photo-op people."
“We want to do something big,” was the cry, long before we reached Nyakinama.
Somehow, AIDP co-founder Hussein Nsenga had a premonition that this would be the case and had already set up two projects that were to involve the most physical labor of all our projects so far.
Group A, we will call them, opted to work in the garden. Visions of seeds and watering cans, no doubt, danced through their heads. But what was actually called for was the removal of huge lava rock from the area before there would be any hope of planting anything.
The work went on for two days; and in the end, a huge rock wall, with open space for the eventual garden was the reward.
The rich soil underneath the rocks that were removed will be worked and planted before the rainy season sets in by September’s end, Hussein tells us.
At the other end of the village, Group B had taken on home building the old-fashioned, African way.
Hussein showed us several homes that have been built to house formerly homeless women along with several orphans entrusted to their keeping. Along with providing education, health care and shelter to vulnerable children in the district, AIDP has also developed a program to pair women and children in homes where the children can grow up in a family setting with a mother.
Our job was to carry a mud-cement mixture to the newly bricked four-room house and slather it over the bricks both inside and out to provide the next layer of protection from water and wind.
As with the rock garden, the work was dirty and physically challenging, but regularly interrupted by laughter and good-natured mud slinging—all the while observed by a group of hangers-on fascinated with seeing "muzungos," the Rwandan term of endearment for foreigners, doing the work usually reserved for them.
Making mud doesn’t happen without water. At the opposite end of the village—from where we had just opened the flood gates with our newly laid pipe and spigot—we got a taste of what life is like without them. Repeatedly throughout the two days of mud slinging we walked 20 minutes one way, accompanied by several merry jug-toting villagers to get the water to mix the mud. Along the way we were amazed by the sight of tiny children, jugs on heads, carrying their own weight in water from the remote stream coming out of the volcanic rock on the side of the mountain.
Curious about a few of the snickering Rwandan teens who observed our progress from a safe distance, I asked Hussein what they were saying.
His translation: “We didn’t know muzungos could make mud and carry water.”
