Building a house in Rwanda

We went to visit the house building project at Matimba in the eastern province of Rwanda on Tuesday last week. It was a long and interesting drive to a village close to the Ugandan border. It was in the area sliced off the Akagera National Park and given by the Rwandan Government to refugees returning to Rwanda after the war in 1994. See what Wikipedia has to say about that.

This house is for the family of a young woman who is a teacher at Kigali Christian School (the YFC school here).

Peace has been sponsored through her university education by a Victorian couple who came, with their two daughters, to help build this house. The old house was in very bad repair! I told you a little bit about this adventure in an earlier blog post.

 

First the mud is mixed for the bricks

 And then it is put into the mould where it will stay until it has hardened and then moved to dry out.

Here Brian is standing alongside drying bricks, discussing the building with Luc from Rwanda YFC

We are photographed here in front of the house with all the family and the Aussies who are building. They have been doing a fantastic job and must now leave it in the hands of the Rwandans as they head back to Aus.

On the way home we stopped to buy some bananas and pineapples at a roadside store and found some other umuzungus (white people) there. As we talked we discovered that the gentleman was the manager of Akagera National Park, where we intended to go two days later. He was so helpful to us with making arrangements for our BIG DAY OUT.