“Clean” Rwanda, Part 2
By Perry Beeman | October 09, 2009 | Rwanda
Earlier in my five-week trip to Rwanda, I blogged about the surprising cleanliness of this east African country. No illegal dumping in sight. Clean streets in the cities, with women sweeping the curbs with brooms. Litter rare. A mandatory fourth-Saturday monthly cleanup sends all adults, including President Paul Kagame, out to spruce things up for four hours.
There are some things that aren’t clean here: The air and the waterways.
First, the air. As I write this, I am in Kigali, the capital city. This is the third or fourth time I’ve returned to Kigali after traveling the rural areas. There is a thick haze over the city, and, for the first time, I’ve having trouble breathing. (Well, OK, a couple of mountain hikes did a nice job of taking my breath away, too, in more ways than one.) My eyes and nose are burning, and my lips taste like smoke. I have some allergies, so maybe I’m more susceptible than some, but I didn’t have this reaction even in Mexico City, one of the world’s air-pollution capitals.
Someone is always burning wood in Rwanda, and the smoke hangs in the many valleys between the famous “thousand” hills. So even in the rural areas, the sky tends to be hazy. Vehicles in Kigali – four-wheel-drive trucks are a staple as are motorcycles that are used as taxis for the not-so-faint of heart — often appear as though someone stole the tailpipes. Thick, black smoke comes out as though the vehicles are burning oil, not gas.
A good share of the haze undoubtedly comes from the burning of eucalyptus trees (and other species) for charcoal. And many families then burn the charcoal to boil water and cook the starchy staples that fuel these hard-working people out in the fields all day.
Then, there are the waterways. Go to Starbucks and buy a nice, expensive black coffee (and ask if it’s the primo stuff that company now buys from Rwanda, a wonderful source of fine coffee beans). Add several ounces of milk. That’s about what the rivers look like here. I have never seen so much silt. I wonder how some of the streams run at all. Compared to the brown and red soils washing from Rwanda’s largely plowed hills, Iowa’s chemically challenged streams look like they are ready for the U.S. government’s “wild and scenic” label. And, yes, the Rwandans drink this stuff, and wash their clothes in it. The lucky ones get water that runs down from the mountains rather than over fields planted with beans, maize, cassava, bananas, and potatoes. Some villages have large storage structures for the water, which would allow some of the sediment to fall out. Cities have some kind of treatment, though I don’t have a good feel for how elaborate it is. No one drinks tap water without boiling it here. Bottled “Source du Nil” water is everywhere.
Lake Kivu in northwestern Rwanda has a resort feel on the border between Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, and even some nice beaches. But many avoid swimming there because of parasites in the water and lingering concern over methane leaking from a big bubble under the lake, formed by volcanic activity. (That methane is fueling electricity generation now.)
The Rwandan government is pushing for a new economy based less on agriculture and more on finance, handicrafts, computers, tourism and other service industries. It also is encouraging people to live in villages to make it easier to offer electricity and water service, still spotty here. Both efforts have the potential to clean waterways, if the hills turn to forest again, though more villages could mean more concentrated areas of burning.
Kagame is an Africa leader on climate change issues; he addressed the United Nations and other organizations in the United States in recent days. Land is in critically short supply in Rwanda, but His Excellency has committed to tailored reforestation projects. Those could help air quality in addition to sweeping carbon from the sky.
By Africa standards, Rwanda overall is an incredibly clean place. Challenges remain.
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