What am I doing here?

This question comes up fairly regularly. Rwanda? Why Rwanda? There are a number of reasons for that, the first one being that I’m a masters degree candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and this opportunity came to me through RIT.

This trip is funded through a National Science Foundation grant, with a two-fold purpose: give American students international research experience, and to study the relationship between displacement and disasters. Rwanda is no stranger to either of those – a huge portion of the population was displaced (a.k.a. forced to leave their homes) during the 1994 genocide, and a previous stretch of internal strife in the 1960s and 1970s.

But this country is also familiar with disasters – flooding, landslides and volcanic eruptions, to name a few. And the flooding and landslides are getting worse as climate change alters weather patterns, and years of intensive subsistence farming on steep hillsides increases vulnerability.

Along with that, Rwanda is also home to a leading system of higher education in Africa, and features many departments and ministries doing high-level work on disaster resilience, sustainable energy and economic development. The government is well organized and at least in the major cities there is modernization everywhere: paving roads, installing water systems and high speed internet. You can order food via a phone app and it will be delivered to your door; you can watch international basketball in a sparkling brand-new stadium that seats 15,000.

But there is also poverty here, and still more than 115,000 refugees – mostly Congolese, after the majority of the Burundian refugees went home in the last year and a half.

So it’s a good place for research novices to come and learn.

“The cycle of having just enough to eat without reserves or excess to sell is a common condition in rural Rwanda today, as it always has been.”

Susan Thompson, in Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace

What is it like here? Well, our base is in Kigali, the capital city. The city is just south of the Equator, but we’re at about 5,000 feet of altitude. So the climate is about like San Diego – 75-80 during the day, 60-65 at night. It’s the dry season, so it’s only rained twice, briefly, since we’ve been here. It likely won’t rain more than one or two more times before we leave in August.

It’s a huge city – 1 million plus people – and it’s built on about a dozen hills / ridges, so everywhere you go is up or down, kind of like Vermont. And the city has grown a lot, like from about 150,000 people to the current size in about 25 years. So there’s a weird mishmash of basically old village type neighborhoods, which are mud or cinder block houses with tin roofs, literally across the street from big gleaming new neighborhoods, with walled compounds, gates and guards. Beyond that, Kigali is modernizing quickly. The government is pushing to make it the tech capital of east Africa, so there’s a lot of gleaming new office towers, posh restaurants and high speed internet. A few weeks ago they broke ground on an mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility. But it’s still strangely a quiet city – as I’m writing this I can hear the tree frogs peeping (it sounds like spring peepers back in Vermont) down in the open space below our neighborhood.

Rwanda is not a typical destination for Americans, except for people going to visit the mountain gorillas (the famous researcher Diane Fossey lived and worked in Rwanda, publicizing the plight of the gorillas before being murdered). People often fly into Kigali and head north to the volcanoes to see the gorillas, then do a coffee tour or visit Akagera National Park (where the managers have painstakingly reintroduced lions, rhinos and other native wildlife), and head out on the next flight.

The nickname “Land of a Thousand Hills” is apt, because everywhere except for the far eastern part of the country is on an upslope or a down slope. As one wag said about my home state Vermont, if you flattened out all the wrinkles, it would be the size of Texas – or to make a more geographically accurate comparison, the size of the Congo.

It’s a country roughly the size of Vermont, with a population of 12 million or so people. So when you leave the city, it’s very rural, but literally every acre of land you can see is under cultivation. Corn, bananas, potatoes, cassava, beans, tomatoes, and on and on. A family of 5 or 6 will grow the food they need to eat on their half-acre plot, and one of the adults will work as a day laborer for $1 or $2 a day. 

The plan is to spend time out in the rural areas, looking at the ways this intensive agriculture impacts the people’s resilience in the face of disaster. In other words, if a massive landslide carried off half your annual crops, how resilient are you? How able are you to recover from that disaster?

We’re going to focus in part on refugees – as I said above many Rwandan families have experience being refugees themselves, including the current president, Paul Kagame, who spent most of his childhood and young adult life as a refugee in Uganda. There are about seven refugee camps in Rwanda, mostly home to about 115,000 Congolese who fled a civil war and unrest in 2011-2012. The camps are administered by the refugee and disaster ministry, MINEMA, along with the UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees). We will visit one or more of these camps, and do some mapping of disaster risks, and use interviews to develop a measure of social resilience within the camp and its host community.

But in general the mission for our summer is to build a baseline body of data, both through publicly available datasets, and through using remote sensing technology like satellite imagery. Then we’ll go out into the far parts of Rwanda to confirm the data – a solid way to make the models better.