Road Trip!

Kirehe, Rwanda
November 2011

Hey there,
It’s Juliet back and I want to update you on what has been going on here at the SHE Rwandan office. I know it’s been a while.
As most of you have read, Megan and I are doing research on banana fiber supply chain in Rwanda and the East African region.
On Wednesday the 16th November, we woke up very early in the morning to take the earliest bus to Kirehe. We visited individual coops in Gatore, Kirehe district in the Eastern Province where we visited individual farmers. Our trip went well, sleeping on the bus as usual on the long drive to Kirehe.
































Meeting these hardworking individual farmers and walking into the big banana farms was interesting. It was surprising to learn that these farmers harvest and transport four trucks of bananas to Kigali every day. This means that they harvest a lot of bananas, hence a lot of pseudostems. Actually, you can’t imagine the way he put us on his truck from the bus park to his farm. It was very funny.

We are definitely learning a lot from these farmers. We also met Anasthase, who you have probably heard about in my last blog. He is the president of the Kamara coop in Kirehe. We had a very interesting discussion at his beautiful home about exchanging pseudo stems for a health and hygiene training for Kamara coop members.
Soon, we hope to travel to Uganda to meet banana farmers. We will give you more updates.

Thank you so much,
Juliet.B