Blogging will be light....

.....or even non existent over the next two weeks. Tomorrow I will be joining a group of volunteers from the Conservative party in Rwanda who are working on a five separate projects and I will be helping with Rwandan businesses. I have decided not to take my laptop and I am unsure when I will have access to a PC so I am reverting to pen & paper to keep a diary of my activity & observations while I am there & will post a full account when I get back.

Never having previously visited Africa, I was very interested to hear from last year's volunteers about their work and what they found and I am really pleased to have the time to go this year. I have been provided with some useful and interesting background about the genocide that took place in 1994 and expect to be moved by the memorials we will be visiting. I will be interested to see how much the people I meet are keen or willing to speak about that time. I have done some research on two of the businesses I will be visiting, one of which is a manufacturer of toilet tissue called Supa which is a product range I am very familiar with from my Central Catering Supplies days, and the second is a producer of pyrethrum, about which I knew nothing until a week or so ago. The company is Sopirwa and their website is here. I am looking forward to meeting the people in both firms and hopefully passing on some of the experience I gained in my business career.

I'm also getting lots of advice from Victoria who spent 6 moths in neighbouring Tanzania during her gap year. Something of a role reversal & she has given me lots of tips & ideas. I know I will miss my family while I'm away, but I'm looking forward to a whole set of exciting new experiences. Lots of details later.