Monkeying around in Volcanoes National Park

I love jokes but can never remember the punch line.  One of the few jokes that I’ve always remembered is one on a lollypop stick from when I was little: Where does a monkey cook his toast?  A. Under a gorilla!  
Well yes, perhaps it is a lame joke, but it seems like fate that I would one day meet a gorilla, and when I did, it was awesome!

The 3 hour hike in the Volcanoes National Park to find the gorillas was an adventure in itself; it is the rainy season at the moment, and we had to wade through thick mud.  At the start of the hike, I naively tried not to get too dirty but soon realised this was a pointless feat so just enjoyed the squelching and squishing.  As well as the mud, there were 6 ft stinging nettles (a key part of the gorillas’ diet), and as we ventured deeper and deeper into the bush, our guide had to use a machete to hack through the dense vegetation.  The excitement of the gorillas meant I didn’t think that much of it at the time, only realising after the adrenalin had worn off how stung my legs had got through my trousers.

We spent an hour watching the Amahoro group with great fascination.  Amahoro means peace in Kinyarwanda.  Before people are able to go and visit a group of gorillas, the group has to be habitualised to humans.  The Amahoro group is so named because it took a surprisingly short amount of time for the silver backs to get used to people.  Now, it just takes a deep “haaaaaaummmmm” sound from time to time to remind the gorillas that their human visitors are friendly and they go about their business of eating leaves, tidying their nests, etc, as if you aren’t even there.

There were 2 babies in the group, a tiny one month old who just clung to its mother and slept, and a very playful 4 month old, who swung from trees and generally performed for the audience until its mother grunted and it retreated back to the nest for a cuddle.

The Amahoro group is unusual in having 3 silver back males.  We were stood watching the 2^nd in command when he turned and decided he wanted to be exactly where we were standing.  We rushed to move out of the way, but he was quick and so passed by us very closely.  Ever the cool, calm naturalist, I clung onto a friend and tried not to look the gorilla in the eye.  Our guide just looked on and chuckled.  But he was HUGE...                   

How many accountants does it take to run a training day?

For an audience of 17, apparently 5 Rwandan Accountants and one Brit!

Having finally got the formal Rwandan greeting down to a fine art, we finished the last of the Health Centre audits just over a week ago.  Before coming, I certainly had not imagined that during these visits I’d sit through more than one meeting with an accountant while she was breast-feeding, or that I’d take a long, bumpy trip in an ambulance, wedged between a woman with a sick bucket and a man with a hacking cough...  It has certainly been a lot of fun exploring the country and working closely with the PIH finance team on this project.

Last week, to follow up our audit visits, we ran 3 training days (one in each district) on financial management for the Health Centre Accountants.  In preparation, I have spent the last few weeks writing up a summary of our observations and recommendations, finishing off the new financial monitoring and reporting templates for Health Centres to use, helping the finance team put together a finance manual for Health Centres, and preparing the training course.

For the first time since getting here, I felt properly stressed last Sunday night.  We hit printing issues - a small malfunctioning printer, no paper, and unsurprisingly, no one to help at 10pm on a Sunday evening.  And then there was the fact that I felt nervous about sitting through training courses that I have been so heavily involved in preparing and having absolutely no idea what’s being said.  But I need not have worried; we solved the printing problems early on Monday morning, and then the team did a wonderful job in presenting the course, a fact that was highlighted by the good understanding the Health Centre Accountants showed when they completed the training exercises, rather than a miraculous understanding of Kinyarwanda by me.

And here is the A-Team of the training world in action:

Gorilla and volcano adventures to follow shortly...