School outing

I went with the Embassystaff on a schooltrip. We went in a small bus, about 25 of us, to Gisenyi. Gisenyi is about 2,5 hours drive in a car, 3 in a bus.

A day before we went we got the news that Rwanda has sent troops to Congo. Gisenyi is a bordertown, seperated from Goma just by a gate. So fingers crossed.

After lunch we went to the Braliwra brewery. Bralirwa is 70% Heineken en 30% government owned. It was an interesting tour. The brewary is remarkably simular to any European brewery; clean, organised. We were surprised to hear the most of the ingredients are still imported. Heineken puts a lot of effort into consistance worldwide. They are experimenting with corn (mais) as a suplement, mostly because of price. They contracted a firm to deliver it. However they need to improve the quality of the corn, standard Rwandan corn is not very good.

Braliwra has a monopoly in Rwanda, they make Primus and Mutzig, the local beers, and they have a Coca Cola lincense and bottle all softdrinks in Rwanda, even the import beers are Heineken and Amstel, both Heineken brands. Less then 1% is imported otherwise, some places have Ugandan or Tanzanian beer.

After a sample of the beer or soda we got a t-shirt as present, this made my happy as I was after a Primus t-shirt for a long time.

In the evening we had a french film without subtitles, this was very hard on most of us, but the pictures were clear ad very graphic. I won't go into details in case we have young readers.

After that we had a fire on the beach, well organised. It was nice and 'gezellig', sorry there is no word for that in english.

The following day we went to the obligatory dance and drum spectacle, we even had to join in.

A colleague arranged a quick visit to the gas platform in the lake (we will finance a large part of it). This is a test station to win gas from the lake on a small scale, if it is succesfull they will take lots more, in theory enough to supply most of Rwanda of electricity at current levels, they are hoping to make electricity cheaper and more available.

The concept is simple; a pipe goes in the lake an extract gas and water, the water goes back, the gas goes to shore where electricity is created by some sort of generator.