At 1,000 square kilometers, Nyungwe is the largest mountain rainforest in Africa and one of the most ancient, dating back to before the ice age.

After traveling for days in Uganda and Rwanda’s heavily cultivated landscapes, crossing into Nyungwe was nothing short of a breathtaking. It was a journey into a rainforest primeval that, that in light of humanity’s powerful influence outside the park gates, evoked awe and inspiration. I knew there was an Africa that looked like this.

In recent history, Nyungwe provided sanctuary to more than just flora and fauna. Refugees from regional conflicts, including the 1994 genocide, fled into the park, living on Nyungwe’s resources until they could exit safely. During times of human crisis, the park has been profoundly taxed and it could have so easily been destroyed to meet the human population’s ever-burgeoning demands but it has, instead, been saved and protected – good news for all.

Rich in biodiversity with 240 species of trees and over 140 species of orchid, Nyungwe is a birder’s paradise, considered the most important ornithological site in Rwanda, harboring almost 300 species including the spectacular Blue Turaco, which was described as a “blue Elvis chicken”, as well as a “blue, red and green bird – flocks travel from tree to tree like a procession of streamlined psychedelic turkeys”. I’m not a birder but how can a description like that not pique your curiousity?

In a country made famous for the mountain gorilla, Nyungwe’s main tourist draw is the primate. Home to 13 species of primate (representing 1/5^th of Africa’s primate species), Nyungwe National Park offers chimpanzee tracking as well as tours that visit troops of L’Hoest’s monkey, Angola Colobus and other habituated species including the Mangaby and Blue Monkey.

Organizations including ORTPN and USAID’s Destination Nyungwe Project are working to make lush but little-known Nyungwe a sustainable ecotourism destination by improving and extending the park’s network of trails and promoting it to gorilla trackers who want to experience the breadth of species and pre-historic beauty in this rugged, ecologically rich national treasure.

As the park visitor numbers increase, communities outside the park are able to benefit. Park employees are hired from the local population and communities near the park are developing tours to their villages that offer visitors a view into their traditions and culture.

Trail time in Nyungwe is a feast for the eyes: orchids dripping color under the thick canopy, monkeys chattering overhead, swinging their way through the treetops, hilltop vistas of Lake Kivu and into Burundi and Congo (DRC) – a unique hike through a landscape that time, thankfully, forgot.

Tick tock, indeed.

Mountain bike pioneer Tom Ritchey founded Project Rwanda after a trip to the region in 2005, partnering with SPREAD to assist Rwanda‘s rural farmers by “furthering the economic development of Rwanda through initiatives based on the bicycle as a tool and symbol of hope.” Ritchey created a custom cargo bike created for coffee farmers, designed tough enough to endure Rwanda’s rugged terrain and strong enough to haul up to 400 lbs.

SPREAD, Bikes to Rwanda, Vision Finance, and Scallywags Bike Shop united behind the farmers’ cause and, thanks to their efforts, there are over 1,000 coffee cargo bikes in Rwanda, empowering farmers to get their crops to washing stations more quickly, ensuring that they get optimal payment for their efforts. Through a micro-credit system offered within coffee cooperatives, farmers are able to pay for their bikes with the additional income they earn from the increased quality of their coffee. In addition, for the numerous days that coffee doesn’t have to be sped to market, coffee bikes contribute to a better quality of life for farmers and their families, enabling them to haul anything you can imagine without the burden of fueling up a gas tank – construction materials, crates of chickens, treetops of bananas, furniture, family members… really, you have to see it to believe it…

A round of applause to the tremendous efforts and overwhelmingly positive results from the work of SPREAD and Project Rwanda that have helped invigorate the economy, improving lives and elevating a product and profession that Rwandans can be extremely proud of… well done.

More information at: http://www.spreadproject.org/

Introduced by the Germans in the 1900s, coffee in Rwanda is cultivated on small, family run farms where coffee plant counts average in the low hundreds, but for decades, the Rwandan coffee market had been state run and coffee was sent into local markets with very little in the way of quality standards. Farmers traded on volume, not quality, so inferior product, along with dirt and rocks, were sent to retail assuring a reputation of mediocrity for Rwandan coffee on the international market.

In the years following the 1994 genocide, all governmental operations were reconsidered and certain programs, including national coffee production, were completely overhauled. Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise (SPREAD), a USAID-funded development alliance of institutes, industries and NGOs, helped identify Rwandan coffee as a potentially powerful economic driver for the recovering nation: a widely produced crop that could command top dollar if very high levels of quality control and premium products were properly marketed and consistently delivered retail.

SPREAD supports coffee co-ops that use farmers’ collective selling power along with the creation of coffee washing stations that enforce quality control from the moment coffee arrives from the field as cherries (the bean itself the seed of the fruit of the coffee plant). Farmers are paid on pure weight of quality cherries while substandard cherries and detritus are discarded. By significantly raising the quality of Rwandan coffee, the international coffee market rewards producers by paying 3 to 5 times the price per pound for superior product.

Dr. Tim Schilling, director and program coordinator of SPREAD, sees Rwanda as a coffee growing paradise, explaining that Rwandan coffee crops are 100% small-holder produced. Small crops allow farmers to seriously fuss over their plants and the care the predominantly heirloom plants receive here results in premium product with a unique flavor profile that rightfully commands top dollar on the international coffee market.

One of the finest examples of Rwanda’s success in these pursuits has been the elevation of the Bourbon varietal grown in the Maraba area. Within recent years, specialty coffee companies have developed a keen regard for Maraba Bourbon and will pay for particularly esteemed harvests at prices previously unheard of for African coffee on the international market.

Good for just a few coffee producers? Consider this: based on recent estimates, there are 500,000 coffee farmers in Rwanda (a country of about 9 million) and coffee-related income that affects 40 to 50 percent of Rwanda’s population.

With the increasing focus on high quality Rwandan coffee, the farmers received a powerful education in the volatile nature of their crop and the very direct relationship of time to money. Anyone who’s ever used a messenger service to deliver documents in a gridlocked city can appreciate the can-do of a bike in time critical environments.

Enter the coffee bike. Follow me….

Walking the school property, practicality blended with beauty… rows of bright green cabbages, carefully crafted gravel pathways, prolific groves of banana trees, healthy cows… and students who were benefiting from exposure to simple, common sense technologies that would be considered edgy in the western world.

There’s no education like outright exposure so keep an eye peeled for those Stella Matutina graduates – they’ve got smarts to share. Read on…

As a school utterly off the grid, GEF/ UNDP became involved with the school to help them make steps toward self-sufficiency, teaching educators and students integrated resource management and created an “education in action” school for environmental education that taught conservation, organic farming and sustainable sanitation.

An all-girls school with 430 students, the school received a generous donation and assistance from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) who helped the design and build a biogas system that would provide an alternative to charcoal and firewood to fuel the school’s kitchen.

Biogas, for the uninitiated, is the methane created by human and animal waste, harvested for fuel. Yep, just that sexy… septic tanks gone wild. But truly, it’s quite wonderful what poo can do for you. I’ll give it an official “ick” on introducing the concept, but it’s really simple, sanitary and smart.

Underground receptacles store waste from the school latrines as well as manure from the school’s resident livestock. Methane rises off the tanks, which flow into gas lines that lead into the school’s kitchen, fueling the commercial cooking burners. While not eliminating the use of firewood, biogas now does the lion’s share of fuel for cooking most of the school’s meals.

Back when the school’s kitchens were reliant on firewood, it took 100 cubic meters of wood to run the kitchen for 9 months. In 2006, after the inception of the biogas program, the school bought another 100 cubic meters of firewood. By March of 2008, they still had half of their original purchase, 50 cubic meters of firewood, left. So, less firewood usage is a good thing!

But biogas is just part of the environmental education at Stella Matutina Secondary School. Like the Gorilla Organization sponsored water cistern projects in Ruhengeri, the school leverages almost daily rainfall and broad classroom roofs to feed massive water cisterns for the school’s drinking and cooking water supply. Students are involved in the acres of gardens on school grounds and all vegetables (yes, ALL vegetables) served in meals for over 400 students are grown in school organic gardens – no mean feat!

Rwanda ‘s population density is the highest in Africa. In Kigali, primary fuels for cooking are charcoal + wood and in rural Rwanda, wood is the main fuel source – with all that wood-fueled cooking, pollution and deforestation are significant challenges. Established in 2002, the Association for the Conservation of the Environment (ACEN), is a cooperative supported by the GEF and UNDP that collects household waste from 12,000 families in Kigali. The waste is brought to a central facility where sorters collect high-cellulose components from the refuse including tree and plant fibers: compost, paper, cardboard and wood scrap.

These materials are dried, shredded and compressed into briquettes, a cooking fuel that is far more efficient and cleaner burning than wood or charcoal.But now for a sense of scale: This operation produces 14 tons of briquettes per day that are sold primarily to factories, schools and other institutions. ACEN employs 133 people, the majority of which are women, many of whom are widows and former sex workers, over 50% of them are living with HIV.

ACEN provides its employees with vocational training and daily meals along with a living wage and community – keys to empowerment for people who would otherwise be marginalized, disenfranchised and likely living in abject poverty.

The positives of ACEN’s efforts are multifold:

• Harvesting materials from city waste reduces overall garbage. Aside from making for a cleaner city, it also results in a pronounced reduction of methane that would otherwise have been released into the environment had it been left to decompose.

• The briquettes produced from the waste products are more energy efficient, cleaner burning and cheaper than charcoal or wood.

• It’s a sustainable business in every sense of the word - reducing, reusing garbage, providing a necessary service, creating jobs + offering services and training – empowerment and better lives for the marginalized.

ACEN is just beginning to crack distribution to private households – presently they have only sold about 50 in-home cooking stoves. A typical family will spend about 14,000 Rwandan Francs (about 25 US dollars) on charcoal a month. With the cleaner burning, more energy efficient briquettes, the cost goes down to 2,000 per month (less than 8 dollars) along with the one time purchase of a briquette stove, which runs 8-15,000 (15-28 dollars).

More efficient, kinder to the environment, and more economical…why, then, isn’t everyone adopting them?

A simple phrase: hand-to-mouth living.

Very few households can buy all their monthly charcoal one purchase – they buy just enough to get them through the next few days, a few thousand francs at a time. The outright purchase of a stove, without the briquettes, is more than most of Rwandans have in their pocket, leaving them overextended with no money left to buy fuel to cook with, defeating the purpose of the purchase.

But solutions are in the works: ACEN is gearing up to increase production of high efficiency briquette stoves. GEF is working to create a micro loan program that will make stove purchases much more accessible to the average Rwandan household. Together, ACEN and GEF have created an exciting, sustainable success story that’s benefiting many with the potential of helping countless others.

Walking out to meet up with our ride into Ruhengeri, two women in brightly colored traditional outfits greeted us with a cheery, “bon jour”. We were checked out of English-speaking Uganda and our arrival into Rwanda was official, er, confirmé.

We were met by Gorilla Organization’s Rwanda Program Manager, Emmanuel Bugingo, a good-humored, one-man welcoming committee. As we drove from the border into Ruhengeri, I found myself lost outside the lively conversation in the car, searching the lush foliage, the buildings, the faces of the people, quietly considering the recent history that rocketed this tiny country into the world’s consciousness:

the horrific 90 days in 1994 when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were savagely murdered by Hutu extremists.

I knew there would be so much more to learn about Rwanda besides the genocide but truly, I wracked my mind, trying to put myself in the place of the survivors, trying to fathom how a nation, a people recover from such darkness…how does one reconcile experiencing unspeakable brutality and loss to find a light of hope that allows you to step into a present not completely poisoned by the past, to forgive, to attempt to fully live again?

I wondered if Rwanda would prove to be a haven of promise, a purgatory or something altogether different. Surely there is something to learn about humanity here…

However, as curious as I might have been, I had been taught that a good guest does not bring up uncomfortable issues. I figured I’d have to do a lot of studying up while reading between the lines of conversation and behavior to draw my own conclusions.

Fortunately, the Rwandans don’t believe anyone is served if the events of 1994 are left to cryptic language or subtlety.

Our first stop was for lunch at a hotel in Ruhengeri. Once seated, I noticed a prominently posted sign in Kinyarwanda, a major unifying language in Rwanda.

One word in particular caught my eye:”Jenoside”

Okay very curious don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask rude rude rude.

As our drinks were delivered, Emmanuel pointed at the sign and asked if we knew what it said.

Shaking our heads, he translated:

“It reads, ‘Let’s fight together against the genocide ideology of ethnic and regional division and eradicate it’”.

Over following days, we discovered variations of this same text conspicuously in every town, neighborhood… even the tiniest of villages had this sign prominently posted.

When asked about his tribal heritage (a common inquiry in most African nations), Emmanuel quickly, firmly stated, “we are all Rwandan”, a sentiment in ensuing days would be echoed and reinforced by his countrymen.

The initial takeaway was a powerful one: the people here are facing down and learning from their past, choosing to consciously turn from darkness in search of an inclusive future that benefits all Rwandans. A top industry that has been identified as a path to such a future is tourism and the most recognized and appealing assets that draw international travelers to Rwanda is tracking the rare mountain gorilla.

“There is need for every Rwandan to play a role in the promotion of tourism, in conserving environment and in promoting yourselves by providing items and services that you can sell to tourists so that they feel at home whenever they are in the country” – Rwandan President Paul Kagame

Conservation need not be a one way street. True, for the gorillas to survive, the people near the gorillas must thrive. Rwanda GO has its own unique programs designed to help the people near the gorilla habitat thrive – cisterns at schools and indigenous community uplift. A complementary strategy is the well designed ecotourism destination in which gorilla survival directly benefits the people near the gorillas.

Community-owned Sabinyo Silverback Lodge provides high end accommodation to gorilla trackers and direct benefits to the people living near the lodge and park.

Intrigued? Onward!