Scare birds, wobbly women and badly drawn henna

This week has been a week of creativity. First of all I have made umpteen bird paper bag puppets with my senior 4 students. They are everywhere. It’s kind of ironic because the real birds have come back. They started to fly into my resource centre AGAIN with bits of twig in their gobs, clearly intent on rebuilding their nest which I so unkindly destroyed before. Now if you read my blog often you might have remembered an episode a while back entitled ‘revenge of the birds’ where the birds got angry at me for driving them out. So this time I’m trying a different tactic. I’m going to use the puppets as scare birds. They are like scarecrows except for they are multicoloured bird puppets with freakishly large eyes and strange rectangular feathers which I’ve hung all over the walls. Now if the birds know what is good for them they will stay clear. I mean if they were real birds there would be something seriously up with nature.

I also tried to be a bit creative myself this week. After watching a whole entire series of America’s next top model in less than one week I tried an evening of TV series cold turkey. I began by writing no fewer than 6 letters to people back home but even that did not fill the whole evening. So I decided it was time I used that henna which I bought from the Indian store in Kigali. I tried to copy this design on the internet that was supposed to be ‘simple’. Well it was not simple enough! How they get it to go into those intricate designs is totally beyond me. I could only make a few squiggles that ended up looking like the fat forest worms we saw in the mud last weekend when we climbed the volcano. Maybe I just need more practise. I couldn’t make chapattis until the fourth attempt, maybe it’s one of those things that gets easier with time.

And a final creative wonder of the week was the apparent emergence of handicrafts in Nzige. Who would have thought it this far off the tourist trail? Today a bought a wobbly woman statue off a gap toothed man who was a friend of one of my work colleagues. He brought round a couple of wobbly statues and wooden masks in a rice sack for me to look at and it was the woman who charmed me the most so I did buy her. Its just like she has had one too many waragis, but she can still balance a pot on her head which is impressive! She can stand just about but needs a bit of assistance.

Paper bag 'scare birdss'

My fat henna design

The wooden lady of Nzige town, propped up by a box of elastic bands