Today we took a bone-jarring bus ride to Rutonde along the Nyaburongo river which flows towards Kigali from the Virunga mountains in the north west of Rwanda.

Once again the ladies of Loanhead have been knitting away to produce dozens of sets of baby clothes for Rwanda.

In the west it is generally assumed that a child will start school at age five or  thereabouts and continue until at least sixteen.

It is Friday and a new school year starts on Monday. Like many in Rwanda we are spending the day paying school fees at the last minute.

It is only three months since we were last here in Kigali and the place is starting to feel like a second home. The evening air as we leave the plane is a pleasant twenty degrees.

Mbabatze is a young girl who is being supported by Loanhead Church.

We could have sworn it was an electrical shop we were in, but this is Africa and we have learnt long before now just to go with the flow.

We discovered a piece of Rwandan technology yesterday for the first time when we visited Mama Melissa at her house.

A while back we wrote about the heavy rains that had hit Rwanda in April and May this year. See Melissa's House.

Followers of the blog will know of our friend, translator and minder, Steven. We first met him shortly after arriving in Rwanda almost ten years ago.