My kind of weather

I arrived safe and sound and was so happy to find out that Kigali (capital of Rwanda) has my favorite climate - in the 80's during the day with little humidity, and in the 60's at night; so far so good. Rwanda is a developing economy whose biggest industries are tourism (those adorable mountain gorillas - and, conversely, the genocide memorials) and coffee and tea. The women I am training today have small and medium-sized businesses of all different kinds, a funeral parlor, an amusement park, beauty salons, a florist with a full-service supply party company, landscaper and more.

There is one woman, Speciose, who travelled to China to purchase wedding gowns to add as a service to her floral shop. Speciose was tortured in the early 1990's and fled with her family to a Burundi refugee camp before the 1994 genocide. She returned in 1995 to nothing - most of their property had been destroyed. But now she is looking to expand her floral shop and wedding supply company business into larger events and open a catering center.

Yesterday, I met with two professional HR people, one with a regional East African Bank, Fina, and an HR consultant who is Kenyan but has the franchise for the Rwandan branch of an HR consulting company. All discussions were free and easy and frank. There are very few professional HR heads in Rwanda and there is a long way to go to integrate professional HR practices in all companies, large and small, NGOs and private sector. There is so little HR infrastructure in the country that each and every dismissal must be approved by the government Labor Inspector so that fairness to employees will be guaranteed. The HR community in Rwanda feels very isolated and would like to be linked up to an outside association. I've searched on the web and have only found international associations for NGOs and public institutions and HR Information Systems. SHRM doesn't indicate it has an int'l division but I will give them a call when I get back back.

If any of you HR people have any information in this area., pls. send on. The idea in my meeting the Rwandan HR people is to see if we can't get them to be HR mentors to our women and have them follow up on the training on a regular basis.

In closing, the Rwandan women are beautiful, the men tall and thin. They are all warm and soft people.