Rwanda's eight and a half million mainly rural population live in homes made of woven branches and grasses, covered with clay with hard red dirt floors, fabric where doors and windows might be, no running water, no electricity and normally a sheet tin roof. Many families also share their home with the family chickens. The traditional Rwandan homestead is called a 'rugo' and  consists of a number of bee hive-shaped houses within a larger, fenced compound. The household or 'inzu' normally consists of a husband and wife and children, sometimes with close relatives. Large families are common with an average women having 4.9 children, although many do not make it to their fifth birthday.

For most children in Rwanda its time to get up at the crack of dawn to undertake chores including taking the chickens from the house and putting them in their mud enclosures and boiling water on an open fire ready for the first meal of the day,  with breakfast often consisting of sweet potatoes and sorghum, corn and millet and milk porridge. Then its off to school, which can often be some miles away.

The school day is often marked by singing the Rwandan National anthem, "Rwanda Nziza" ("Beautiful Rwanda")  followed by prayers in a country that is over 80% Christian with a much smaller Muslim population (4.6%). (Roman Catholic missionaries established themselves in Rwanda in the late 1880s and taught that Tutsi were a superior race ~ not least because they were easier to convert to Christianity) and this contributed to the seething ethnic tensions over the generations)

Whilst most children are eager to attend school in Rwanda, many schools are under resourced with no running water nor electricity, although he government is attempting to get those schools too far from the national grid installed with solar panels to get over some of these difficulties. Government spending on education is quite high, currently at 12.25% of all expenditure, but some idea of the resource shortfall can be ascertained by the fact that in a country with a child population of some 4,757,000, there are just 1,197 school library books.

There are 2172 primary schools in Rwanda catering for 1,636,563 pupils who are taught in English or French (after starting their education in Kinyarwanda). After primary school education is no longer compulsory for the 179,153 pupils who go on to attend Rwanda's 405 secondary schools where the number of qualified teachers drops from over 80% to under 50%. Illiteracy remains stubbornly high at around 50% of the over 15yrs population.

Whilst the children go to school the men are mainly engaged in agriculture especially outside of urban areas with coffee being one of Rwanda's main industries with 500,000 coffee farmers located mainly along Lake Kivu and in the central high plateau, each with a small family farm of 200-300 trees normally grown on terraces.  Many Rwandans have constructed wooden bikes to help transport the coffee cherries to a washing station however logistics pose a problem with the countryside being unsuitable for vehicles for transportation with what are deemed as roads resembling more like goat trails. Landslides often destroy passable routes and wash away bridges making what could be a lucrative farming opportunity subsistence living with 65% of all rural Rwandans living on or below the poverty line.

Whilst the men work and the women maintain the household the children complete their day's education and after school its more chores including collecting firewood and water, normally carried in large jerry cans for the adults smaller cans for children. Although collecting water digs deep into the average Rwandan day, the government has commenced a program of installing water points so that most of the population are little more than a mile from a water source.

Dinner often consists of  Ugali, a maize and water paste; Isombe, mashed cassava leaves with dried fish and Matoke, a dish made from baked or steamed plantains being the staple diet for most Rwandans. Most rural Rwandans rarely eat meat, perhaps just a couple of times a month, and this had led to relatively high levels of protein deficiency in children leading to the disease Kwashiorkor. Then as night falls, its time to crawl into bed awaiting the day of another day.