5 years, while a woman would be expected to live 40. He lives in a rural village halfway between Ruhengeri and Kigali. It is about 25km north-west of the capital, and 50km west of the edge of the Akagera National Park, whose limits are continuously being pushed back towards the Rwanda/Tanzania border. His country, Rwanda, 26 338 km, which is the size of the state of Vermont in the United States, its borders drawn utterly arbitrarily during the "scramble for Africa- prior to colonization. That random fencing off has meant that today, land and population settlement pressures are high. About 90,2% of Rwandans work in agriculture, like Willy's mother, while more than half of landholdings are smaller than 1ha, which is generally too small for harvests to sustain farmers, let alone provide a marketable surplus. The main food crops are beans, sweet potatoes, sorghum, plantains, bananas, potatoes, cassava and maize. Agricultural yields are often very poor because of decades of over-farming and a shortage of farming inputs, especially fertiliser. About 75% of Rwanda's land is potentially suitable for agricultural use, but just feeding the people requires that almost every available piece of land be under cultivation (except for the Akagera National Park along the border with Tanzania, and the higher slopes of Rwanda's volcanoes). Since most of the country is mountainous, this involves a good deal of terracing, and the banded hillsides are similar to those in Nepal or the Philippines. Because the country's tea and coffee plantations take up large amounts of land, the density of the rural population per square kilometre of arable land is an astounding 901 (1999), which is one of the highest in Africa and possibly the world. .
Willy's country is poor: Rwanda is a major recipient of international development assistance, and between 1995 and 2000, roughly US$3.9bn was pledged and US$2.
