How wrong we were. Kigali is a bustling, developing city with freedom to move across the rolling hills that are interlinked with wide dual carriageways. The friendly faces that smile at you along every roadside and from the drivers of the hundreds of mopeds that zip between the traffic, make you feel welcome and accepted. Only the presence of armed policemen on most street corners reminds you of that bleak chapter in Rwanda's recent past.

Rwanda is the one of the poorest nations in the world. As in the UK, education can provide the social mobility which is so desperately needed to move people from poverty towards prosperity. However, unlike the UK, there is limited government assistance for those who cannot support themselves. My project was designed to help those at the very bottom of the social ladder.

Project Umubano was an ambitious attempt to overhaul a pre-school occupied by around 80 orphans, in just two weeks; essentially a fortnight of 'Challenge Anneka' meets Ground Force.

The pre-school was originally an orphanage established by our link man, Daniel Eugene Rudsaingwa, himself a genocide survivor, who created the 'Girubuntu centre' to house over 100 children who had lost their parents and had nowhere to go. It is located in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Kigili. Here there is no tarmac on the roads, water must be fetched from a central distribution point, electricity is intermittent and the main cause of death is from HIV/AIDS.

The state of the pre-school was shocking. The 'toilets' were simply holes in the ground and could be smelled from some distance away, electrical wires dangled dangerously from supporting beams, class rooms were cold, dark and damp and the shortage of tables and chairs meant children had to eat their food off the floor. Yet meeting the children provided an added incentive to turn the place around. 80 beaming little children, who despite losing their parents and living in such desperate conditions, vented contagious levels of energy and enthusiasm and as classes continued around us and served as a constant and rewarding reminder of why we were there.

Work began at 6.30 every morning and did not finish until 5 in the evening. Skill sets varied incredibly in our team from person to person, as well as among the locals. This necessitated the sharing of knowledge and required us to train others in the competencies needed to complete the different tasks. We had a fortnight to build a new classroom, connect the site to the water supply, up-grade all electrics, build new stair and ramp ways, upgrade four other existing class rooms and, build a number of educational and sporting tools from large alphabet cubes to a climbing frame - all out of eucalyptus, the local wood harvested in abundance across Rwanda.

After two weeks of hard work our mission was complete. In traditional African style, in front of the Rwandan Finance Minister, an entire afternoon of celebrations with music and dancing began and if it were possible, the smiles on the children's faces had grown even larger.

Yet during those two weeks we did more than just re-build a pre-school. We were able to engage with local Rwandans and hear their story of where the country is going, hear their views of what happened in the Spring of 1994 and hear their appreciation that we are now taking a belated interest in Rwanda, after turning our collective backs only 13 years ago.

The French dismissed the 1994 genocide as 'a local war' and as 'something Africans do'. We now recognise it was a total failure of the West. Helping solve the challenges Africans face today is helping avoid those challenges becoming the West's problems tomorrow. In a small way, in a corner of Kigali, we did just that, but just as importantly, we raised the profile of Rwanda on the British political conscience.

As Parliamentarians who regularly debate the issues of Africa from the comfort of the green benches, we returned all the richer in understanding those issues. The time we spent in Africa was an invaluable two weeks which I am sure Bob Geldof would approve of - even if the media would have had us back in our rainy constituencies for photo calls in wellies, holding brollies.

My thanks to all those who helped sponsor this project, in particular to Adam Murry who very kindly donated £5000 from the Murrey Foundation which takes a particular interest in Africa.

(All flights and accomodation were paid for by individuals and the carbon footprint of the flights were off set twice using two UN approved schemes).