hey there muzungu world!
my wife and I are in Kigali, Rwanda right now. a layover in Amsterdam and a long flight across the Sahara dropped us off Saturday night. I didn't sleep for at least 36 hours due to uncomfortable planes and adrenaline.
Kigali airport has scary guards. there are soldiers with machine guns at every major street corner. brick walls everywhere, often topped with shards of glass. most of the major roads here are paved but all the side roads are rutted dirt. everyone rides motorcycle taxis, rides very old-looking bicycles (single speed- push the bike uphill and hang on for dear life on the downhills), or drives like crazy in Landrovers or vans. or they walk, lots of walkers. it's pretty dry and cool here due to the altitude. all the posh buildings are at the tops of hills and the slums are at the bottom of the hills.
We attended an English language church service this morning and stayed for part of the local dialect service. It was awesome. The praise music as we expected was incredible. We ate at Hotel des Mille Collines, site of the story in the movie "Hotel Rwanda." the hotel is super swanky! I have managed to not get sick or go hungry on my narrow vegetarian diet so far. I'll probably accidentally de-veg myself before the end of the week, I hope I don't get sick. I couldn't help but look at this beautiful pool and realized 17 years ago that was the only drinking water. It was starting to become real.
Tonight our group of about 20 met a man, Athanase, who was 4 years old at the time of the 1994 genocide and survived. only to become a drug-dealing, thieving orphan. he ended up in jail and when he was released, he went back to the streets. he started visiting the children's services at Africa New Life and eventually got his life straight. now he's going to school and staying the straight path. Here more of his story here: http://vimeo.com/23416242
Tomorrow we are driving three hours to Goma on Lake Kivu, then a two-hour boat ride on the lake to this island where the hundreds generation of boys who were orphaned by the genocide are getting occupational training and education. it's apparently a controversial program but it seems to be working to rebuild the country. (we also learned that the government should be done linking up the whole country with fiber optic cables soon.) thousands of boys like the man we met grew up with no parents, no schools, and no one to care if they lived or died, much less got good grades in school, got jobs, took care of the families, etc.
other interesting things:
*having the word "muzungu" shouted at you randomly. it basically means "white person" and we whities stick out like something that sticks out a lot.
*dudes holding hands. when you're walking home with your brah after a soccer game, you hold hands. it's just part of the culture.
*scary traffic- very few stop signs, no speed limits, sharing the narrow roads with bikes, motorcycles, pedestrians, and vans is nuts. the cops stopped us because two of the people on our bus were standing, but you can drive around as fast as you want and do u-turns in the middle of a street and no one seems to care.
*markets- you can shop among mounds of tiny fish, knock-off fashion clothing, used clothes, and just about anything else. I have not converted any USD to Rwandan Francs yet, so I have not bought anything.
*eating at a swanky restaurant and then roaming the streets with beggars and limping children holding their hands out for spare change is really uncomfortable and I'm glad we won't do that anymore this week.
We still have a very full week ahead of us, including visiting our sponsored kid in Uganda, and a spotty internet connection, so I'll upload photos and more stories when I can. I will try to upload photos in here later, our internet connection keeps crapping out every five minutes.
-Jonathan
