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...and I'm in Rwanda. The ride should have been 12 hours (by car it's more like 7-8 hours) but the bus had three flat tires. You can't even imagine how bumpy this ride is, and I took an overnight one so I did not sleep! Waking up at the border to go through immigration at 4 am was also not pleasant. I think I'll fly back...
The sign above is posted in the bathroom at NFT, a human resource company where my company shares an office (by share I mean we have one tiny room that we cram into). No peeing on the seat, written in multiple languages in case you don't understand.
Kigali, the capital, is a big change from Kampala, it's very nice. I've heard people say that it's "Africa light,"
ridiculously nice and clean here with very solid roads) now just weeks after
arriving in Kampala. I had just found a place to live and had met a few people
when I was asked by my work to come over here. I’ll be here for a month and I'm
supposedly an MFI (micro finance) "expert" in trying to get a program
running with a cool micro finance organization. Apparently in April they have a
memorial week where no one does any business and everyone just remembers the
genocide, which I’m sure is tragic.
Rwanda is sort of the opposite of what I expected. I think I really have a skewed perspective in general of Africa because I never spent that much time in major cities like this in my past visits. But Kigali in particular seems like a 1st world city. But they go one step further, when you have someone like Kugame for President you can just make things happen more easily – there’s no plastic bags allowed in the country and this is enforced. There’s also a cleanup day on the last Saturday of the month and you can be fined if you don’t send someone from your household to represent you and help clean. This is taken very seriously, I'm not sure what to do as a muzungu (white guy).
I was also surprised that a lot of people, even most maybe,
at this point don’t speak French here. While many restaurants and roads have
French names , it does not feel like a Francophone African country. English is
probably more common, and everyone seems to speak Kinyarwanda. But it’s weird
not knowing which language to start in when you great someone. It seems like a
lot of people that were forced to go abroad in the genocide times learned
English and in addition to not being huge fans of the French here, there is a
strategic and economic advantage for Rwanda to join the Anglophone East African
block. But it’s a strange mix here, they drive on the right, but you can feel a
British influence here, while economic monetary conversions are made to
dollars.
In my first weekend here I played in a huge annual Frisbee
tournament. Before coming to East Africa I didn’t know that ultimate Frisbee
was even a thing. I assumed it was just
a hippie white liberal arts college’s thing but this tournament had more than
just British, French, and American players, there were people from Burundi,
Kenya, Uganda, and of course Rwanda. There’s a social aspect to the game that
distinguishes it from soccer, basketball, or other sports. There’s a whole lot
of running involved, which I don’t mind, but some people are seriously into the
game and are a little more intense than what I can tolerate. Tennis seems to be
a lot bigger here in Uganda (and soccer too) so I’ll probably start to seek
that out.
I haven’t had a chance to blog as much as I want because
internet is so ridiculously slow and I haven’t bought a modem for home use.
When I do have internet, I can't really download things, or even watch YouTube
videos. Can you imagine, Friday afternoons at the office at the office and you
can't watch YouTube videos?!
I'm off to Gisenyi for the weekend to do some work at the Congolese border
Until then,
Akesselfish
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