The best cure for terrible diarrhea…

 It turns out is not a two hour moto ride into the bush. Let me rewind to provide some background as to how I got to this point. After two trips to Africa and a fair amount of time spent on the continent my lucky streak of never getting sick finally came to end. I always thought I was especially strong or something, but maybe I’m just like the rest of you. It’s not like I ate some suspicious meat off of the ground this time, in fact I've only been eating “known” sources of food but somehow I got a 24 hour rush of the most horrible something or other that I will not describe here in more detail for the sensitivity of my younger readers (ok I don’t have any younger readers, that I know of, but I might have some one day) but just know that it involved stuff coming out both ends. I suspect in the end that it may have been a salad prepared at work and some strange dressing but I can’t know for sure. I also had some local water at home, which was boiled, so it shouldn't have been a problem (and no one else from my house got sick). Drinking boiled water here is actually really common in a way that it was not in other developing countries that I've been to. I wonder if the water is “good enough” that you can do that here for some reason but not in other places? It cuts down quite a bit on cost not having to buy water all the time.

Anyways, getting back to the story at present, so I had unfortunately timed some in-country travel with getting sick just perfectly which really sucked. I traveled to the “college” town of Butare this week to begin some work for my company on a new pilot project with a micro-finance organization who can help people get affordable loans for our product. It’s a nice town, although I used quotation marks around college because we couldn't find food past 10 pm and there was no real places to go out outside of the Friday-Sunday usual nights, which is really surprising for a town with the country’s biggest university (over 15,000 students go to Rwanda University). I suppose college town is a cultural U.S. thing (I know even in Europe in college towns students often live at home still with their families for example). I was already committed to visiting a rural area where people already wanted the loan for our product when I was sick, so when I felt slightly better at 6 am the morning of our excursion I decided to go, and we literally left at 6 am. Spending two hours on the back of a moto on rough, bumpy, and steep hilly roads though is a pretty horrid experience; my back was killing for two days after this. There’s no support structure, or something to really hold on to on these bikes. Considering how far we went, the $16 or so we paid is pretty cheap.

We were right next to the border in this town called Nyarugulu with Burundi when the “muzungu” show arrived. Meaning, me, the “muzungu” (white guy) was the attention of town and everyone who saw me, especially children thought it was important to tell me, or remind me, that yes, indeed, I was a muzungu, thank you Rwandans. It’s not that I find it that rude, it’s just weird. No one in America would see a black person and say “black guy,” hey, “black guy,” and not really say anything else either. Cultural difference I guess but I never know how to respond to this call. I sometimes just say “Rwandans,” “Rwandans” in return, but this seems to just confuse people.

the view from the road

me on the suzuki moto bike

Urwego bank (lender to the poor) loan officer Steven. Good friend now, with members collecting money in the field. Beautiful fields of maize in the background!

When I was told the trip would take two hours I actually didn't really believe it. But it was actually just about two hours. You can’t really believe people around here with time. People even joke about being on “African time,” which usually means being late. But in the case of the bus to go to Butare, they swore that the bus didn’t leave until 11:30 (I just missed the last bus around 11 and I wasn't wanting to wait) but looking down at my phone as we pulled out it was 11:20, I knew the 11:30 “time table” was a bunch of BS. The bus here leaves when the bus is full.