Inshuti Wanjye

This title means “my friend” in Kinyarwanda. We’ve made quite a few friends during our time in Rwanda, so you’re going to hear about some of them! (and some other fun from the past week).

When we had gone to the Forum in Uganda, we met many other GlobeMed GROW teams like ourselves, working for East African NGOs for the summer. Among these other teams was the GROW team from Middlebury College, who has been working for Gardens for Health International (GHI) just outside of Kigali. This past week, we had the chance to drive over to GHI with Cassien to see what work they have been doing! We were given a short tour of their office and farming area with an explanation of their project, them we joined the staff/community for lunch! GHI generally trains mothers about nutrition and health, while helping them start their own gardens to help feed their families nutritionally. It sounded like a really great organization!

The GHI office

One of the dogs on the property :) We saw two and they were so cute! And made me really miss my dog :/

Pig roast for the community dinner that would happen later that night. Gross.

Heading out to see the gardens! Cate is the first one heading out, followed by Ryan. They are the two GlobeMed students that are partnered with GHI.

This is Cassien, my boss at HDI! We all took pictures to pass some time as we waited for the HDI car to come for us.

On Saturday, the three of us were invited to go to the Expo with Maureen and Juliet, two HDI staff. It reminded me so much of the expo at the Wisconsin State Fair! There were a lot of crafty stores with clothing and jewelry, and a few sort-of “TV ad” stores with mops or blenders, similar to at the Wisconsin Fair.

Abby, Maureen and Maggie checking out a shop at the Expo. Notice the panels of tile and wood next to them for people to demonstrate the mops they are selling! Just like Wisco :) 

They had quite a few cool food designs here! I'm not sure what they were trying to sell...since selling the produce would have messed up their designs...

Right after the Expo we headed to our favorite market in Kimironko. Our first time there, we found a woman made Josephine and her fabric store. We were able to pick out fabric and describe a piece of clothing that we want made from it, and she has a really good seamstress to make it for us! And it’s cheap compared to clothes in the US! We’ve been there a few times already – it’s pretty addicting. We’ve gotten mixes of shirts, pants, and skirts! Abby recently got a dress. I had to stop after three things since I’ll probably find something like this in Ecuador too :)

Abby sitting in the little fabric stall!

Fabric :) I love this part of the market!

We got home just in time to head out again to a Chinese restaurant for Ryan’s birthday (one of the GlobeMedders at GHI). After dinner we wondered what we should do to pass time before going to a club, and decided to come back to our house to play beer pong! I should be pretty bad at it since I had only ever played once before, but to everyone’s surprise, I accidentally made a “death cup” shot that won the first game!

Teaching our housemates how to play! I guess beer pong is not a thing in Ireland :)

Every good game of beer pong needs a custodian!

Once we passed enough time, we headed out to the clubs! The three of us were pretty excited since we’re not allowed to go out dancing in the US. We started at this place called Papyrus (the same place we had our first meal in Kigali), which was a lot of fun! There was usually a good mix of American music we were familiar with and a few songs we didn’t know. Then we headed to the part of the night we were most looking forward to: the mirror club. We heard a lot about this place where apparently there are mirrors all over, and strange men just stand in front of the mirrors and dance with themselves, intent on not involving anyone else in their groove. The actual experience was not quite what it was talked up to be, but we still had a great time! There was one wall that was a giant mirror, and there were a few times we caught people dancing with their reflections. We definitely tried it, too :)

Cassien, Abby and I in the taxi!

The famed mirror that we danced with ourselves in! 

The Americans of the group! So basically, the group minus Cassien. Maggie, Ryan, Brett, Abby, and me!

Sunday morning I went to Christian Life Assembly for the last time. I have really enjoyed worshipping and learning there and am sad to leave! Once the service ended, I found Maureen and Juliet and Maureen’s friend Kevin, who just moved from Kenya. (I enjoy the fact that there is someone who is newer to Rwanda than me! Haha). We walked over to Bourbon for coffee and lunch – a nice Sunday afternoon with people and a place I’ll definitely miss when I go home!

Maureen took a picture for me in front of church once the service was over :) 

Me, Juliet and Maureen at Bourbon coffee!

This Monday, and the one before, we finally got around to going to the quiz night we had been hearing about! We met up with the other GlobeMedders and some of their GHI friends at a restaurant called Sole Luna for pizza and trivia. Last Monday was a lot of fun, but this Monday’s quiz was just obscenely hard and not fun. I’m for sure excited to be able to do trivia in the VR (Lawrence’s campus bar) when I get back to Lawrence in January!

We just have our SHARE training week, which is in progress, and a relaxing weekend at Lake Kivu ahead of us before we go home! I am sad to be leaving Rwanda and everything I have enjoyed here, but at the same time I am very excited to go home and see everyone/do everything I have been missing! I guess getting sick with worms made me a little more homesick as well, but that’s a different story! :)    

East Africa Forum

This weekend we had an amazing opportunity to go to Kampala, Uganda to meet with 45 other GlobeMed students and their partner organizations from Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and Togo. It was the first annual East Africa Forum, put on by GlobeMed National Office so that the East African NGOs (and a few West African NGOs) can network and brainstorm together! They always say that GlobeMed events are like getting together with your family that you’ve never met, and I have always been skeptical. But really, it is so easy to quickly befriend people who are across the world with you for the same purposes!

The countries represented in the East Africa Forum! The theme was "Uniting communities for sustainable action."

We came to Kampala a day early with the intention of seeing some sites in the city. We got to the bus station in Kigali at 5:00 for our 5:30 departure time! We were told that the bus ride would be 7-9 hours, so we settled in our seats with some books and MCAT study materials (definitely not me)! Two hours later, we hit the border and got out to go through the customs office (just a stand by the road). When we tried to get back on the bus, the guy on it was just like “No, walk to Kampala” and we were worried for a second that the bus ride just ended there and we had to figure out the rest! Then we realized that we had to walk like a quarter-mile to the Ugandan customs window to get our visas before getting back on the bus. Same story on the way home…it was a little sketchy but not too bad! As long as we didn’t give our passport to any people on the street claiming to help us, otherwise they would have stolen it, we heard. Also, this was our first time being forced to pee in holes instead of toilets. Quite a skill! 

Book I read on the bus - really worth your time! Paul Farmer, whose life this author follows, is a great example of someone not only trying to heal the world, but full of genuine compassion as well.

These are your future doctors, studying for the MCAT.

Just enjoying the ride.

Ugandan countryside! I like Rwanda's patchy hills better, but this was still nice to see! There's a lot of cows and goats in the distance!

The Rwandan customs office.

Once we were 10 hours into the bus ride, we started to go a little crazy. (Remember, it was only supposed to take 7-9 hours). Also, they were playing the same short CD on repeat the entire time, aside from a few hours in the beginning.

Going craaaaaaazy/rocking out to the music we heard for the 50th time.

12 hours of bus later we finally arrived in Kampala! Our hotel reservation had fallen through late the night before we left, so our first goal was to find somewhere to stay. We didn’t have any luck in the city but remembered Nessa and Ciaran telling us about Backpacker’s Hostel in the outskirts of town, so we took some motos there. I’ll just leave it at: the motos in Kigali are SUPER safe compared to Kampala (or anywhere else, we’ve heard). Also, Kampala is really busy and crowded. We definitely like the calmness of Kigali, which we thought was busy before we got to Kampala. The hostel we stayed at turned out to be really nice, and we slept like 12 hours that night.

Looking for somewhere to stay! Oops.

Our bunk room at Backpacker's Hostel

Nice little courtyard at the hostel!

We met at a different hotel the next morning and looked around the area a bit before getting to Ndere Cultural Center, where we would spend the weekend! Ndere was really nice (not like fancy, but it had everything we needed and was cute and comfy)! Throughout the conference there were many speakers, mostly from African organizations, who had a lot of wisdom to give us concerning topics like media use to advocacy. Cassien, our HDI guy, gave a short speech on advocacy and everyone really liked hearing from him! 

Appropriate that the bartender in our group has her own bar in Kampala. Who knew?!

When we were walking around looking for a place to eat, we followed a billboard that said, "Get your Asian experience!" It took us to this reeeally nice Chinese restaurant!

One of the GlobeMed partner organizations in Nairobi, Kenya is called U-Tena and they teach health lessons to kids through drama and other art forms. This is their first performance for us. It was really cool!

Maggie joining in on the dance!

Abby and my little room at Ndere :)

The common area in our set of rooms. It had 3 rooms and a bathroom!

First set of presentations and panels - GlobeMedders all ready to learn!

Our National Office Executive Director, Maya, dancing with U-Tena! 

First panel, on "cross-sector perspectives on partnership." This was interesting, at it was great to hear someone from the Segal Family Foundation talk about how sustainability and partnership are a part of that foundations goals when they donate to NGOs. 

Cassien talking about advocacy!

Lawrence GROW team!

We also had some time to just hang out and get to know each other, which was full of fun and laughter! We made new friends, and already made plans to go clubbing with another group from the Kigali area for one of their members’ birthday next weekend :)

Fun night with GlobeMedders once we all arrived!

Night out at an Indian restaurant. It was so good!

The currency switch can make our bills look a little alarming.

After stopping at a cute craft place, where I got some colorful pants that I am in love with, we boarded the bus back to Kigali! This one was overnight, but I didn’t sleep more than like a half hour because the guy next to me was a little too big for his seat (to be fair, the seats are small. Anyone bigger than me would be too big for his or her seat). Luckily, this bus ride was only 10 hours and we got home at 4:30am. The Forum was a really great experience, and talking with everyone else from GlobeMed really gave me the energy to finish this internship strong!

My fav water brand! So cute.

MONKEYS mostly

This past week we spent a lot of time working, but that didn’t stop us from having a good time in and out of the office! Our typical week includes us all getting up sometime between 6 and 7 to go running, going to work, taking an after-lunch walk to a shop to buy a Coke Zero, working, then figuring out dinner. On Monday (I think) we made dinner for our little muzungu “family” that turned out really well! We mixed a lot of vegetables, garlic, cilantro and beer into a sauce that we put over pasta, with fruit salad for dessert!

Our delicious pasta sauce! I thought we were just experimenting, but Maggie knew what she was doing and it was so good! 

Our kitchen is kind-of dark even with the lights, so we like to use a headlamp when cooking or doing dishes. Definitely adds to the experience! 

Cutting a mango... actually the hardest thing to cut in the world. Major props to whoever cuts those dried mango strips we get at school, since it just ends up as mush when I try. 

Housemates! (Left to right) me, Nessa, Ciaran, Abby and Maggie!

Tuesday (maybe…I really don’t remember days well) we went to Meze Fresh for dinner again, which I said in my last post is like a Rwandan Chipotle. Obviously, we are fans. There are quite a few other muzungus (white people) who frequent this place. One strange thing about us since we’ve been getting used to living here is that we have started to become weirded out by seeing white people. Just like many people in our area do when we pass, we now catch ourselves staring and pointing out the “muzungu” to each other. It’s a really strange feeling that I never expected to have since the U.S. has so much diversity! It is quite an experience being white here, though. Abby compared our encounters with neighborhood children to being like the ice-cream truck. Whenever we pass, they run out of their houses yelling, “muzungu, yaaay!” They are VERY cute, so I certainly don’t mind being chased down by them! They also always say “Good morning!” regardless of the time of day, so we’ve taken to just replying back with “Good morning!” I hope we don’t get too used to that and make fools of ourselves when we’re back home. On Thursday, we made dinner with Nessa and Ciaran and invited Cassien (our main HDI guy) over to eat with us! I’ll confess that I didn’t help much with dinner since I really needed to do laundry. It was a curry dish and dal with rice and naan bread, which was soooo good! We had a nice time with Cassien here, and then we ran out of water. We didn’t get to shower or wash anything (including our faces and hands) until today, Sunday. Gross. But as Maggie would say, “It’s whatever.”

Two other somewhat eventful things happened during our lunch breaks at work. One time when we were coming back to the office with Cokes and waters, we passed a man sitting casually on some stairs by the road. When he saw us, he immediately started shouting “GIVE ME THAT WATER. GIVE ME IT. GIVE IT TO ME!” until we were out of his sight again. It was pretty startling. Then, another time coming back from getting soda, some guy who was walking past Abby and I got hit by a car. Sometimes cars drive really close to the side of the road, and this one nipped the guy’s hip! It sound really loud, but nobody make a big deal about it. He just walked on, holding his hip in pain.

Friday was nice because we took our computers and went to Bourbon (Rwandan Starbucks) for the whole workday for a change of scenery! We had dinner in town and then headed home because of the early Saturday morning we were anticipating. We left the house the next morning at 5am to make the 2-hour drive to Volcanoes National Park! My eyes kept falling shut, but then as soon as they did I would get carsick and force them open again to watch out the front of the car. When people call Rwanda the land of 1000 hills, they are NOT kidding. There are so many, and they are so beautiful! We got to see the sun rise on our way there.

Sunrise :) Our driver pulled over because he knew we would want to take pictures!

Preview to the beautiful Rwandan countryside! It's 10X better once we get further away from the city air, and hopefully I'll be able to get some good pictures of it later! Every single bit of every hill has farm patches all over it, so it looks like a giant quilt of green and brown :)

Just driving through the hills for hours. I actually got pretty carsick for the first time in my life.

There are five volcanoes in this park in the northwest of Rwanda. We had originally wanted to go there to see the mountain gorillas, but then we found out a few weeks ago that it is SUPER expensive…like around $800 or $900 I think. Yeah right. So, we found out that going to trek the Golden Monkeys is way cheaper, and that’s what we did! It was so worth it – there were so many of them so close to us, and they were extremely cute!

Abby smelling the eucalyptus leaves that our guide showed us!

Then he made her try a "happy gorilla" noise :) 

CHAMELEON. I almost liked this better then the monkeys. Almost. Also, it made me miss my gecko.

One of the volcanoes of Volcanoes National Park. Apparently on the tallest one, you can hike a full day to the top, then camp out, then hike back down. Without question, if I ever make it back to Rwanda (which I hope I will!) I am doing that hike. 

Our gorilla walking sticks :) Completely unnecessary for our short hike, but they looked cool so whatever!

Our tour group going through the bamboo forest at the base of the volcano. 

Our tour guide was ridiculous! He would often impersonate the gorillas, including frequent stops to just pick things in the forest and eat them. He definitely made the trek interesting and funny! 

Hello, malaria.

A pretty opening in the forest where we dropped our bags with some guides before going to where the monkeys actually were eating and sitting.

Volcanic rock just in time to remind us that we're on a volcano! So cool!

And here are the monkey pictures! I had so many since they were all so close, but limited it here for your sake. I'll put more on facebook when I get home and have enough internet to upload them!

Just hangin' out with all the muzungus in the woods.

 We were amused and a little disheartened by our tour group. They were all old, typical, rich American tourists doing ignorant things like getting up in the faces of Rwandan children to take pictures without asking or even saying hi to them. It was clear they weren’t here to appreciate Rwanda, just the primates it has in the mountains. I guess it’s nice to stimulate Rwanda’s tourism economy, but I think it’s definitely worthwhile to see the people of a place you go to and not just it’s nature. I’m glad that when I tell people, “Rwanda is so beautiful” I can refer to the Rwandan people I meet as well, and I think that’s an important aspect of travelling.