First day and first impressions!

By now it feels like our first day here is long past, but I haven't had any time to blog about it yet and it deserves some mention! It was an interesting mix of crazy and amazing but it certainly told us that there would be plenty to remember on this trip! We got into Kigali Friday evening, stopped at our house to drop off our stuff and pick rooms, then went to dinner at a restaurant called Papyrus with Cassien and our housemates Nessa and Ciaran. Cassien does a ton of stuff with HDI and is our main contact there. Nessa and Ciaran are a couple from Ireland who are both doing long-term volunteering here; Nessa is with us at HDI and Ciaran works for Never Again Rwanda. Papyrus had decent food but we soon learned that restaurant service in Rwanda is extreeeeeemely slow.

Here is where we live!

Our house, the "muzungu house." Muzungu = white person. The five of us that live here seem to be the only white people in the area, as we are reminded by all the "Muzungu!!" shouts and curious stares we get when we go out. It's entertaining to us, but strange to think of how wildly inappropriate it would be to shout someone's race at them in the United States. 

My room! I was surprised to learn we would all get our own rooms, and my bed is super comfy!

Saturday began with some form of unfortunate bits of culture-shock for each of us. I promptly threw up after eating breakfast, while Maggie and Abby got lost on the dusty streets of Kicukiro, the area we live in. After we got those typical foreigner mishaps out of the way, we got all dressed up to head to the wedding of HDI's executive director, Dr. Kagaba!

Nessa, me, Maggie, Abby and Cassien, all dressed up and ready to go! We could walk to the church, as well as most other places, and I'm super excited to walk so much! The roads in our area are mostly dust, so I'll have to get used to having it in my nose whenever I go outside!

The wedding! You can just barely see the bride and groom up at the altar. There was a large crowd and it was a big church! I'm sure I would have enjoyed the service more if it was in English, so for once I was glad I arrived an hour late to church. Also, it is no big deal to go in and out of a Rwandan wedding, even if it is to answer your phone!

One of the first things I have noticed in Rwanda is that everyone always looks SO GOOD.  I mean, look at these women's dresses? Even when they're not in traditional and/or dress attire, people tend to dress quite well here.

Heading to the reception at the back of the bus, where all the cool kids sit!

One of many traditional dances at the reception. Honestly, I wish you all could have been there to see this - the dances were incredible and all the dancers so beautiful!

 A little bit that we learned about Rwandan weddings: apparently there are three parts called the introduction, the civil part, and the church part. We only went to the church part, which included the ceremony and the reception, much like a typical American wedding. I'm not entirely sure what the other two parts are - if you're dying to know you can google it - but I found it interesting that a whole American wedding is just one part of a Rwandan wedding!

A couple more little events to complete our crazy day: Nessa's phone was stolen out of her dress pocket, and we came home to discover that someone had broken in through the ceiling (and had been doing so for a while)! We figured out it was probably the house boy, and he hasn't stolen anything of ours since our housemates advised us to keep our bedrooms locked. The eventfulness of our first day isn't typical of a Rwandan experience, but it quickly taught us that to adjust to a different culture, we sometimes need to tell ourselves: "It'll make a great story later!"