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.

A little more of Kigali!

With Thursday off of work for a holiday and cancelled weekend plans, we were free to do some Kigali-exploring these past few days! With that exploring came a better understanding of the transportation systems here, which were a shock to a suburban girl who has never had to use public transportation in her life.

Squeezed into the bus. It doesn't look super crowded in this picture, but they typically fit as many people as possible into them. Often, we end up sharing seats.

On Thursday we tried the buses for the first time. They’re a little confusing, but I don’t have any American public bus experience so I won’t try to make any comparisons. We went to a part of Kigali called Nyamirambo to hike up Mount Kigali. It’s not much of a mountain, but it was still beautiful and fun to hike. We were told we would run into an army base at the top of the mountain, but we never found it. We did come to a little village or neighborhood, and we met a guy who talked to us the whole way back down the mountain! When he asked us about our time in Rwanda, and we told him we were here for six weeks to work, he said something along the lines of, “You know, you could stay here for a long time and marry Rwandan men!” Then when we told him we have boyfriends in the US, he told us to send our little sisters. So, Rachel, you have a Rwandan man waiting for you! :P Sorry Shaun! He did tell us a lot more about Rwanda in general, and we had a good time chatting with him!

The beautiful hills of Kigali. There is a lot of dust/smoke/pollution in the air from dirt roads and the practice of burning all the garbage (ew) so it's not a very clear view, but just wait until I get some good pictures of the hills in the rural areas! They are amazing. 

Dirt everywhere, even on the bushes! We've gotten used to breathing it - for the most part. I still have a hard time breathing during some of my morning runs.

Gross feet. We have accepted the fact that even if we wash them every day, our feet will be brown until we have washed them a few times in the U.S.

Abby and Maggie on our trail up the mountain! 

Rooster! We were hoping to see more animals on this hike (basically just more chickens and goats), but this little guy was as good as it got. 

I love caves. In case you are wondering, I did not go in, but I really wanted to.

The guy I was talking about that walked us down the mountain was nice and took this picture of us!

We got some classic Rwandan food in Nyamirambo when we got back down. This is a fish brochette (basically a kabob) with chips (fries). It was so good! 

Saturday was the day of our first genocide memorial visit. We went with our new friend Maureen, who works with us at HDI and is from Kenya. The memorial was something I won’t forget – it was horrendous to read about how people can so easily be convinced that their friends and neighbors are the enemy and that they should torture and kill everyone just because of the ethnicity written on their ID card. Periodically, there were videos we could play that have personal testimonies. There were stories of teens that watched their entire families be slaughtered by family friends, wives whose husbands were killed right in front of them, and more. What struck me the most is not just that so many people killed those around them, but that they made it as brutal as possible. So much torture and suffering was involved before people’s lives were actually ended. It was also so sad to read about how ignorant and stupid the international world was while this was happening – heck, the French government was even supplying the killing side with weapons! Everything about the genocide is absolutely disgusting, but it’s so important that we know about it. The whole event was the product of the simple manipulation of people by the government. Awareness of our human weakness is where we should start for avoiding things like this in the future.

Flowers on top of the mass grave outside of the memorial. They say, "NEVER AGAIN" on them.

After the memorial and some time sitting at a nearby restaurant, we went home to meet up with our housemates and try a new restaurant, Meze Fresh. Guys, this is Chipotle in Rwanda. We were so happy, and we have already been there a second time. Actually, it’s Chipotle with a bar and an 18-year-old drinking age. Though we haven’t taken advantage of the bar yet, we are looking forward to bringing our computers and spending an evening there with burritos and cocktails.

On Sunday, I joined Maureen at her church here, Christian Life Assembly. I wasn’t sure what to expect… all I knew was that the service would be in English! To my surprise, it was EXACTLY like Christ the Rock (the church I attend while I’m at Lawrence). It was the same set-up inside and roughly the same size. Worship had the same type of music and a worship band. People may have been slightly more enthusiastic, like moving and clapping, but that was one of only a few differences. It had a powerful message about the cross and what that should mean to us today, preached in a similar style to Bill Lenz (the pastor at CTR). The similarity was so strange, but it was so comforting to be there and be reminded of home while fellowshipping with Christians from around the world!

Christian Life Assembly from the hill we walk down to get there!

We went to the market again when I got home and bought some vegetables, grains and fruits to attempt cooking here. It was our first time going to the market alone, but we did an okay job at asking about prices! Once we dropped off our food at home, we hopped on some motos to go to Mille Collines, better known as Hotel Rwanda, where 1,268 people took refuge during the genocide. We met up with Maureen again and splurged a little bit to spend the afternoon eating their delicious brunch and swimming in their pool! It was super hot out that day, so jumping in the cold pool and laying in the sun felt great! After that, since we were in the city already, we went to the movie theater in Kigali Tower and saw the new Superman movie in 3D. It was intense and good, but for some reason movies like that put me in a bad mood. I think it’s that feeling that the bad guy can just pop out of nowhere and you’re never safe that I get from these movies. 

Mmmm pretty food. Those are beans in those bowls - they are so colorful! I have to say, I loooove going to a market to get fresh food!

A "swimming pool" at the swimming pool!

Us with Maureen at Mille Collines!

When I got home I got to Skype with JOSIE and hear about her and Noble getting engaged! I’m so excited for them and can’t wait to see how God will work through that amazing couple! I’m looking forward to Skyping Hailey next week to hear all about her and Ebiji’s engagement too! My friends are growing up so fast :)

It's business time.

So we’ve had our fun, especially with two holidays last week (July 1^st is Independence Day and July 4^th is Liberation Day), but now it’s time to get to work. We’ve had a few days of work at Health Development Initiative (HDI), and already we’ve gotten to experience a lot and get a pretty decent idea of what we’ll be doing with them this summer. HDI does a lot of different public-health related work around Rwanda, but we are specifically working on their sexual health and reproductive education (SHARE) program. This program focuses on using peer education as a tool to spread knowledge about HIV/AIDS and general sexual/reproductive health. 

Walking into work!

On our first day we got to plan a presentation about HIV/AIDS for a secondary school’s Anti-AIDS club event. As it always is with a new job, it was a little frustrating trying to figure out how the SHARE program works and how our work will fit into it, but I think we are getting the hang of what they are looking for and learning a lot from the process. The second day, we actually got to go to the school (I can’t remember the name, unfortunately) and judge a debate on the issue of, “Can we stop HIV/AIDS in this generation?” The students were very well informed and well spoken, and we have never seen such passion for the issue. It was really impressive! We gave our presentation afterwards, and learned that presenting in front of the group is probably one of the more boring methods we could have used. 

One of the girls on the opposition side of the debate making her case.

They had entertainment breaks between the debate and presentation, where they played loud music and some boys got up and danced. It definitely kept the event interesting! 

Group picture with us and the Anti-AIDS club! 

GROW team with two of the girls who debated the proposition side. They were very good and interesting to listen to!

Beautiful sunset as we waited for the HDI van to come pick us up.

For the next school visit, we planned a discussion (after a few misunderstandings about what we were to prepare) and had a lot more success with that route. Friday was when we had the discussion groups, at King David Academy. I really enjoyed talking to their extracurricular faculty advisor about that school system and thought it was a good way to run a school! I think I like their education system. Though to be honest, I can’t remember what it was – I just remember that I thought it was smart. :)

Me with my discussion group! We crowded around a table to talk about different methods for preventing HIV/AIDS and some recent HIV/AIDS milestones in Rwandan news. They talk about prevention as the "ABCs" (abstinence, be faithful, condom) so we discussed those methods and then I introduced some newer strategies such as putting pregnant/nursing mothers who are HIV+ on anti-retroviral drugs, male circumcision, microbicides, and a drug called Truvada.

One of the Anti-AIDS club leaders giving a summary to the entire club about the prevention methods we discussed. He was very thorough and a great speaker! He was in my discussion group and made some really good points about these newer drugs not being available in Rwanda, and definitely not available to the majority who are not wealthy. It caused me to wonder what the excitement about these new preventative measures was about if they don't reach the people who really need them. I'll be excited when they're cheap in places where HIV/AIDS is prevalent!

In the office, when we are not planning for school outings, we are researching and writing articles on various SHARE-related topics for the website we are helping to build, sharetank.org. This website was created last summer as on online resource for young people in Rwanda (and hopefully elsewhere) to find health information and ask questions. We are writing articles that will eventually be translated into Kinyarwanda and put on the website, which we will ideally get up and running this summer! In the future, we are anticipating more school visits, and a visit to one of HDI’s HIV/AIDS cooperatives, which I will tell you more about when we go! Although sitting at our computers full-time has made us go a little stir-crazy a few times, we really enjoy our work and are excited about what we get to be a part of! And as for the debate we judged earlier… the side that said, “Yes, we can stop HIV/AIDS in this generation” won. They have hope, and so do we!

Working hard, obviously. Don't worry, this was near the end of the day... we were decently sane and got work done the rest of the time :)

Rwandan training-wheels

We have explored and learned so much about Rwanda already thanks to our housemates, Nessa and Ciaran! (They are the "training-wheels" my title is referring to). The first couple nights and days we went out with them to get a sense of the area and how to navigate it. Going to the market for the first time was quite an experience. There were many tables with vendors selling various fruits and vegetables, and it was somewhat overwhelming just deciding what we wanted to eat for the next few days!

The market! I like the idea of cooking fresh and from scratch, so I am definitely excited about the market! I'm going to try to learn some numbers and other market-appropriate words in Kinyarwanda before I go again, otherwise it's just awkward trying to figure out how much to pay!

After walking to the market, we headed to a set of other stores to buy our internet modems. Some places have Wifi, but if you get a modem you can buy days of internet to use wherever you are! It's pretty great.

Another skill-set that was important to learn before they sent us off on our own - negotiating transportation. The most common and easiest way to get around is by taxi-moto (a motorcycle with a hired driver) but like the regular taxi, we have to be bold to negotiate a normal price for the distance we want, as they sometimes will try to get more money out of us since we're foreign. We also have to learn how to navigate and give directions by landmarks, not street names, as that's just how Rwandans do it.

Our first day on our own was Monday, which we had off of work since it is Rwanda's independence day. Shortly after lunch, we hopped on some motos and rode into town! Our first stop was the Belgian memorial, a really moving remembrance of just a few of the genocide-related atrocities. 10 Belgian peacekeepers were assassinated in this building.

The building where the Belgians were shot, as you can probably tell. We think this might have been a school building but we're not sure. The main room with all the bullet holes is left fairly bare as a memorial to the men who died there, while the other rooms serve as a mini genocide memorial with some reminders of human rights, shown below.

Human rights poster. It was nice for this memorial to have reminders of our goals as humanity in the midst of some of our biggest failures.

After this sobering reminder of the recent past of this nation, we headed toward the city to check out the big shopping center called Nakumet for things we can't get in markets. On the way, we found a nice, crafty shop that we spent some time looking around in. Also on the way, we passed a supermarket called Simba, so shout-out to my little gecko! (who, if you don't know, is named Simba).

awwww Simba <3 don't judge, I really like my gecko!

Walking into Nakumet was a strange experience... we were told there weren't even washing machines in Rwanda, yet this supermarket had rows of them for sale. It didn't quite feel like Rwanda anymore, that's for sure. We found some cleaning supplies, got excited about going home to clean the house, grabbed dinner at Lil' Vegas (so good!) and went home! I'd call that a successful first time out alone!

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!"

11,504 miles

11, 504 miles and three days later, we're finally in Kigali (as of Friday)!! Traveling from Tuesday to Friday was definitely tiring, but we had a great time seeing some other parts of the world during our long layovers! Seriously though, try sleeping two nights in a row in plane seats. It doesn't happen. We did try... look how ready we were!

Getting comfy with neck pillows and glasses! To bad it's still impossible to sleep on planes...

Our first stop outside of the U.S. was Paris, but just for Abby and I. Maggie got to spend some time in Munich on her way over. We spent 9 or 10 hours walking and riding trains around, trying to see as much as we could! I think we did pretty well considering how the 7-hour time difference completely erased Tuesday night for us and we hadn't slept.

Abby and I in front of Fontaine Saint-Michel! The other American tourists who took this picture for us must not have understood that we wanted the fountain in the background, but here is the bottom half at least!

Notre-Dame Cathedral! We went in for a quick walk around the main floor. It was beautiful, and it would have been worth spending more time in if we didn't have all of our carry-ons with us and if we had more energy!

Delicious (and huge!) crepes with mozzarella. While we were walking from Notre-Dame toward Musée d'Orsay, we decided to try some less touristy roads that were further away from the river. We found some cool places like this crepe place, but the roads were far from parallel and we had to use our map quite a few times to get back on track.

Mustache sign? It took me days to find out that it actually means road-bump. This was in one of the alleys we were in as we tried to take a "path less traveled" between our tourist sites. 

Sooo tired after a long day on no sleep! Abby kept trying to give up on carrying her suitcase down the stairs, but it was so loud as it thunked down that she ended up picking it up every time! This is outside the Musée d'Orsay, which Abby said was really cool the last time she was here, but we didn't have the energy to go in so we just sat outside for a while.

Instagram-worthy? I don't know, but this tea was so good, and it was so nice to sit down for a while! Plus, their bathroom was down some stairs and now everyone knows about my weird obsession with basements :)

Tour Eiffel! We didn't go up to the top because of a "social dispute," according to the sign, whatever that means, but we took some pictures and went to relax in the grass off to the side! "Relaxing in the grass" really just meant sitting there like zombies staring off into space for a half an hour, then mustering up the energy to go find food and head back to the airport.

Paris was a really cool city to see and there seemed to be so much more worth visiting if we had had the time! Our overall impression was that the buildings are either ancient or space-age. There was a lot of really beautiful architecture and we realized how the fast pace of development at home and the emphasis on convenience and function resulted in a lot of comparatively boring buildings in the U.S. On the space-age side, we saw outdoor public bathrooms that were totally automatic and metallic, with a "wash cycle" in between uses that cleans the toilet and floor. I don't know how else to describe them, but they were really strange and futuristic. The airport was the other big space-age-looking thing that contrasted with the majority of the city. Walkways between terminals looked like giant air pipes, except with people flowing through them!

Being horizontal for the first time in a couple days - it felt amazing! We did some stretches on the gate floor, and then I fell asleep on it. Apparently people were laughing at me as they stepped around :)

Wednesday night was also spent in a plane, and although we expected to sleep the whole time, we still barely managed to. Thursday morning we arrived in Johannesburg, and after the long customs line, we finally met up with Maggie, who had arrived an hour earlier! We took some time to get to the hotel and shower, then we went to the Apartheid Museum. There was a special exhibit on Nelson Mandela, which was fascinating and inspiring to visit especially considering that we were in South Africa for one of his last days of life. The rest of the museum was extensive with a lot of reading, but the parts that I did look at were informative and heartbreaking at the same time. I personally don't understand the point of segregation based on the color of one's skin, and seeing some of the consequential inequalities reminded me of how big of a problem discrimination is and has been around the world and how it can easily spiral into something as horrible as the apartheid.

The GROW team on the roof of the Apartheid Museam in Johannesburg!  The city and part of the theme park can be seen in the background.

The Aviator Hotel, where we stayed overnight before our flight to Kigali. It was really nice, and the electric fences surrounding it were a stark reminder of the crime in the area, but also reassuring to us. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel, and it was very good! Everyone we met in Johannesburg was super friendly too!

 The flight from Johannesburg to Kigali was very quick, even with the stop in Bujumbura, Burundi. We got to Kigali way earlier than expected and spent a little time on the Wifi of a coffee shop until Cassien came to take us to our house! I will post more about our house in a bit, along with our crazy first day and the wedding we attended!