March 28, 2010; 14.45 CST
I have been and gone to Gisenyi, and it is an absolutely beautiful place. I feel as if I can relax there, among the palm trees and the innumerable flowers, on the coast of huge Lake Kivu in the middle of the mountains, on the border of several African states, with active volcanoes among the mountains … it is beautiful.
We left early in the morning, as planned, minus one – Anatol was very sick and so he stayed here. The drive to Gisenyi took about five hours, although we only covered about 120 km, since it was very up and down and roundabout. The road was built by Juvénal Habyarimana, the last dictator of Rwanda (and one of the instigators of the genocide), to go home, because Gisenyi was his home. Because of this, the road from Kigali to Gisenyi was the last to be rebuilt after the destruction of the genocide. All along the way, from Kigali on, we saw people working in the ditches or in the fields, doing the muganda just as Igor had said they would – the community work on the last Saturday of each month. We were indeed stopped a couple times, but everything checked out and we kept going.
We made three stops total, if I remember correctly: one where there were a bunch of eucalyptus trees; one at the very top of the mountains, on a sort of plain where there were lots of trucks (a parking lot, basically); and one in a small village next to the marakuja-juice factory, where we could buy food for lunch.
The eucalyptus trees were everywhere, Igor said, and they helped a bit with the rising altitude: since there was less oxygen, the eucalyptus would help us breathe. I didn’t notice much of a difference, but that’s okay. Cool anyway. At this stop, we met a couple kids (also everywhere), to whom I sort-of taught the heart-hand sign. I believe Roxanne has a picture with me and one girl doing the little hand heart. It was very cute.
At the next stop, at the top of the mountains, you could see the river flowing through the valley. I don’t remember off the top of my head what it’s called, but it was very orangey-brown and looked a little bit like the Red River (more orange, less brown). Igor said that since it connects to Lake Victoria, from which the Nile flows, and since part of the anti-Tutsi propaganda was that they originally came from Egypt and not from the actual region of Rwanda, extremist Hutus would speak of “showing the Tutsi the [name of river] road” – meaning they meant to kill them and throw them in the river (or kill them by throwing them in the river). Up here, we met a whole bunch of kids. A couple of the older girls (and a couple of the younger ones) were carrying babies on their back: one of them handed the baby off to a slightly older woman, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those young girls were the heads of their families for some reason or other. It was very sad for me.
It was about this time that I started noticing the kids asking for things, or rather demanding. I hadn’t noticed so much in the village – there was only one little boy who asked for chocolate – but the more rural kids were flat-out (but that may have been because their English and their French was very rudimentary): “give me money.” Now that I know by sound the Kinyarwanda word for money – “amafaranga” – I hear it more … umuzungu, amafaranga! White person, money! It is sort of upside-down for me that I as a white person am equated via fictionalization (as Igor said) to wealth: by the standards of my country, I am not terribly rich at all. I am very middle class, lower middle class once I leave home. But here I am rich.
The last stop was in the little village: I bought a baguette (300 Rwf), a pot of honey (1200 Rwf), two samosas (200 Rwf each) and a bottle of marakuja nectar (3000 Rwf) – for $8.57 USD, I bought what would have cost me roughly $30 CAD. They also had cheese, which I kind of wanted, but I didn’t want a whole quarter of a wheel, so I had some of someone else’s … wow. So very good. Tangy, sort of like a raw cheese, but soft like a cheddar and sweet like a mozzarella. Yum yum yum. Also, the honey tastes like raisins, and is liquid (and so kept leaking, ugh) –and even though I don’t like raisins, I like this honey.
When we got to Gisenyi, we stopped at an upper-class hotel (I believe Igor said $50 USD a night … and the place was amazing) for a drink. Driving into the city, we weren’t entirely sure where to look when Igor told us to look at the lake – and then Mikey exclaimed, “That’s not the sky. That’s the lake!” and we all figured out that indeed what we were looking at was not the sky, but the huge expanse of Lake Kivu. The view from this hotel (Le Belvedere) was astonishing. Words don’t do it justice – I will put pictures in.
After our drinks at Le Belvedere, we went to the guest house we were staying the night in and settled in. We all slept in the same room on the floor on mattresses, and had brought our pillows and comforters from Bel Air Inn. After quickly settling in, we got into our bathing suits and went (after a rather long wait) to Kivu Beach, just by the Serena Hotel. The water was almost warm – we could go in and not freeze! Such a novel idea … It wasn’t very sunny, being as it’s the rainy season now (or almost), but it was warm and calm and a little breezy even. It would have been nice to have been there for longer than forty-five minutes, or with the sun, or both, but it was lovely anyway. You can get out of the water there and not be cold – all of us Winnipeggers were totally unused to this concept. And the view, as is any view of Lake Kivu, is amazing.
We went back to the guest house after the beach and got changed to go to the restaurant, La Corniche, where we had a buffet of pretty much all the same food as we’d been having at Bel Air (difference: the spinach and the meat was better at La Corniche, but the rice, the beans and the fries are better at Bel Air) and played a lot of games of Would You Rather while eating and after. I took lots of photos, including trying to get one of the glowing volcano in the distance, and plenty of plant life. It started pouring while we were eating, and I have photos of me in the rain, trying to look ecstatic in the wonderful, wonderful, not freezing cold rain – but it was kind of hard, as it was raining pretty heavily and making me squint. But it’s beautiful rain: it’s not cold! You can walk in it! You just get wet, and then a little cold, but it’s so wonderful here …
We came back to the guest house, dried off and changed into pyjamas, and organized the room with all the mattresses. I got to use Rodrigue’s laptop briefly to check my email (30 messages, as I had predicted; all but 7 were useless), and I sent off an email to John and one to Dad. Rodrigue explained the process of Rwandan courtship to Mme Fréchette while I was writing, and the whole thing is incredibly complicated: for the guy and girl to get to know each other alone, it must all be done silently and entirely in secret; then when the guy decides he wants to marry the girl, he has to send a representative to the girl’s family to present himself; if the family likes what they hear, they will ask to meet him and that comes next; if all goes well, there is a huge party where all of both families meet (paid by the guy’s family, and the guy must pay a price for the bride – generally a certain amount of cows, Rodrigue said, and no joke); then there is a public ceremony and the guy and girl get married. Rodrigue said that if you don’t follow that, you can end up being threatened with machetes … and he wasn’t kidding, apparently. I’m glad I live where I live and in my culture and that it isn’t nearly that complicated or expensive … oh, and if the wife leaves and goes back to her parents, if the guy wants her back he pretty much has to do the same thing over again. Yikes.
I fell asleep listening to the songs that John and I recorded, and thinking about how beautiful it is in Gisenyi – the yard of our guesthouse was ringed and covered in flowers and greenery: I took lots of pictures the next morning.
I woke up a little before six this morning, and listened to Sting for two hours – mostly the Fields of Gold album because I woke up with that stuck in my head. I ended up wandering around the yard for a while taking pictures and still listening to Sting; I put on sunscreen because I wasn’t sure whether we were going swimming again or not, and it was a good thing I did because lots of other people got very burnt. We took the bus along the presidential route (open to us through Igor’s connections) to a peninsula where we had breakfast (omelettes, toast and fruit – good food and amazing plants again) at a hotel called Paradise Malahide.
After breakfast and all the photos, we took a tour to what Igor called Spice Island: there were cloves growing there (I had always wondered how cloves grew – they grow on trees, turns out), along with rosemary and lemon trees, and lots of spiders. Honestly, the amount of spiders even creeped me out a bit, but they never crawled on us and were little grey-brown things. Igor didn’t even mention them, so we weren’t worried. After Spice Island, the boat continued to another peninsula where there are natural hot springs, coming out of the ground heated by the volcano and sulphuric to the point where it makes yellow algae; the water is honestly boiling hot: you can barely touch it. The guardian of the hot springs has been guarding said hot springs for over sixty years, Igor said. Also on this peninsula were coffee trees (had I time and would it not have deprived someone of a job, I would have picked a few handfuls and roasted them myself). We could also see the fishing industry and the gas industry: the boats are really cool, and Lake Kivu is the only lake in the world, I think, where the water is mixed with methane gas because of the mountains and the volcanoes and stuff – so they extract the methane, and in extracting the methane you create electricity. There is one platform already that churns out 20 MW, and Igor said another was starting tomorrow that would churn out 5.
A little ways along the coast from the restaurant at which we had breakfast was a church, or more like a gathering of people in a square. It was Palm Sunday today, which Roxanne reminded me of, and while we were having breakfast, the people in the church never stopped singing loud and clear. It made me very happy, but a little sad since I would have loved to join in the singing and grab some fresh palm branches. We actually drove past a baptism going on in the lake, and that was really cool too.
I went on the second boat tour (each boat only held 15 and we were twice that), and while Roxanne and I waited we sat in the shade and talked with Manu and Claude (our driver). They asked what I wanted to do, since they knew I sang, and I told them my plans. I said to Roxanne later that maybe I would come back to Rwanda and start the Kigali Symphony Orchestra, combining Rwandan music with classical to form a new genre. Roxanne laughed a bit but said it was a really cool idea.
We went back to Le Belvedere for lunch, and I had chicken curry and marakuja juice. It took over two hours for any of our orders to get to the tables – they don’t serve one at a time; they wait until everyone’s is cooked and then hand it all out. The fries were insanely good, as was the curry sauce, but I keep forgetting that I am spoiled in Canada and that the meat is too good to be true – here the meat is a little tougher, but still good. Should stick to fish, lamb, and goat, I think: those have been really good. It rained while we were here too (and in fact all the way home, and it might still be raining now – the fog we had for a while on the ride home was kind of creepy, in fact), and I contemplated the fact that it’s crazy safe here (there are video cameras, the bus got stopped on the way back for no visible reason, everyone knows everyone, the border to the DRC is a metal gate (then a string, then a wall)) ... If you come in April it rains a lot, it’s warm, I can eat as many fresh fruits and vegetables as I want ... I am relaxed here. I have never felt so relaxed in my life. Someday. Someday I will come back here.
This country is full of agape, as I said to Roxanne earlier today at Le Belvedere. There is so much love. To touch another person is not to hit on them or flirt with them or be intrusive of their personal space. Everyone is friendly; everyone is loving. I have already started to see this change work in me: I will give people hugs, or take their hands, or hold their hands, or touch their shoulders – I even look people in the eye more now when I speak to them. It is not wrong to smile here; it is not wrong to say hello and to ask how you are doing. This place is full of love for one another and understanding for one another. This place is full of God’s love and acceptance and beauty: His creation, lived in by His creatures, showered in His love and blessings.
The ride home was shorter than the ride there by half an hour, but it seemed to pass even faster because I listened to music and because it was dark. During the course of U-Catastrophe //, Turn it On Again and almost all of The Best of 1990-2000 (U2), there was a rather large game of Risk-like style going on: Mikey and Danika, because of the fog that enveloped the bus, created a zombie apocalypse scenario, and then it degenerated into a power struggle that enveloped PJFM techniques and became absolutely hilarious as everyone got dragged into it. Mikey, Luc, Danika and Sandrine were all president or prime minister or both at some point, Myriam and Dan were heads of the army (then Dan got demoted because he supported Sandrine’s driving skills over Mikey’s), Juliane was Minister of Superheroes and Defense, Quentin was Minister of Jokes and Funny Things and Would You Rather, Renee was the oracle, Luc and Janique were bodyguards respectively of Mikey and Danika (also Janique was going to teach us all tae kwon do), Roxanne was chief of police, I was the Leader of the House (timekeeper/order guy that stands beside the Speaker), Élodie and Justin were on the Supreme Court, Janelle was … Minister of Domestic Affairs maybe? Anyway, the whole thing got rather insane rather quickly and I believe Mikey ended up getting executed for abuses of power or something like that by the end of the trip. The whole conversation/debate lasted about an hour and I didn’t hear all of it because A) sometimes I had my headphones in and B) I couldn’t hear anything anyway (which led to A again and so on and so forth).
We got to Bel Air around 9.30, and ate a little bit – now it is time for getting my pictures off my camera, which is proving to be a pain, and then beautiful sleep.
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