Rwanda, post number 8 (March 30th)

March 30, 2010; 15.15 CST

Today has been a very long and very exhausting day. We began the day, as always, with breakfast: at breakfast, we did a small collection for the newly-widowed sister of one of the Centre César employees, who just lost her husband to (I think) sickness. We collected just under 100 000 Rwf for her, or approximately $160 USD. That was nice to do and felt good.

We headed off to the Centre César not entirely certain of what was going to happen that morning. Our group ended up getting chosen to go to the nursery, and we waited at the Centre until 9.30 until we could finally head over there. The nursery is a refurbished chicken coop, and is definitely too small for the Centre’s needs. A new nursery on the Centre property (the current nursery is a couple streets away) is one of the priorities, but the list is long enough ...

Anyway, when we got there we helped out with colouring and a bit of English phonics. Both were incredibly difficult, what with about 30 kids between the ages of 3 and 5 all talking loudly at the same time in Kinyarwanda and not particularly wishing to pay attention or to attempt to understand what the abazungu were trying to help them with. Very cute and very eager, but as most preschoolers, not terribly focused on the task at hand. Oh well.

After that mini-lesson was snack: whatever water or juice or milk they had brought from home, whatever snack they had from home, and two cookies from the nursery’s stock. They sat and ate that quietly enough, washing their hands before and after. Several of them left without asking (I think) to go to the washroom – it seemed rather an informal practice as they seemed to just up and leave to the building directly adjacent, using a little room as a sort of in-outhouse (inside a building, but outside their own). After their snack we gave them all a lollipop, then we all went down to a patch of grass kitty-corner to our own building site, where we said goodbye and headed back to the Centre. The other group that would go help with the nursery kids was to go at 10.30 and we were to work.

We didn’t get very much work done today, even though there was lots of wood to be used. Roxanne has been getting sicker (a cold) over the past couple of days, and today she was exhausted. Most of us were, really. I continue to be very irritable, though I try to calm myself down as much as possible. It is often difficult not to swear at the boards that don’t quite work, or to resent the fact that the wood is not cut straight or has been badly chosen or is just very bad wood. None of these are things we can do much about, and we just have to work with what we have. I believe we got three shelves done in the half-hour we worked, as opposed to five or six which would have been at least 75% done in that normal amount of time if we had not all been exhausted.

Upon our return to the inn for lunch, M Raval told us that Maman Nicole had been almost in tears when he had given her the money we had donated for the employee’s sister, which made us all feel very happy that we had been able to do something good.

After lunch, we headed to the downtown area for an afternoon of shopping. We first stopped at a small market of artisanal goods: I bought gifts for everyone and filled my list, but in the process spent 41500 Rwf (approximately $72.55 USD). Far less than what I would have spent on the same items in Canada, but probably about a third more than I would have spent had I had Manu or someone bartering for me. I did some bartering on my own, but you can only go so far when you are an umuzungu. I don’t particularly like markets like these – they give you a rush of adrenaline, especially if you are good at bartering, but I always feel sort of let down afterwards. If you’re not happy with what you spent, you have only yourself to blame really, and you can’t return things ... not that I want to. I am happy with what I have, and it is silly to think that I should have spent less: the extra money I may have spent as an umuzungu may have put food on the table for a couple more days for those vendors. That’s a good thing. Also, it’s no use trying to save the francs. I need to spend them here, just like Dad said when Mom and I went to Washington – the money is to spend; it is better to bring back useful/good things than just money. Or something like that. Still, I don’t like spending large amounts of money, especially when I have a limit. I suppose most people are the same. I suppose that’s a good thing in some ways and to a certain extent, too. One shouldn’t be a spendthrift, but one shouldn’t be a miser either.

After that small market, we went to the Hotel des Mille Collines and had drinks by the pool (and some of us had ice cream, which was apparently very good – I miss ice cream (and I miss Nucci’s more), and could go for a pizza ... no, a clubhouse sandwich, that’d be really good). It was really, really neat to be at the Hotel des Mille Collines, especially by the pool, since it’s the center of fictionalized accounts of the genocide (Hotel Rwanda, A Sunday in Kigali, etc). You feel a bit like you’re on a movie set, like you do at the White House or the Smithsonian and all. It started pouring while we were there: the rainy season has definitely begun, and the interesting thing about that is that while there is intense rain at least once a day, there is also intense heat and sun – extremes, like in Canada, but far faster. The rain is very welcome after the boiling sun.

We spent more time at Mille Collines than we should have, and only had 25 minutes at the Kigali market (and didn’t go to the new mall, but Igor said it was basically like a mall at home, so no big deal). I only had 9850 Rwf left (and still only have that much), so I didn’t bring any money in with me: I went in to help Roxanne find what she needed and to look around. While there, I saw an absolutely wonderful game that I really wanted, but of course I had no money so I had to leave sad – this sadness was only worsened when the vendor told me 19000 Rwf for it, and the others I had seen and asked about were between 25k to 70k Rwf.

Roxanne and I made it around the square and met up with Rodrigue, who asked me whether I was finding anything and how it was going. I told him that I had found all the gifts I needed and had brought no money in, but had seen this wonderful set and unfortunately couldn’t buy it. I expected a small amount of consolation and a sort of, “eh, that’s life” response, but he told me to show him the set. A little surprised, I found it again and showed him. He asked how much the vendor had asked for it and I told him nineteen grand. He looked at it, then said to me that he would come back tomorrow and buy it for ten grand, and it would be his present to me. I was shocked, and still am. That’s $17.50 USD – less by far than what I would pay in Canada, again, but a sizable amount. I thanked him profusely, and he was pretty blasé about it. If I have enough francs left by Sunday, I will give him back everything I can; that or split it between him and Manu as thanks for both their services.

I have set aside 5000 Rwf to pay for my dress, which will hopefully be done by the end of the week, because I would like to bring it home now and know whether or not it will be my grad dress and not find out in May that I didn’t need to buy a $300 dress (if it’s not done by the end of the week, Maman Nicole will bring it, along with any others, when she next comes to Canada in May). If I pay that 5000 Rwf to the widows making my dress, then I have 9850 Rwf that I can split between Rodrigue and Manu. Although it is possible that Rodrigue may refuse it, since he said it would be a gift. It might be considered rather rude to repay that, even if it is in thanks. I don’t know. I will see.

After the Kigali market, we drove through the most densely-populated neighbourhood of Kigali, the name of which escaped me at the moment but which starts with Nyaruba, I think … this neighbourhood is notable for being the only predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Kigali, the rest being predominantly Christian. Igor didn’t say why that happened to be the case, only that it was: and that during the genocide, this was the only neighbourhood and the only religion that refused to separate its people into Hutu and Tutsi. Igor didn’t say, but I think the implication was that the Interahamwe just killed anybody here. Nonetheless, the neighbourhood holds over 500 000 people, and as one person (Will? Danika? Sandrine?) put it, “They have houses in their backyards!” which is basically how it was. Igor had once told us that in one neighbourhood of Kigali, the houses were so close together on the hillside that people would fall off of their roof onto their neighbour’s roof, and it was a common occurrence. I have no trouble believing the stories now.

We came back and had supper, which included a distinctly Rwandan dish made of manioc: the root was made into a sort of gooey dough that you were supposed to shape with your hands into a sort of spoon, with which you would scoop up some of the cooked manioc leaves. The cooked manioc leaves tasted strongly of seaweed, and the manioc root had a very different texture, so while I made myself each all that I had taken, I don’t think I could back for seconds, nor do I think I will eat it again. Definitely an acquired taste, perhaps better acquired in youth.

Igor told a short story at the table about how Janelle had sung an Édith Piaf song on the island tour the other day, and how it had told him that he could see La Vie en Rose just as how his father had seen that Je ne regrette rien at the end of his days. It was a rather touching story, and Igor said that in Rwandan tradition, if someone gives you a gift that you cannot repay, you are supposed to talk about the person to everyone you meet and even to swear in their name to show that you are very grateful. He spoke of hoping that his descendants might have the chance to thank Janelle’s descendants properly for the gift she had given him.

The Visionaries came around tonight again, and we brought out the drums we had bought and started playing them with them. I learned how to drum semi-properly, and was the first to be taught. I love it! It’s so much fun! It’s right-arm dominant so far, so my right arm is pretty sore, but I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. I’m glad I had the chance. Several of the Visionaries told me that I was very good at drumming – a very high compliment, it seems to me, to give an umuzungu! I drummed for what must have been over an hour, and am even more exhausted now.

It is time to sleep. We go to Butare in the morning, where the king’s palace used to be/is, and where the National Art Museum is. I’m pretty excited, but I’m also falling asleep on my keyboard, so good night.

Rwanda, post number 7 (March 29th)

Another long one, but only one day.

March 29, 2010; 14.48 CST

Today was a rather long and frustrating day. I felt like I was often losing my patience and being irritable with and/or without reason. Not sure what day I’m on – but I think it’s more likely to be just fatigue and heat (it was incredibly hot today) plus a bit of cabin-fever style stress due to being with the same people 24/7 for over a week. I miss my alone time – and I still miss John. I wonder how many times I will say that in the course of this journal. I am used to speaking to him every night; perhaps this is my version of speaking to him every night now that I cannot do so ...

Anyway. Woke up this morning to an ant crisis. And I do mean crisis. Now, I don’t like ants. I really don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t like them at all. They creep me out. And last night, when we got back to Bel Air, I didn’t think twice about the honey and marakuja nectar in the paper bags from the market. I’m not used to thinking about insects getting into houses.

Yeah, revise that. Woke up and got up to get dressed and saw ants all over the floor. I’m immediately disgusted and creeped out, and then I realize they’re on my stuff – specifically the paper bags with the honey and the marakuja nectar. I instantly feel like a total idiot for not having thought of this before, and then I’m thinking about how the heck I’m going to fix this in twenty minutes and still have time to get dressed and ready for the day, since it’s 7.10. Oh dear.

So I pull the marakuja nectar out of the big paper bag and clean off the top, which was sticky. I put it in the plastic bag which had my mosquito netting in it. I gingerly pull the pot of honey out of its little bag and wipe it off too, and put it in the same plastic bag. I take the two boxes of tea out of their little bags (which the ants are crawling on too) and roll them in some of the fabric. They have no honey on them so I thought it should be okay. I throw away the big paper bag, which has two marakujas and two parts of a baguette in it (sob, what a waste, but they would have been no good after all the ants). I get dressed and take the honey with me to breakfast, leaving the marakuja nectar in my backpack, which I closed.

Ate a good amount of the honey at breakfast, slathering it on my bread (so good after just butter) and putting it in my tea (I miss the creamer: they keep giving us milk now, but that’s okay ... the milk is better for me). Come back to the room, wrap the honey and the nectar in the plastic bag again, seal them both in my backpack and pack my bag (the hotel staff was going to change our sheets this morning, so I just put everything away). I wrap my backpack in my mosquito net to deter any more ants, and leave it on my suitcase. On the way to the construction site, it occurred to me that I could have sprayed the netting with Off – it’s not meant for ants, but maybe it would help mask the smell of the honey.

Work this morning was more efficient than it was at the end of last week, mostly because of Danika’s genius with kids: she stopped working, more or less, and distracted them all with games (the Hokey Pokey, a simplified version of Simon Says, plus bracelets, necklaces and bouncy balls) and trying to learn Kinyarwanda. I have a few pictures plus a video of this: it was rather touching, not to mention it was an absolute lifesaver. The kids, helpful as they want to be, are very difficult to communicate with and after a certain point just start getting on your nerves. More proof for me to not work with kids. The ones who didn’t go to play with Danika were easier to communicate and more willing to cooperate, so that was much nicer – we could actually tell them to wait, or not to hammer (oh, and we had the genius idea of only having one hammer per group, so there were no extra hammers and so they couldn’t get them! It worked for a while, but then they found the rest), or where to hammer. One of them, Steven, spoke fairly good English (if pretty rudimentary), and he was really helpful. It’s great to see them wanting to help to help themselves.

I think we are at eighty-ish sets of shelves now, since there was a power outage in the late morning and there was no wood for a while (nor was there much in the afternoon, which made for a semi-unproductive afternoon – all the wood started getting cut just as we were supposed to close up for dinner). But I want to write down the experience of delivering one of the sets of shelves to one of the widows. This was a couple days ago, I think Friday. Roxanne, Myriam and I hopped into Rodrigue’s van to help deliver shelves. The little kids were faster than we were and delivered the first two sets, but Rodrigue told them to let us do the third one. We brought it down into the widow’s house, and started talking with her and her friend (who taught the widow’s daughter, killed in the genocide, in school). The friend could speak French, so she translated for us. It was very touching and somewhat difficult – the widow said that she had a granddaughter in school of whom we reminded her, and she said that Roxanne smiled like her late daughter (which made Roxanne rather teary later). She blessed us and thanked us and we got pictures with her; I was glad that I could remember the first two words of “God bless you” in Kinyarwanda, and that her friend understood what I was trying to say and provided me with the last word – it’s Imana aguhe umugisha, I think, or close to that anyway. The message got through. It was an amazing experience. The house was little; painted teal on the inside in the front room – a couple chairs, a small TV, a bedroom and a kitchen – but that was all I could see. Rudimentary and very clean, but definitely a home. A picture of her late daughter on the wall. And still she smiled.

This afternoon we were supposed to work more, which only kind of worked as planned – the remaining people who had not gone to the Kimironko market went, leaving two of the three groups missing people, so they (our group and another group) joined up to work together. Yeah. That didn’t work so well, since each group has its own production-line style of building the shelves, and it’s rather difficult to integrate ... even more so when you have a new set of kids to work with. The ones at the site we went to were incommunicado, speaking neither French nor English to speak of, and the mother apparently invited some of the group in to eat but they didn’t understand what she was saying (and tried to tell her so, but apparently that didn’t get through) and so she was potentially offended, and the kids were trying to walk off with things ... the whole atmosphere was sort of tense and awkward, more so than the morning. Ah well. Also we had to bring all the shelves from those two sites to the Centre at four, which was another whole step. I’m very grateful for the way our site works now, and how efficient we are.

I read for about two hours this afternoon, which was nice – I’ve read sixty percent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man now, and I’m really getting into it. Joyce has a funny way of making you think you’re in Ireland, creating a strange sense of displacement every time I look up from the book, because I am not in Ireland but neither am I at home, and so it takes a moment to re-realize that I am in Rwanda.

I have been so tired these past few days that food almost makes me feel sick – I keep coming back to the room after meals and feeling kind of out of it, a little queasy, rather weak. I want to just sleep; it is so hot here during the day, and the food is heavy most of the time and carb-loaded, so I keep becoming more and more fatigued. It is nice to have the honey in the morning (along with fruit) and the marakuja nectar to mix with my water (along with some stevia) to make for some sugar during the day.

Oh, more ant crisis in the afternoon. The marakuja nectar had leaked onto a few pieces of clothing, so I had washed them quickly last night and hung them to dry on my window. When I came back that afternoon, I saw a trail of ants going up the wall to my window, and just about freaked out. That was pretty nasty and not cool at all – and I had thought I had gotten all the nectar! I pulled the window out and saw that there was like a whole colony of ants on one spot on my capris ... evidently I had not gotten all the nectar off. Ugh. With Roxanne’s help I managed to toss the three articles of clothing into a garbage bag, and then I brought them to the outdoor sink and washed them as thoroughly as I could, then hung them on the hedges to dry. (Two of them – my shorts and my capris – are still there, drying: the t-shirt, being very thin, dried quickly. No sign of ants. Win.) I came back in and sprayed the wall with Off, trying to get rid of everything. Oh, and I sprayed the mosquito netting and even my backpack to mask the smell of the honey. The inn staff had cleaned the room a bit, including the sheets and the floor, so the ants were pretty much gone. I still feel like they’re all over the place, though, and keep jumping whenever something touches me gently, like my hair or my headphone cord. Ach.

After supper the Visionaries came along for a debate evening, which I thought was going to be difficult to hear/understand/focus on because I was so tired and not in the mood for a debate, but it was actually pretty good. We started again on Romeo Dallaire, which we had discussed a bit during one of our discussion periods last week, the question being what do Rwandans think of Romeo Dallaire? The Canadians think he’s a hero, the Belgians think he’s a traitor: where do Rwandans stand? The answers varied, from answers seemingly closed-minded (he is not a hero because he failed, regardless of whether he could have done more) to forward-thinking (he is a hero because he is spreading the word of the genocide and has been since 1994) to two-sided (he is not a hero because he did not succeed, but we cannot condemn him because it was not his fault). A lot seemed to depend on one’s personal or cultural definition of hero: I explained the Canadian point of view of a hero being someone who gives their all in spite of personal danger and does their absolute best to save lives; the traditional Rwandan point of view was given as someone who fights valiantly and (generally) wins in battle. The viewpoints were evidently, therefore, very different to start with. The conversation was, in general, a good one.

One of the things I have noticed during conversations like these is that often the Rwandans will make the same point at least three times, almost starting over their idea again at the end two or three times. It can get kind of frustrating for those of us who prefer conversations and discussion points to be precise and concise (oh dear, the IB is controlling my brain): you make your point and you support it, and you don’t repeat yourself. I am one of these people, so some of the people who spoke several times (often pretty much the same thing as they had said before) got on my nerves a bit.

After the debate, though, Andrée said something which I had (I admit to my own shame) not thought of: these people need to talk these things through. Apparently one of the guys who talked the most (and was the most polarized of the speakers) had seen the rest of his four-member family die. Hm. Perspective much, us Canadians? This whole trip has been an exercise in seeing other people through the right eyeglasses: we have to keep in mind what they have gone through, while not letting that be the only light in which we see them: we must see them also through the lens of future development and the new push for humanity. The genocide is not where it ended and is not where it ends now – life goes on and they must somehow move on as well. Debates like this are part of that.

Rwanda, post number 6 (March 27th-28th)

Sorry this is a couple weeks late ... would take too long to go into the various reasons ...

This entry is a double entry: I did not bring my laptop to Gisenyi, so I wrote the whole thing in one go when we got back.

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.