Kigali

Hello everybody!

It took us a while to write our first message, but here it is!

We've had a nice flight to Kigali together with Dorothee and Philippe, and Maaike en Veerle were there to pick us up at the airport together with Siegurd, the owner of the house we are currently staying in in Kigali, rue du Progres. A really nice house that we share with the girls and two other belgian boys, Ward and Filip, who are doing a socio-cultural internship here in Kigali working with the local youngsters. Do and Phil live just on the other side of the hill -one of the thousand!-, close to the CHUK hospital in the house of Philippe's sister.

In the last couple of days we got to go around Kigali, enjoying it's friendly inhabitants, and beautiful green surroundings. On Thursday, International Women's day, an official holiday here, we went to Lake Mahazi, with the typical little minibuses that bring you to many locations in the country: crammed, sore buttocks, mixture of African and American music (think 'Venga bus' and you know the kind i mean!),... a great fun experience! Some of us didn't mind the possible Leishmaniasis infection they could get from jumping into the lake at the shore -where water is shallow and still-, but I did, and so I "supervised" from the land ;-). On the trip back we hitched a ride in a toyota jeep all the way back to Kigali (65km, windy, people waving and laughing when passing through the villages, a funny adventure it was!)

On Friday we went to Butare to take care of the paperwork for our internship (sitting, waiting, chatting to the very friendly vice-dean for 2 hours to finally receive one paper with a stamp typed by the very friendly, yet very slow secretary; yes, that's Africa! Patience is a virtue). Butare is in fact only a little bit more than one dusty street, but looks like a lively student town. And so we went back to Kigali on the same day (with the more luxurious express bus 'Volcano', 2.20h drive one way).

Today Muriel and I went for a (quite intensive) walk on the mountain 'Belle Vue' somewhat out of the center of Kigali, with indeed a beautiful view over Kigali. This all thanks to Filip and two Rwandan students, Aime and Abdul, that work with him in the youth house. Especially the trip in the 'R-Kelly' minibus on the way there is worth mentioning (very loud hiphop, bus completely adapted to the theme, it was fun!!!). And of course the fact that everybody waves, smiles at you when passing by them (as we are 'muzungus' =white people; quite a fenomenon in little villages) and kids tend to walk behind you, love just touching your hand, shout something that sounds like 'bonjour', but in fact is more like 'bonjuru'; it's strange, not used to being stared at, but you get used to it, and it's nice putting the kids on a photo (we'll put those on later!), asking there names so they can show off their knowledge of the French language :-)

And then tomorrow we're gonna arrange our stuff, as we leave in the afternoon for Butare again, since that is where we will be working for the coming 5 weeks. (Butare is probably more of an adventure, more rural, so a better place to start off at, before we get used to the luxury of our guesthouse here in Kigali with hot water, a 'boy' guarding the house and a cleaning lady (!), but we'll come back for the second half of our internship!)

More news from Butare will follow...

Big hug for everybody back home!