Obviously I'm not very good at this. It is 3pm in the afternoon, or 9 o'clock Ethiopian time, and I am sitting slouched over with two branches of qat plant in my hands in a smoky, dim room off Bole Road no bigger than a typical dingy African single bedroom encircled with enough colorful blinking Christmas lights to give me a minor epileptic seizure. I'm trying to keep the wad of plant between my right gums and my cheek, but the wad keeps moving out towards my teeth and disintegrating in my saliva, only to be washed away down into my [View Full Entry]

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I am sitting at the Ethiopian Airlines office on Ohio Street across the way from the golf course here in Dar es Salaam at about 10am. I have come back from Zanzibar early this morning to book a flight out to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for later today. Originally I had thought I could travel through Kenya and then up through the border to Ethiopia, but as things go I decide to skip Kenya out of lack of interest, and furthermore decide against traveling overland as North Kenya seems to be really dangerous and dodgy with bandits and god knows what else [View Full Entry]

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You know, it's nice when people I don't know message me or leave comments in response to my entries. However in response to the last entry I wrote on how Africa was wearing on me, seriously people, chill the fuck out yeah? I'm not sure if its that real Africa lovers have been following my blog or what, but when I write an entry explaining that I'm tired after 2+ months in Africa, I don't need anybody to tell me... Didn't you do any research before you went?... All the comforts you want are available if you want to spend the [View Full Entry]

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No, there wasn't an ending to the last post but of course even the most hellish situation always somehow works itself out in Africa. Because it has to. I end up almost hitching with a few lorries (or "truckers" as we know them in America) that pass by all too eager to bring a little Asian girl onto their vehicles for the day, only that I realize trucks actually drive ridiculously slow and on these roads probably at snail pace. Which would in effect make the already unbearable remaining 15 hours to Dar something like 30 hours to Dar which I [View Full Entry]

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When my brother called me to wish me a Happy Halloween, I didn't think I would be spending the night like this. I'm not really sure what I'm doing in Tanzania. I didn't actually plan on coming here but as I fled Congo east back into Rwanda, then fled Rwanda east here... well, Tanzania is the next country over. I am on a bus travelling from Ngara, right inside the western Tanzanian border with Rwanda. Our destination is Dar es Salaam, all the way on the eastern Tanzanian border with... the Ocean. I decide I don't really need to see much [View Full Entry]

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So I think I spoke too soon a couple entries back on my way to Gisenyi about how lovely the bus rides were in Rwanda comparatively to other African countries. Because on hauling ass back to Kigali, I didn't bother with returning with the same bus company I came with to Gisenyi, Atraco, but instead just took the next available bus out of Gisenyi to Kigali which happened to be on Otracom Express. Otracom Express, at least the one I took, in short is a total shithole. The bus is not a small speedy minivan, but one of the larger tourbus [View Full Entry]

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"Eastern Congo is very, very unstable right now. ... There have been attacks and counterattacks between rebels and the Congo military." -Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer to CNN, November 1 At the time I wrote this October 28, only so much of the recent events had unfolded. Today on November 1 as I post this finally as I haven't had reliable internet connection until now, the current situation is on the CNN frontpage and has been in the news for the past week straight. Far away from you on the dark continent a war has been raging in a country [View Full Entry]

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"YU, AMY." Oui, c'est moi! "Yu... Amy..." He laughs. Yep... "YOU," he points at me, "AMI!" he points at himself. "We friends!" Yep... It is ten in the morning and the chief DRC official at the Gisenyi/Goma border has had me in his little office now for about half an hour. He takes a funny liking to my name and has spent the last ten minutes repeating it on end, giggling to himself all the while, and smiling toothily at me sitting alone in the chair across his desk. Why I've been singled out to sit in here with him, I [View Full Entry]

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"Good luck...I would tell you to be safe but that seems pointless being that you are in the middle of Africa heading toward (instead of away) from rebel fighting and war.... " - Big Sturms, via email I have made my way now from Kigali in central Rwanda over way west to the town of Gisenyi. Gisenyi is rather nondescript and sits on the Rwanda/Democratic Republic of Congo border at the northernmost part of Lake Kivu, opposite the border from its DRC counterpart, the village of Goma which serves as the UN base for the war in the Congo. I come [View Full Entry]

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I don't particularly enjoy writing "heavy" entries, but writing about Rwanda today and ignoring the fallout from the Genocide wouldn't paint for you an accurate picture but an incomplete one. Sometimes you peruse a museum lightly, glancing fleetingly at some exhibits and perhaps reading a plaque or two here and there, strolling through to see what the hype was all about. Sometimes though, you let yourself become totally engulfed in the pictures, you read every narration, you watch each film in its entirety, and you stare at every murdered face as if you had seen it somewhere in some life be [View Full Entry]

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