Wigs

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It's my last day in Kigali for a while and i've just been wandering around admiring every other women's wig and enjoying feeling at home .... and astounded at the number of Mzungu who live here!! The population of Kigali is over a million despite having predicted 420,000 for 2020 (though not sure when that prediction was made) and there must be a fair few thousand mzungu. And the country had over 8.5million in 2002. Apparently the current child birth rate is 6 kids per family and the government are trying to bring it down to 3.

I headed to Butare the second biggest town in Rwanda yesterday, though Kigali is by far the biggest and the others are all similarly sized, and pretty small at that. They host the National Museum, largest cathedral and National University of Rwanda. I went and checked out the museum to ensure my knowledge was up to scratch on the country and as usual got fascinated by the geography bits and facts .......so what can i tell you:

Rwanda as you've probably gathered from my blogs has a very varied climate, rain and sunshine almost daily..... it is also the land of 1000 hills and so when the rains come this causes huge erosion to the land and some 2.8 million tons of silt fall over the Rusumo falls (waterfall at border of country) each year. and that is presumably only one exit route for the silt! there is on average 1200mm of rainfall a year. The land, given all the hills and the rainfall, is tiered to help combat the erosion and heights range over the country from 962m to 4507m. (am secretly hoping i'll be magically fit when i come home, having lived at slight altitudes for a couple of months - wishful thinking!!!) The county is land locked in Africa and interestingly there is no navigable route that connects it to the oceans.

I also read up about Kinyrwanda, the national language. In Africa there are some 1250 languages and each country has 30 odd of them being spoken today, but Rwanda has just one language. Each African language normally has just 400,000 speakers but kinyrwanda has well over 8million. It seems unbelievably complicated with words in phrases conjugating to verbs and agreeing to other words in the phrase. Apparently there are 120 tenses (or the equivalent) and 20 persons (ie i, you, he....)! don't ask how it works....

The way there, for the first time since i've been here the bus got stopped and checked.... something that happens the whole time, so i've just been lucky. They were checking personal documents.... i managed to get by with my driving license, the first time in days i wasn't carrying my passport!

Also every other women must own about 3 wigs... changing their hair from day to day - i had wondered why it always looked so neat and tidy!

Off to Uganda tomorrow so will need to learn some Luganda.

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Comments

[Helli]

Wigs
Why do all the women wear wigs? Whats wrong with their real hair? What kind of wigs are we talking about - crazy ones or normal-looking ones? More details, please!

[Natalie]

Sounds like I would fit in perfectly well - and it sure is a joy to have perfectly formed hair every day :)