Blogs from Ville de Kigali, Rwanda, Africa - page 13

Early in March, the girls and I moved into the Gishush house - aka the "fish bowl"! We are the neighbourhood spectacle, entertaining the locals. From the road you can see straight up onto our porch if you come up the hill. Often small children will yell from the bottom of the road up to us - "Muzungu!" (white person!) I often like to point out the irony of the name, but well...I'm be nice. While it is strange to have people continuously stare at you, I do feel like a movie star (or a pariah) and hope when I return to Canada people will also ooggle at me and faint! We held an official house warming party in conjunction with our bosses b-day party! There were a lot of people (most of whom came for ... read more

If you’ve come to Rwanda for anything other than gorillas, your first days are bewildering, full of contradiction. Western knowledge about this country begins and ends with the genocide, yet it’s been almost fourteen years since that terrible chapter in Rwanda’s past was written. President Kagame - despite certain authoritarian tendencies, or perhaps because of them - has helped this country rebuild in ways that most people would’ve considered unimaginable just five years ago. In the past decade, Rwanda’s boasted one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. Kigali is on a short list of the continent’s cleanest and safest capitals; on its leafy streets, where freshly planted trees litter the sidewalks with their blossoms, you can’t easily imagine the checkpoints, the mass graves, the dogs feasting on the bodies of the dead - scenes played out in endless ... read more

After catching my connecting flight in Addis Abba, I finally arrived in Kigali just after noon. After breathing a sigh of relief at the arrival of my lugguage, I was greeted by two other interns, Marissa and Ally! I was able to eat, take a shower and settle down at the guest house, where I stayed until moving into my house. A few hours later I was zipping on the back of a "moto" heading to the UK embassy's weekly pub night and then having dinner out in a beautiful backyard of one the many restaurants. Less than 24 hours in the country and I was attending a conference on the quality of the resolution process with respect to land disputes. The conference was a perfect introduction and summary of the current dispute process dealing with ... read more

Jan 10,2008 Hey everyone I've made it to kigali before yesterday at night made connections through brussels and arriving here at about 8pm. I was a little nerves at first considering the embassy said I should have gotten a visa before coming.... but as luck would have it i met another Brasilian in the immigration line(she informs me that there's only about 10 registered brasilians in rwanda so I think i was really lucky) and she said not to worry so I didnt, paid $60 and got through in no time...immigration officials very helpful here...She works for a an NGO here and we should be meeting to go out this weekend. Hoped on a cab went off to my hostel....couldnt go to sleep because i was so excitedm so i went to the bar and ... read more

So... HOW IS RWANDA??!! That has been the most common question in our emails, and the answer is...AMAZING!! When we mentioned to a man in South Africa that this was where we were headed next, he said "Oh, well don't forget to bring your flak jackets!" - but nothing could be further from the truth! We knew enough to know that there wasn't a war going on, but still weren't too sure what to expect, and really, when we got off the plane, both of us were a little wierded out knowing what had happened here. We have both read Romeo Dallaire's "Shake Hands With The Devil", and had pretty vivid images of what it must have been like during the genocide. The reality however, is that the genocide happened 13 years ago ... and since ... read more