Blogs from Africa - page 2703

here's a link to a map of our trip http://www.travelblog.org/gmaps/map_4f0.html... read more

Life on the street... For children on the streets of Rwanda, is always a familiar story - abusive parents, lack of money for school fees or a uniform, being forced into manual labour in the home or conflict with step-parents, who often, according to the culture, cannot accept the child of a previous marriage and makes life unbearable for them. Equally common are the children who have been driven from their homes, and those who have no home. In this respect, Rwandan street children are nothing special, which is exactly how they feel, what is different is the sheer volume of cases. The boys hang around the taxi-bus stations, steal in the market, beg from passers by. They do small jobs to earn their daily food, and spend what little they get on sweets and drugs. ... read more

Blog Update You may have been wondering why we haven't published any blogs for the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the Travel Blog website crashed and resulted in the loss of thousands of people's entries, including ours. We are trying to retrieve our old entries, without a huge amount of success, but in the meantime our priority is to get the new entries published so you can see what we've been upto. Hopefully we will be able to recover our old entries, but for the time being, you won't be able to see them on our blog. Journey to Swaziland Set off for Swaziland, which Paul (our friendly host at the backpackers) said would take around 3.5 hours on good roads. Yeah, maybe if you go the easy way! Lesson One: always familiarise yourself with the ... read more

On Monday, Jacintha's last full day in Rwanda, she and I went to see the Kigali Memorial Centre, which chronicles the genocide here in 1994, as well as several others that have happened in the last century. The Centre itself is a small, nondescript white building on the side of one of the hills in Kigali. It looks like a house from a distance, but it is so, so much more, inside and out. When we arrived at the Centre a guard at the gate searched us, the full bag-digging, pocket-emptying, pat-down type search. It was the first time this has ever happened to me here, even though I have gone into many government buildings, met two Cabinet Ministers, a 3-Star General of the Army and gone into the Canadian Embassy. This indicated to me ... read more

7-3-2007 Today was a slow, relaxing day that Katie and I both really needed. Jet lag finally caught up with us, so it was great that not too much was scheduled so that we could get some good rest. Spent some time dwelling on how to help Hillside. Soooo many ideas. We got our first look at My Brother's Keeper, the school run by Mission Africa, tonight. Also saw the nearby garden called "Four Seasons." Absolutely beautiful. I'll tape a video tour. Katie taught Jerome, Taritta, and me some ballet in the dance room. I look a bit goofy. Wonderful conversation before bed. Jerome often remarks that the things we say are exactly what he needs to hear. It works both ways, and the exchange is beautiful. How could I have ever known 6 months ago ... read more