Gamosan

Sorry I didn't get a chance to make a post yesterday; we were very busy. Yesterday we drove down Butare along with a journalist from Boston who is here to do a story on the genocide and Rwanda's reconciliation. Along the way the mountains gave way to wide valleys with large rolling hills. Butare is Rwanda's second-largest city and was the former colonial captial of the Belgian territory of Rwanda-Urundi. In 1962 the capital was moved to Kigali because of its central location. Butare was the largest city at the time, but today Kigali is many times larger. After walking around and having lunch in Butare, we drove another hour back north to the Murambi Genocide Center, formerly Murambi Technical School. As word of the violence in Kigali spread out, Tutsis all around the country began ... read more

Left Ruhengeri this morning to make a few stops in the area around Kinigi, the town closest to the Verungas, on the road to the DRC. On our way out we saw two trucks of soldiers headed to the border. The Imababazi group from yesterday had seen a convoy of seven trucks full of UN soldiers also headed to the border. Hmm. We stopped at a Batwa settlement a couple miles outside Kinigi. The Twa are a race of pygmies that live in Rwandas forests. They make up about 2% of the population. We watched them perform a dance, and once again someof us joined in. After that we headed down to AIDP (Amahoro Intergrated Development Program), the "One" organization from the common basket program. We were there to drop off the $1,500 in donations from ... read more

Observation: Red Eminem shirts are really common here. Question: How does a four year old Rwandan living in a remote village 45 mins walk from the nearest road end up with a "Hillary Duff 2005 US Tour" shirt? We went to a crafts associations today in a very remote village about a two hour walk from Ruhengeri. After working our way down from the mountains into a giant valley, we walked the last 45 mins on raised dirt paths between 8-10 foot tall beanstalks. Saw another Project Rwanda bike- that makes four so far. The fgirst thing we did was make banana beer. We took mildly rotten bananas and peeled them, thowing them into a wooden tough carved from a log. After that we mixed in shredded banana leaves with the 200 or so bananas we ... read more

Uraho! Amakuru ni mesa. Rwanda is great. I once again slept a lot last night, a solid 10 hours. Woke up feeling like I got hit in the back of the head with a brick though. Heh, bricks. I'm fine now. I think it was mostly dehydration. This morning we left in our small group of just 6 of us (Mickey, Dann, Mary, Kelsey, Ms. Overbo and myself) to go work at a brickmakers' association about 4 miles outside Ruhengeri. Greg (our Rwandan friend from Amahoro Tours) gave us a lift, after we pushed his land rover a couple blocks to get it started. The association is in a large clay quary on a bluff above a road and a swamp down below. While we were there we learned how to do all the basic jobs ... read more

I'm writing from an internet cafe in downtown Kigali that has what is perhaps the slowest internet in the world! Took a solid 9 minutes to load this page... Anyways, we certainly arrived safely. All three flights went fine, and the transfers were pretty smooth. I closest we came to trouble was some drunk lady who claimed to know us. She claimed a lot of things. I had my bags searched in Brussels, but the guy was pretty nice. Beautiful scenery on the way down- lots of wildfires burning in Sudan. Ah, Rwanda. What a beautiful country! Customs were quick and easy ,as was getting to our hotel. I've gotta love the street life here: hundreds of people walking down the streets, cars, buses, motos, and trucks vying for a place in traffic. We got to ... read more