The First Week in Rwanda

Rwanda is really a beautiful country.  We are located in Kigali, the capitol, and it is a surprisingly ordered developing world city.  The city itself is built across many dramatic hills, and nearly everywhere you look is a breathtaking view.  It is lush and verdant.  There are many tropical flowering trees and bushes and birds that chirp lovely songs and dramatic valleys whose walls are lined with tiny huts, shacks and houses.  The roads in the city are generally good, its only when you get of the main arteries that they are unpaved.

We went upcountry yesterday for our interviews and drove 3 hours from the capital to a small village on the top of a mountain.  Rwanda is called the land of 1,000 hills, and it earns its nick name.  We wound up and down past steeply terraced farmland, tea plantations, small mud huts, past rivers and waterfalls and eventually up to the top of a high mountain.  According to my GPS we were at 7,200 feet.  The village is isolated as the roads are steep, deeply rutted and muddy, hugging like copper-red gashes the sides of the mountains.  It is hard to get there and remote.  The cluster of huts was proper in the small village.  One Rwandan man took us past some of the huts to a vista point and pointed out the hill that started the border with Uganda.  We were only a few kilometers away. Though the drive was long and bumpy and slow, it was worth it just to meet people, hear stories about how this development project is changing their life, and take in the fresh air.

I was partnered with Diana for the day to complete our interviews, and we were the center of attention as soon as we pulled into the village.  You could hear little children squeak “muzungu” or white person.  The word sort of rippled through the crowd of people waiting for their delivery of school supplies, and all eyes were trained on us.  No one smiled until we would wave or say “muraho” which is hello in Kinyarwanda and their faces would break into a large grin.  We conducted interviews inside a small municipal building for nearly 5 hours and the whole time there were small curious faces peeking over the windows to get a glimpse of the muzungus doing their interviewing.

Rwanda is certainly a developing country, and it is certainly poor, but meeting people and hearing about the context of their lives through the lens of this development project is really exciting.  It is amazing to hear success stories and see the projects I have learned about in development come to life, and to know that they are real.  People are still suffering, but it is not the focus of the people we have been speaking with.  It has been reassuring to me to come here and to realize that yes, I do want to do this.

We have been working 10 to 12 hour days for the most part since we got here, so it has been exhausting. There have been so many meetings, so much to prepare and so many different things to see that it is hard to soak everything in.  My brain is on overload, and I don’t know quite how to process it all.  It is good to be working in a group, because this would be monstrous to tackle alone.  Tomorrow is our first day off, so we are going to lighten things up by going to the Rwanda Genocide Memorial…

I have so much more to say but it will need to be updated for tomorrow.  At this juncture I am going to go nap for a bit.  Or maybe I will go for a walk. Yes.  I will go for a walk. More later.