Rwanda Is You and Me

A few days ago the GO team was having lunch in Muhanga. Costa (our host) gets up before the food arrives and wanders off. He shows up as we are finishing our food and sends his food back for something else. When that comes out he tastes it, tells them it is no good, and orders something not on the menu. That comes out and he starts eating, and we tell him that we are already late for our meeting with the mayor. When he finishes eating we walk to the mayor’s office, about 45 minutes late. Bart mentions on the walk over to the mayor’s office that it was “kind of a rock star move.” After thinking about it, Costa is absolutely a Rwandan rock star. Here are five illustrations of Costa's rock starness.

1. I am sitting in Costas living room, having never met him, but he invited us over to a graduation party at his house. Family members slowly trickle in and reassure us that Costa will arrive soon. We are shocked when Costa walks in wearing a cap and gown. Thirty family and friends sit in a circle feasting in the yard using various levels of English to converse with us. Costa tells stories in 3 different languages, translates many things for us and cannot stop smiling.

2. During a ten o’clock dinner, Costa tells us that he spent the day checking up on a recently placed orphan two hours away. The orphan has been put into a family as a week trial before Costa asks if they like the family. The orphan approves of the family, but Costa must be at the office at 8 clock the next morning (leaving at 5 AM) to get a stamp so that the adoption can be official.

3. While Eve and Denise tried to teach me how to do laundry and speak Kinrwandan (I cannot say chicken or get shoes clean), I learn that Costa’s wife is their older sister. They watched their mother be murdered in the genocide in 1994 while hiding above the ceiling. Two orphans live with the family, children of those who murdered the family’s parents. Costa met the orphans and upon noticing their struggles asked them to join the family in Kigali.

4. I wake up early, and Costa is frantically tying his shoes. He explains that his friend’s child is very sick and to tell everyone he would meet us later. Costa rides the kid to the hospital on the back of a bicycle. Then, he gets in an argument with the mother who is convinced that he is cursed, not sick. After the positive TB X-ray Costa convinces the doctors not to let the child leave until he is healthy. On the way home he calls a friend to go to the hospital and stand guard.

5. Costa convinces a friend who owns a mini-bus to drive for a family outing to a genocide memorial. Nineteen people fill the minibus; many have never been to this memorial and had families killed in the genocide. After many tears and emotional moments we pile back into the bus and drive to a soccer game. Bart, Costa, Kyle and I are thrown into the action and at the end Costa brings out 1300 pens, a trophy and a soccer ball for the kids.

Early in our friendship with Costa, he said that he was not the best man in Rwanda. I told him a few days ago that I have not met very many Rwandans, but it will take a lot to convince me otherwise. I find it hard to not support people doing amazing things for their community.

More blogs and pictures here.
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FOOD

When my sister came back from Nepal, we talked for the first hour about the food. So, before venturing into Rwanda I will comment on the food in Tanzania.

Best entire experience:
We had just showed up at the school to play with the kids when we realize we have 30 minutes until the kids finish their lesson. So, Kyle and i aimlessly walk down the threet to find lunch. In 3 minutes we walk into a local restaurant with meat on a little BBQ. Perfect.
Kyle: "Do you serve food?"
'Yes, you want meat?'
Me: "Yes"
'Ugali or wal?'
(Blank stare)
'Wal is rice.'
"Oh, yes rice."
'With rice, you want...?' She clearly cant think of the name.
Kyle: "Vegetables?" 'No'
Ryan: "Sauce? 'No'
Kyle: "Beef Stew" 'No'
Ryan: "Chapati?" 'No' "Beans?" 'Yes' Big smile.
"Yes, we would like beans"

We sat down, drank orange Fanta and watched the locals fill the restaurant. We got white rice, with a scoop of whole pinto beans in a thick sauce, a chopped green leafy vegetable, and a bowl of goat stew with squash and potatoes. I promptly dumped my bowl onto the rice and enjoyed the meal I have had several times in Tanzania.

Most Unique: Ethiopian platter
A spongy crepe with piles of sauces/meats/vegetables on it. Rip apart the crepe and scoop full of spicy concoctions Wash down with house fermented honey wine.

Staple: Chapati
Wile ugali is the staple (soft doughy flour biscuit), chapati (fried tortilla) I could eat every meal for the rest of my life.

Most Creative: Salomon
Our cook on Kilimanjaro wowed us with many dishes. Early in the trip we had half an avocado filled with a coleslawish salad. I told him it was the best thing I had ever eaten. Sorry mom.

Late night craving: Zanzibar pizza
After walking out of the pool hall and back to the hostel. You could not walk past a person cooking on the street without spending 70 cents of a Zanzibar pizza. Ground meat and vegetable mixture is dumped into a freshly rolled dough square. They then crack an egg into it, fold it up, and fry it. its served with hot sauce and a garlicy hummussy side. One night we arrived 5 minutes too late. Cried ourselves to sleep.

Mt. Kilimanjaro

I managed to sneak in to a trip up the tallest mountain in Africa as a fund/awareness raising venture for GO (www.groundworkopportunities.com). We set off on an exciting bus ride early in the morning. Our bus is packed with porters, which we think is probably the most efficient way of getting a bunch of different groups up on the mountain. No. We have 16 porters, a waiter, a cook, and 2 guides. Which seems a bit excessive. But we are supporting the local economy I suppose. We go up the Rongai Route and day one is very easy. We pick up some porters bags (they each carry a backpack with their supplies and no more than 20kg in a bag on their head) and while we can carry them, it is hard to imagine carrying it all the way up to the last camp. The cooking on the trip was incredible. We had a mess hall set up for us every camp with a table, chairs and a 3 course meal. I felt like a general in a war a few hundred years ago. The guides taught us 2 new card games which we would play with them every night.

Day two was also fairly easy as we are starting to get into the groove of walking and hanging out at camp. Getting acclimated mostly involves going much slower than you want to, but it was nice to take our time. By the end of the second day we were above the cloud layer and would wake up to watch the sun rise over the clouds. Pretty average.

Day three we decided to change our itinerary and made it much longer. We climbed up a ridge and then back down to the same elevation on the other side of the mountain. Doing a big day three allowed us to finish our 1000m ascent on day 4 before lunch. We napped for the rest of the day and woke up at 11PM for summit night.

At about mid-night we set out for the summit. We rapidly pass most of the others who have set out a little before us. There is one group where many of the guides are singing songs in Swahili, I really liked walking near them. After about half the way up, we start moving very slowly. Bart and I got drunk from the lack of oxygen and Kyle got nauseous. All of our water froze so we were probably quite dehydrated as well. We got up to the summit, snapped a couple of pictures, and started down. Kyle vomited on the way down and I was very dizzy until we got a few hundred meters lower. It is crazy how elevation effects different people.

It takes us two days to get down to the bottom. After a day to recover, tomorrow we start helping with a school being built about 30 minutes away from Moshi. I am very excited to see what this will be like.

Peace Corps Test

Here is my post on Nic's peace corps blog after spending a week with him.


Hello, my name is Ryan, and I have known Nic for about 18 years now. I applied to the Peace Corps and have been waiting to get my assignment. I am not sure that the Peace Corps is in my future, but I was interested enough to apply and spend a week with Nic in Kenya. I am incredibly luck to have this opportunity and cannot thank Nic enough for letting me interrupt his life for a while week.
I do not know what to say about my time in Kilisa Village. I have done my best to not try to interrupt what is going on here while being whatever help I can to Nic and the community. I have done lots of water pump trouble shooting and discussing economics with Nic.
I cant imagine have been raised in Kilisa Village. Being breast-fed in the meeting room of the KVDC, building forst our of bricks in between shops, and going to school for 10 hour days are normal life here. The people are beautiful and I will remember the smiles and brief conversations with those who are willing to speak english, which greatly outweigh the unwelcomness that I have also received.
Nic is much stronger than I am in the difficulties that he has dealt with in this project. I do not envy his position. It is great to see someone put their heart and soul into a community that is struggling. Struggling may be the wrong word. Life is harder here.
As I explore, I become less sure about everything. I hoped that by the end of this week, I would know that I definitely wanted to join or avoid the Peace Corps. But, I still find myself totally unsure of what my future will hold. I plan on visiting Nic in a month again, but in that time I doubt I will have reached any new conclusions. Then I will go to Europe, will I find what I am looking for there?

Now I am in Tanzania preparing to climb Kilimanjaro. Check out GO's website for what I will be doing for the next 2 months http://www.groundworkopportunities.org/kilimanjaro/index.htm

Every Continent (Almost)

So I still have not been to Antarctica, but I now have been to Africa for a few days. Everywhere I go, things are very different from everywhere else I have been. I spent two days in Nairobi at a cool little hotel. I applied to the Peace Corps and am in Africa to visit a friend in the field and do some volunteer work. At the hostel we had a 4th of July party and I met about 15 peace corps volunteers. It was great to get about 12 one-on-one interviews, very productive and fun stay.

I am currently on my peace corps test. Nic (a friend from Pleasanton) and I spent 4 hours crammed into a matatu (bus) to go to his site. He has no power, pays someone to bring water, and has a small kerosene stove. This place makes southern Utah look lush and wet. Everything is red from exposed soil and everything is covered in dust.

I am helping Nic with a water pump to bring water from a subsurface dam to the village. Nothing is working. It is interesting and I am using some of the boring parts of firefighting to help. I think that I have a more lucid idea of what the Peace Corps has to offer, but every country and project is so different that there is no way to know what I might be getting into.

River Kwai

From everyone who I have talked to, the tour we went on was a typical example of tours in south-east Aisa. At 7 AM a can picks me up and use drive around town picking people up. Some guys sitting next to me at the hostel show their papers and are told to wait. My paper gets taken away and they put a sticker on me 25 vans show up in a spot and people get off and others are put on. After about an hour I get put on a new van with no one with my color stickers. We go back to my hostel and pick up the two guys sitting next to me and we drive west.
We go to a cemetery and a museum, Australians love their WWII history. Then we get dropped off at the "optional" train ride which is clearly necessary to get to lunch and continue on the tour. After lunch we go and splash around in a waterfall. Two dutch guys and I get stopped by a Thai couple because they want to take pictures with the half-naked white men.
No one on the tour knows what they have signed up for, has paid different amounts and are constantly told to do different things. We stay for two nights on a floating barge on the river Kwai. The next two days involve more waterfalls, elephant riding, a bamboo raft float, drinking games and great Thai food. A unique three days with lots of unique people.

Bangkok

So the main thing that I have learned in the last few weeks is that you cant get jetlagged if you dont sleep. It works much better.

I am now in Bangkok. I have been here about 18 hours. My flight got in at 11PM and I think I had a pretty typical first few hours. Customs and everything was no problem. Got in a cab to take me to the hotel. It drops me off and tells me to walk down the street, everything is perfect. My hotel is no where to be found. Dammit. I walk for about 15 minutes, get into another cab who drives around in a huge circle, drops me off at the same place but this time gives me directions (in Thai). I follow them to a hotel that has a very similar name to mine, but I talk to someone inside who gives me new directions. While walking down a back alley, I pass two teenagers with automatic weapons. I think they were fake. I check into my hotel about 1 AM and go to sleep about 45 minutes later when my heart rate was no longer 200.

The next morning I talk to a couple of very unhelpful travel agents, wander around and get a cab to go to STA travel so that I can change my tickets to stay in Africa for longer. We hit serious traffic, and they just closed when we finally get there. The cab takes me to a bunch of spots for commission that I need to talk him out of and pulls out a brochure of hookers and asks if I am interested. After finally getting him to go back to my hotel, he tries to charge me extra because we hit traffic. I was not in the mood for that. Jesse would be quite satisfied, that for once everything was not going right for me.

But then I found a new hostel that I like much better. They have a very nice travel agent so I talked with her for a while and tomorrow morning I am going into a National Park in the area I wanted to visit, west from Bangkok near the Myanmar border. We are hiking, floating on bamboo rafts, riding on elephants, etc. I suppose I may write a post in a few days about that. I wish I spoke a little Thai, that would help.