Akagera Safari Party

Ah fall.  The season of harvest and bounty - a time to connect with nature by killing animals and cooking their remains over an open grill.  Although we don’t get the change of seasons here in Rwanda, many expatriates still feel the pull of the outdoors and a fire pit.  In this spirit, the weekend before Thanksgiving, twenty or so of us headed out to Akagera National Park for a weekend of drinking, grilling, dancing, and general revelry.  Akagera is Rwanda’s version of the famously grand Masaai Mara game park in Kenya.  The number of animals doesn’t compare; many were either pushed out by agriculture or killed in the years following the genocide and the park is working to increase the animal count each year.  However, the park is still stunningly beautiful and worth supporting.  

I know the title of this blog would lead you to believe that my time in Rwanda is not about safaris, and I know that driving into Akagera National might also lead you believe that we did something close to a safari, but I can assure you that you’d be wrong.  We left Kigali early Saturday afternoon, packed into an SUV filled beyond capacity with pots and pans, food, blankets, clothes, tents, cameras, and what seemed like an entire mini-kitchen’s worth of seasonings, knives, olive oil and the like.  Some people brought entire mattresses to sleep on; my roommate Sasha and I stole the couch cushions.  The drive is about an hour and a half to the east, where the hills are softer than in Burera and the landscape is more savannah than purple misty mountains.  At the park entrance, the ranger demanded to see our car, because she didn’t believe that all of us fit into one vehicle.  We were eight, and there were three other cars equally packed with people and gear.

 

Our campsite was on the top a hill that overlooked a lake separating Rwanda and Tanzania – the view was spectacular.  We had a great time that night.  From an illegal walk through the park at sunset (we were discovered and chastised by a park ranger for not being in a car – “There are snakes and wildebeests,” he said) to a dance party on the roof of a colleague’s car, to the massive amount of food grilled over a huge fire, to the run-in with the stubborn old baboon the next morning, it was a blast.  I’ll let the pictures say the rest.

(As always, you can click the picture to see it full-size.)

The campsite.  Igloo cooler courtesy of two Marines and the U.S. Government.

View from the campsite.  Note my boss in white in the lower right hand corner.

Artsy shot!

Out on our illegal walk.

Love this shot - the people are dwarfed by the majesty of Akagera!

Jake fighting with our army-issue 'tent' we rented from the park.

Just before the booze-fueled insanity started.

Someone brought their large grate and threw it over the fire - steaks, fish, veggies abounded.

Jake is not impressed by the baboon.

And for that matter, neither is Cher-Wen.

 My apologies for not having pictures of the car roof dancing, Jager shots, and general silliness.  The pact we all made with each other was that what happened at the Akagera Safari Party....well, you know.

A night out in Kigali.

The website Xtranormal allows anyone to easily make videos by simply typing words into boxes for different characters.  Their motto is "If you can type, you can make movies".  I'd seen some pretty hilarious ones pop up onto people's facebook feeds - one was about a girl immediately turning into bridezilla after her boyfriend proposes, and another one showed an exchange between a bartender and a fussy client.  I decided to make my own about the expatriate hierarchy in Kigali and the video below is the result.  It's been viewed almost 500 times (as of me writing this), so people must think it's generally pretty funny.

There are a few Kigali inside jokes (for example, waraji is a cheap Ugandan gin that locals love - drinking it gets you street cred), but most of it should ring true for anyone who's ever worked in a place where your job determines 92% of who you are as a person and where you stand in the world (such as Washington DC).

Photo of the Week - Sinigurisha

Sinigurisha

Taken at the 'Burera Open Days', the nation's first expo on local NGOs operating in the district for the purpose of showing local people what organizations are working on in their community.  The dancer wears a shirt which translates as "I don't sell myself".  The Sinigurisha campaign is a local campaign by the international social marketing organization Population Services International (PSI).  It aims to address the issue of suga-daddies (and, to be gender equal, suga-mamis) by giving young people a positive, proud way to resist the advances of older people hoping to exploit them for sex.

Note: you can always click on the picture to view it full size.

You're not serious.

Think about the last time you really wanted to insult someone.  Not just a minor slap to the face, but really offend someone to their core.  What did you say?  My generation is so comfortable with foul words that the terms asshole, douchebag, dick, bastard, and whore barely merit an eye blink.  Young Americans curse so much that our insults have lost almost all sense of gravity and weight.  The term bitch now means so little, that I often use it as a term of endearment among young women my age.  I could call a friend a fucktard, fuckhead, or just plain fucker and they’d laugh; throwing the same insults at an enemy would probably elicit the same response.  In politics, ‘terrorist’, ‘Nazi’, and ‘communist’ still seem to invoke some indignation among the slurs’ recipients, but when they come from twenty-four hour news cycle commentators like Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann, they’re pretty hard to take as anything more than parody.

Over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about how we insult and compliment each other in the States, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with anything really “American” on either the positive or negative side of describing a person.  In my own family, I personally took the most affront at being called thoughtless or selfish (although ‘lazy’ was probably merited more than once), and really liked being described as driven.  But if you think about it, our insults and accolades reveal little about what we, as Americans, revile and value 

The Burera Team - both serious and organized.

In Rwanda, there are two insults and accolades that I hear used most often.  Whether there are others used commonly in Kinyarwanda, I can’t tell you, because I understand a total of perhaps twenty words in that language.  Again and again, all across the country, there are two concepts which people use –  especially when referring to those involved in any activity aimed at bettering the country  - to either praise or offend others: serious and organized.  For example, if I want to express that I think the staff at a particular restaurant provide high quality service, I might say, “This restaurant is really organized.”  This probably means that their servers are courteous, knowledgeable, attentive, and prompt – something you don’t often find here.  If I wanted to articulate my anger that someone showed up to an important meeting an hour late, I might say, “You know, this guy is really not serious.”  

On the other hand, to refer to someone as ‘serious’ is just about the highest compliment you can pay – Rwandans value the image that they are a country on the way up, dedicated to development and, well, serious about getting things done.  To describe a person as serious is, in many ways, to liken them to a patriot.  It’s the ‘serious’ people – from the president down to an accountant of a community-based cooperative – who are perceived as those that drive Rwanda towards success.  The superlative of ‘organized’ is one that I associate with Rwandans’ interpretation of the American workplace  – purposeful, on time, responsive, and prompt (of course, whether the American workplace actually  resembles this perception is another thing entirely).  Being organized refers to an approach or a method, namely efficiency.  Being serious refers to an ethic or a belief about one’s purpose in the overall framework of the country’s development and progress.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into all of this, but hearing these same descriptors over and over again seems to me to be an indication of what people in this country value.  To me, it’s clear that people who work hard to contribute something positive to development in an efficient, professional, and frankly, ‘American’ way are seen as beacons of progress.  Those who are not serious and are disorganized are seen as accomplices in preventing advancement – those who cling to old ways of doing things and who are more concerned with their own betterment than that of the nation.

The liberal artsy fartsy side of me would love to see a study done in lots of different countries and cultures on the biggest insults and compliments one can use to describe someone else.  I think the results would indirectly reveal a lot about what the people in that country or culture value and revile.  I’m not sure what researchers would find out about American culture, other than that we love potty humor and body parts.

Storm's Coming

A Love Letter

Dear Rwanda,

Baby, I love you, you're the best.  Your president is brilliant, a visionary who is proving the world and history wrong.  When a policeman stops my company's car, it's not to demand a bribe but to check that our seat belts are on.  The soldiers that purposefully walk the streets are polite and say, "Good evening, ma'am" when I pass.  I'm not afraid they'll hassle me or give me a hard time.  When I email someone at the Ministry of Health - Pharmacy Division, he emails me back with the information I need in ten minutes.  In a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the MOH, she puts two NGO people in their place, is tough as nails, keeps the meeting on track, and ends on time.  When I go to run at the national stadium, the elderly guard asks me what I need and I tell him I'd like to "faire l'exercise".  I'm afraid he'll send me away (it is the national stadium after all), but he breaks into a smile and says, "Of course!  The stadium exists for that - run until you get tired.  Spend the night if you like."  The next week, I go again, but this time there's a game going on.  A different guard says, "No problem, I can keep your bag safe for you.  Feel free to run."  More than an hour later, the game is over and thousands of people have exited the stadium gates.  When I ask the guard for my bag, he retrieves it from inside his own bag and everything is exactly as I left it.  At the bank, I stand in line for no more than two minutes before the teller happily greets me.  I'm in and out in five minutes.

I know I had that small dalliance with Burundi but baby, I swear it meant nothing to me.  It was a one-time weekend thing.  You have no idea how happy I was to be back on your clean, well-lit streets on a sidewalk with working traffic lights.  Where I can go running at night through the local neighborhood and not worry for a second about whether I'll make it home.  There are no barbed wire police checkpoints here, because when the cops say stop, people stop.  They calmly ask for my ID, and would never ask if I'm an Arab.  I don't know why they asked that in Burundi, baby, I really don't.

Sometimes, my love for you scares me.  No one else can compare to you, baby, and what will happen when I have to go out into the world without you?  Say you'll always be mine and won't ever leave me, baby.

Love,
ali

Must-Read : Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)

This is a new recurring feature I'll be posting every so often and which I hope the literary-types out there will enjoy and possibly find useful.  Since I'm in a car so much, I try to always keep a book around to pass the time.  The roads are usually too rough to try to get work done on a laptop, and if I stare too long out into the endless distance, I generally starting thinking about home and then can't stop.  So, I try to stay mentally busy.  In general, I read books that are in some way pertinent to my work, development, Africa, etc.  There are exceptions, most recently Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", an excessively long novel about a girl from backwoods mountains North Carolina who gets a full scholarship to the fictitious Dupont University (which seems highly based on Duke) and proceeds to get sucked into a world of athletes, frat boys, and general college unsavoriness.  I wouldn't particularly recommend it, but did find amusement in how accurate a lot of it seemed. 

Anyway, carrying on.  I'm currently reading a supremely fascinating book told from the varying perspectives of three expatriates in the early 1990's working for the UN and the Red Cross.

'Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)' begins in the months leading up to the first democratic elections in Cambodia after the rule of Pol Pot and his horrific genocide.  The main characters are real - Heidi, a woman running from her failed marriage and trying to score fast money by doing secretary work for the UN; Andrew, a doctor from New Zealand who seems to be running from life in general; and Ken, a law school graduate running from a slow death in corporate law who wants to do something 'meaningful'.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the juxtaposition of the pampered, excessive expatriate lifestyle with the usually-scary, often life-threatening work each of the characters carries out.  In the first post of this blog, I wrote about a personal internal discussion which attempts to reconcile my life on the weekends dancing in clubs and talking to my family on wireless internet with the poverty I see everywhere around me during the week.  In 'Emergency Sex', the heights to which the expatriate lifestyle can grow are written about in frank detail.  From massive colonial houses with gleaming wood floors, to a private generator that powers a blender for mango daiquiris, to kiddie pools on the roof filled with water from the sink, to cavorting with a Masai tribesmen for three days in a sex-filled, joint-smoking bender that ends with Heidi paying him $200, the excess is a bit breathtaking.  I don't live an impoverished life in Kigali, but I certainly don't live like that.  In addition to a $40,000 salary for six months (in a country where the cost of living is likely 1/10th that sum), Heidi earned an extra $140 per day just for expenses.  Incredible.  At the same time, the three main characters constantly live in a state of alert - a UN volunteer is brutally murdered during their time in Cambodia, gunfire is always just around the corner, and their work automatically makes them target of rebel groups with something real to prove.

I'm only about 1/3 through the book, but the back cover tells me that after Cambodia, the three continue their work in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti.  After a little investigation on Wikipedia, I learned that Andrew, the doctor, was fired from the UN after the book was published and that then-Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan himself tried to stop its release.  With this in mind, I'm exceedingly interested to read what Andrew has to say about the UN's infamous role in the Rwandan genocide.  This is something I'll write about in more detail later, but in short, the UN knew what was coming ahead of time, actively ignored pleas from General Dallaire (commander of the mission to Rwanda at the time) for extra peace-keeping troops, forbade him from authorizing any kind of action (not even to confiscate the thousands of machetes the French were flying into the country), and then refused to recognize the genocide as a state-sponsored campaign (which would have compelled them take some action), even though Dallaire had plenty of documents to prove it was.  In short, the UN could have prevented the genocide, and didn't. 

I love reading uplifting stories of successes in the developing world, but I think I like reading about the failures even more.  For far too long, those of us doing the 'developing' have done a piss-poor job and have reaped the spoils of obscene salaries and a lavish lifestyle while accomplishing embarrassingly little.  (Just for the record, I don't have an obscene salary.  I think the technical term is 'stipend'.)  Stories like this provide a great opportunity to think about where and why past attempts have failed in light of the work we're currently doing. 

So, in closing, if you're interested in how the UN operates from the inside, what the expatriate lifestyle can look like when allowed run amok, want more insight on how complicated 'development' work is, or just like a well-written story, check this book out. 

But don't take my word for it.

Shout-out of the Week

I've managed to keep up pretty well with my feature "Photo of the Week", but slacked off on the Shout-Out of the Week.  So let's try a reboot. 

This week's shout-out goes to my mom, Victoria.  In addition to being a complete badass (she broke her foot and then managed to organize and coordinate my cousin Nathan's wedding less than a week later all while wearing a boot on her foot), she's really been great at staying in touch with me while I've been so far away. 

As someone who could generally care less about the latest iPhone or the newest internet phenomenon, I've been really impressed and grateful with how she's started using Gchat to keep in touch and just check in on a regular basis.  She keeps me updated on everything that's happening at home and really makes an effort to make sure that even though I'm far away, I'm still in her thoughts.  When she took my brother Blake and some of his friends to a UNC basketball game last weekend, she made sure that they called me and sang the UNC fight song to me, with an emphasis on the "Go to hell Duke!" part.  One day, when I was feeling a bit homesick and sentimental, I put my status message as "Gone to Carolina in my mind", a reference to the famous James Taylor song.  That night, I received an email from her that contained a collage of images from UNC's campus and a really sweet message from her.

While all of that is great, there's something that makes my mom even cooler.  In March, she'll be taking her spring break (and the week after) to fly across the Atlantic to visit me.  Even better, her oldest sister, my Aunt Joan will be coming as well.  This is a HUGE deal for me, especially since the plane tickets alone cost well above $1000.  I am so excited and grateful that she's taking the time, money, and effort to come visit me on the other side of the world.  We traveled throughout Italy earlier this year and had a blast as she showed me around a country she had known 30 years ago.  I can only imagine the fun we'll have as we explore this little country I've come to love so much.

Three cheers for my mom!  Love you!

Mom at WCHS homecoming 2010.

A trip to Burundi - Rwanda's dysfunctional twin.

Long, long post ahead.  But fun!

A few weekends ago, Global Health Corps - Rwanda packed up and headed to visit our neighbors to the south - Burundi.  Almost every person in the GHC-RWA contingent (and some random friends and co-workers who came along for the ride) boarded a bus at 8am for the eight-hour trip to Bujumbura, Burundi's capital.

I won't go into a detailed history of Burundi, partially because I'm not fully familiar with it, and partially because it's not really necessary to appreciate our adventurous weekend.  I'll just hit the highlights.  Burundi and Rwanda were, in the past, essentially the same country - same ethnic groups, virtually identical language and traditions, same system of rule.  Germany won most of East Africa during the Berlin Conference  of 1884, which formally divided up the continent into colonial territories, and Ruanda-Urundi was part of their spoils.  The ownership of these twin countries was transferred to Belgium in the 1920's, and the Belgians proceeded to inflict all kinds of colonial horrors upon both.  The most significant of these was the solidification and stratification of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic identities, whereby people were given identity cards and highly differing life opportunities depending on which they were.  The last 60 years in both countries have been wrought with violence and horrors as the two 'ethnicities' have battled for control and equal opportunity.  The most famous was, of course, the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda.  Rwanda has bounced back brilliantly in the wake of the genocide, and is everyone's favorite little African country that could.  Burundi, however, has continued to struggle with a civil war, rebel groups, and governmental instability as recently as 2006.  This is important because it explains, at least in part, why Bujumbura seemed to be so different from its fraternal twin, Kigali.

So, after shamefully summarizing hundreds of years of history of Burundi and Rwanda, let's get to the story.

During our Global Health Corps training in Stanford in July, everyone headed to Rwanda made a pact that we would travel to our fellow corps member's- Gerard's - wedding in Burundi in October.  We took a bus on Friday morning from Kigali at 8am.  The cost of the ticket was 6,000 Rwandan francs, or about $11.

Ever the organizer, I was the last person to get on the bus and was consigned to the front of the bus - which made it much easier to see just how often we almost got into accidents.  After a few hours of traveling, we made a pit stop at a small roadside store.  I bought a few hard boiled eggs and a some roasted corn.  The bathrooms were behind the back of the store and I needed to pee badly enough to brave them.  Squat toilets - not exactly clean, but not dirty either, with jugs of water you poured around the hole.  The smell of ammonia was incredibly strong, but you'll encounter much worse in Africa.  Outside the bathrooms, I found this:

That's hundreds, maybe thousands of empty and cleaned cooking oil jugs.  They went back for probably a hundred feet.  People often use these jugs to carry water between public sources and their homes, but that didn't explain to me what so many were doing at the back of this African-style truck stop.  I learned when we got back on the bus that bottles were for milk - the people who owned the truck stop also ran a business selling milk to travelers.  Perhaps not up to strident US health code, but a brilliant bit of entrepreneurship nonetheless.

At the border, we quickly passed through the Rwandan side of immigration where the men behind the window grilled me on why I'd put my country of residence as 'Rwanda' when I couldn't show them a green card to prove my foreign resident status.  I told them that I had applied for one and was waiting on Immigration to get back to me.  They grilled me some more, just for fun, and then let me pass to the Burundi side.  Chaos immediately commenced.  The windows for entering and exiting Burundi were side by side and were crowded with many people, all trying to push their way to the windows, which were manned by exactly two people - one for entries, one for exits.  Here's a surreptitiously taken photograph (military people don't appreciate it when you take pictures on government property) of all of us standing in 'line'.  You can't see the other twenty or so people crowded around the same small window.

Americans LOVE hiking backpacks

The experience of getting visas and passing through immigration into Burundi was like a perfect metaphor for the difference between Rwanda and Burundi.  Our bus load of people passed through Rwandan immigration in about 20 minutes.  It took about an hour and a half on the Burundi side.  Also, at the immigration window on the Burundi side, when we asked how much the visa for Americans was, the guy behind the window said "How much do you think it is?"  Our representative Cher-Wen (who took all the Americans' passports to the window, where they processed them without ever looking at the people whose passports they belonged to) said, "It's twenty dollars."  The man behind the window said, "No, it's eighty dollars per person."  Cher-Wen said, "No, it's twenty."  The man behind the window said, "Ok, it's twenty."

Burundian Border.  The billboard says "Welcome to our place."

Finally back on the bus, we headed into the heart of Burundi, which looks almost exactly like the heart of Rwanda, with perhaps slightly less agriculture.  About a half hour outside of Bujumbura, Burundi's capital and our destination for the weekend, we came across this fantastic scene:

What you're seeing here is not only seven men hanging off the back of the bus, but THREE layers of animals in the truck.  At the bottom are cows, which are a bit hard to see.  On the upper layer are goats and sheep, and on the top left hand corner of the truck is a row of chickens.  I was highly impressed with the do-it-yourself construction style of the bed of the truck, although a bit concerned that the top row of goats might come crashing down on the cows below.  About fifteen minutes after this picture was taken, we came half a second away from a head-on collision with a car.  It was bad enough that even the Rwandans looked shaken.

We were greeted once we got off the bus (about eight hours after we'd begun) by Chandler, Simone, and Liana, Global Health Corps - Burundi fellows.  We chanced money, a simple exchange rate of 2:1, Burundi to Rwanda francs and got coffee and snacks at a hip little coffee shop downtown.   Chandler was gracious enough to let me and two other GHC girls crash at her house for the weekend.  I got to sleep in the room on the back porch of the house usually reserved for house help!  There were around 25 of us who met up for dinner and then we went out drinking and dancing afterwards.

Dinner!

Burundi apparently has a 0% import tax on liquor.  It was painfully, sadly cheap compared to Kigali.  We wend to this super swanky place called Havana - overstuffed leather couches, well-framed photographs of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on the wall, really nice golden wood tables.  We don't have anything like that in Kigali. I drank a moderately decent margarita for about $7!  This would have cost at least $12 in Kigali.  One of the things I found most interesting about Bujumbura was the noticeably greater disparity between 'normal' folks and the elite.  At one of Kigali's most popular spots - Papyrus - you'll see a broad spectrum of folks including well-to-do Rwandans, expatriates, prostitutes, and generally middle class people.  It's not exclusive, but it's not ghetto either.  This place Havana in Buj was SWANKY and full of sketchy-looking Italian men in really nice clothes.  It felt pretty strange to me.  Anyway, carrying on.  Our night ended in a super-local, packed, sweat-drenched club that was actually nothing more than a wooden platform outside covered by a tin roof - no walls.  Mostly Congolese music (similar to the Youtube video below) and it was so hot and I was so tired that I thought I might pass out.  That was my cue to call it a night.

I woke up about five hours later because it was so hot I had woken myself up with sweat.  Because Bujumbura's elevation is so much closer to sea level, it's HOT.  Seemingly always.  Some ladies and I hit up a courtyard garden brunch.  We ate cereal, fruit salad, pastries, and more underneath the dappled light of a vine-covered trellis.  Very lovely.  From there we headed to the famous and fabulous 'Bora Bora' on Lake Tanganyika.  I'd heard of this lake before, but never realized it's the second largest and deepest in the world.  The shores were almost white and went on forever!  I guess that's what you get with so much wave action.  The only sandy shoreline we have on Lake Kivu in Rwanda is at the Serena hotel in Gisenyi - they brought it in on trucks.  Bora Bora was essentially an outdoor club with a huge white deck, white furniture, royal blue pillows everywhere, and bartenders and waiters at your every beck and call.  Absolutely nothing like this in Rwanda, but I can't say I complained.  The swimming was superb and although there were no fences on the shore to keep the 'riff raff' away, the whole place made it clear that if you weren't white or fabulous, you stay stay away.

Fabulous dahling.

My partner Alain called ahead to make sure he planned his wardrobe accordingly.

I swear I washed my hair before the wedding.  Grease monkey.

We even managed a little physical activity.

The girls and I left Bora Bora in time to run to Chandler's house to take showers before getting ready for the wedding.  As we walked down the road looking for a cab (which were about 1/4 the cost of cabs in Kigali), I was struck by the parade of amusing things carried on bicycles.

Big water barrels on bike.

Firewood on bike.

Tik-tik from India.

We headed back to Chandler's in a tik-tik, which we don't have in Kigali, but I wish to God we did.  More fun than a regular cab, less exposed than a moto.  All the GHC girls - both in Burundi and Rwanda - had agreed to wear umushanana, the traditional dress of the two countries.  We prayed that they'd choose something that looked good on pale skin.  We ended up with white accented with red.  It ended up surprisingly less hideous than I thought.  We all got dressed at GHC fellow Simone's house in an old-fashioned gaggle of women-stye gathering.

The goal was to ADD to the hips as much as possible.

Chandler - beautiful as always.

I called ahead so I could match my earrings to the outfit.  Of course.

Not everyone, but you get the idea.

We were about an hour late to the wedding ceremony, but that was ok, because there was still another hour to go.  We were surprised to learn that it was a quadruple-header.  Four couples married at the same time!  Apparently there's a dearth of respectable churches to get married in, and they stay constantly booked.  The church was filled to about capacity, and we caused quite the stir coming in.  Some people laughed because they thought we were cute, some people laughed because they thought were hilariously inappropriate.  Most of the people with their camera phones out were men.  Just sayin'.

Packed house.

Four veils.

It was actually a little eerie seeing four bridal veils all diaphanous and lit up in a row.  It reminded several of us of the P-Square video, "No One Like You" I posted about in October which also features four brides.  Gerard was a stunna in a white suite, and his new wife Olive was beautiful.

Moment of truth.

After the wedding, we all packed into a minibus and drove to the reception - speeches, sodas (no alcohol), and general funny banter between the families.  Everyone was seated.  Here's a video of the bride's choir coming into the reception hall.

The bride's aunt or mother (can't remember which) made a speech wherein, at the end, she thanked Gerard for all the blessings he had brought to them.  My coworker Jacques translated the last part of her speech as "You have brought us so many blessings - I am even seeing many white people who have traveled far to be here."  And it was true - we really were rolling deep.  Typically, you have a token mzungu or two at African weddings, but we were almost ten.  My fav Emily even flew all the way from MALAWI!

After the reception, we all headed over to a local joint to grab some food.  They graciously converted the dance hall section of the restaurant into a dining room for us.  It was, let's just say, colorful.  I heard everyone else had an amazing night of dancing that night, but everyone staying at Chandler's house went home and passed out.  In the morning, we packed up our bags and headed out to hopefully find a taxi to take back to the bus station.  It started to pour before we did and we arrived at the bus stop completely soaked.

The ride home was long but quiet.  The Rwandan border men didn't give me any trouble coming back.  I was famished by the time we got back, and I was extraordinarily glad to hit Kigali's clean, sidewalked, well-lit streets.

Many thanks to everyone who uploaded pictures to the Picasa album so that I could steal them for this post!