A week ago, I spent my 43rd birthday as a more-or-less willing prop in a photo op. Here in Rwanda, the last Saturday of every month is designated “Umuganda,” a term that translates as “pillar” or “contribution”. Whatever you call it, it is essentially a mandatory community effort for all adults in Rwanda. Like everything…
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The view north from about 6,000 feet atop Colline Bumbogo (a Cat 2 climb on the outskirts of Kigali recently renamed Haedrich’s Hump on Strava). Rwanda is truly “the land of a thousand hills,” (in addition to “the petting zoo of mountain gorillas” and “the tiny country with the nasty past”) and those hills are…
Amahoro Stadium in Kigali can hold 50,000 people. This past Sunday it was filled to the hilt when a group of Rwandan churches came together to celebrate the first ever “Thanksgiving Day.” The freshly minted celebratory day was billed as an opportunity for the already extremely religious Rwandans to give special thanks to God for,…
This little guy probably lives somewhere down the alley that runs alongside our house up here in Kinyinya.
It should be hard to be blue with a sunrise like this, but today was a bit of a challenge. I’m still trying — and failing — to “get” the charm of Kigali. In my (probably unreasonable and, thus, unwanted) opinion, there’s precious little of it around. By the international “big smelly African citiy” standard,…
I fear I may just have screwed up the first ever Rwandan Census. The very kind old gentlemen from the Ministry of Carefully Counting People who came knocking on our door this morning has been checking off little boxes with his No. 2 pencil while trying his hardest to translate the Kinyarwanda questions into French for…
I guess I’ve always considered myself safari agnostic. I am not a big fan of zoos – never did get the appeal of watching lethargic caged animals on display in a fake landscape in the middle of a big city. But a safari is supposed to be more like the real thing, right? Seeing the…
For all I know, the sign says “please don’t take pictures of this sign.” I hate being functionally illiterate. Yesterday, this ticked in as a message on my cell phone: Ijoro ry’ibarura ryo kuya 15 rishyira 16/08/2012:Wibuke imyirondoro y’abaraye iwawe n’iy’abataharaye bahasanzwe n’iy’abashyitsi. Ibaruze kuko uri uw’ingenzi. Really? I won a million dollars in the…
According to a Belgian friend who has lived here for the past eight years, the only way to go in Rwanda is to get staff to manage your staff. That is to say, your guards, your housekeeper, your cook, your gardener, your driver, and so on get really unwieldy and can’t all be trusted, and…
Kigali is renowned for an unusually low cime rate, not just by big-African-city standards, but by any standard at all. It’s hard to say if this is because of the incredible security measures people are taking, or entirely unrelated — in which case all the razor wire and the countless bored guards would seem like…
