Nonsense. This is Rwanda — every season is busy season. But still, with the return of the rains, there’s a renewed push to prepare the fields for a second harvest. it seems ridiculous that there’s still subsistence farming going on right here in Kigali, but the pace of development is such that new neighborhoods are…
Category: The L’s In Rwanda
This is the ongoing tale of a family of four carrying out a six month stay in Rwanda. It involves some planning, some thinking, some compromising — and probably some trial and errors as well.Come along for the ride — from the comfort of your own home. Learn from our mistakes and take part in the fun.
Tradition and protocol are important aspects of life in a foreign country. Do’s and don’ts, can and can’ts, accepting – or at least respecting – the different ways of doing things in these parts. And so it was that I spent a morning learning the intricate steps involved in getting an oil change in Rwanda this…
The “small” rainy season in this neck of the woods started on Saturday. Suddenly, it became quite apparent why the main roads have massive four foot deep culverts on the side. It’ll help green up the place, but it also had the novel side effect of emptying the streets of people, which is almost unheard…
(The elusive RAV4 in its natural habitat. Only a few hundred are left roaming the plains of Eastern Africa; the rest have been domesticated or killed for their lean meat and the delicious timing belts, which are ripped from the still living beast and used as an aphrodisiac in sacred fertility rituals). Did you know…
(Spoiler alert: this gets ridiculously geeky. You can ignore this post with impunity if you’re just here for the gorilla babies and mountain biking trip reports). Right up there with food, water, and air, Internet access is obviously an essential requirement in life, particularly when you’re stuck in Rwanda for six months. The prevailing way…
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…
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,…
