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…
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.
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…
Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. We had our newfound bestest friends in all of Africa, the O’Callahan’s, over for dinner last night, and the pile o’ kids wanted to watch a movie. Since we forgot to bring the 67” flat screen, they’re having to make due with a 17” laptop. I…
Okay, I’m going to gush like a teenage schoolgirl for a second: I am absolutely head over heels in love with Google maps and their recently updated satellite imagery. The reason for this total crush? Without the CIA-grade detail, there’s no way in hell I would be able to string together a random collection of…
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for all of us. After a week of simply adjusting to being here, getting over jet lag etc., we got around to renting a house. After appreciating that the pickings are slim (either overpriced or unacceptably crappy or an audacious combination of the two), we learned the hard…
That’s the wonder of being a few degrees off the equator: sunset is at six sharp every night (and sunrise at six sharp as well). We go from daylight to pitch black in about 15 minutes. Took this shot from our balcony here in Kinyinya, Gasabo — there’s a big party going on at the…
It feels terribly unfair to slam the Kivu Serena for anything at all. As an outpost of civilization on the edge of the chaos and anarchy that is the Democratic Republic of Congo (literally walking distance from the hotel’s lobby), pretty much anything shy of cholera and gunfire at the breakfast buffet should be counted…
