The country of a thousand hills (part two - the country!)

This is my second post on my recent trip to Rwanda. After spending a couple of days exploring Kigali (see part one!), Becks and I took a six hour bus journey to Kamembe in the Rusizi district, in the south west of Rwanda. 

I had been told a few horror stories about people being a little ill on the bus, due to the hills and winding roads. Luckily there were no such incidents on our journey and it was fantastic to get a glimpse of the landscapes and wildlife, particularly the last couple of hours as we travelled through Nyungwe Forest National Park (and spotted quite a few monkeys!).

Becks has been living in Kamembe since last September and it was great to see where she's living and meet some of her fellow volunteers. On the first night, we all went out for dinner at a favourite dining venue, Hotel du Chutes, where I sampled their famous beef brochette (a beef kebab essentially, but nicer) and chips (everything I ordered in Rwanda seemed to come with chips!). 

Kamembe sits on the banks of Lake Kivu, on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Lake Kivu is incredibly stunning:

 

 

 

 

Half of Lake Kivu is in Rwanda and half is in the DRC. The island you can see on the following picture (taken from hotel veranda near to where Becks lives) is actually in the DRC:




From this veranda, we watched the night fishermen sail ourtonto the lake to start their night's work. As they sail out, they all sing a traditional song. When they come back in the morning, their wives wait for them on the shore and sing them home. They fish in groups of three boats attached together and the fishermen (bravely!) walk between the boats on thin pieces of wood.

The following day we went for a walk around the hills of Kamembe and saw from a distance the fish being sold at market:

A view of Kamembe

 

May 1st, Labour Day, is a public holiday in Rwanda (and Uganda) and we had been told about a procession taking place, followed by a football match with the army playing the district (essentially the local council workers). The timings of when this was all going to happen were a bit confused and we managed to get to the stadium towards the end of the match! In the final moments, the army scored, but the goal was disallowed, so the game ended in a no score draw.

 

 

The two teams pose for a photo at the end of the match.

Becks lives next door to a lovely family with lots of adults and children living in a one-roomed house, and she and her family do quite a lot to support the children. Before we left Kamembe, we spent a bit of time with the children; teaching them to sing "heads, shoulders, knees and toes" and blowing bubbles, which they absolutely loved:

After two days in Kamembe, we took a boat up the entire length of Lake Kivu. The boat trip took just over 8 hours:

The night fishermen about to head home

 

 

The boat only sails a couple of times a week and it seemed to be an occasion everywhere we stopped, with people from the local villages coming on to the banks to see the boat -

We didn't wait for latecomers; they had to catch up in this little boat and jump on from there!-

 

 

We made a little friend on the boat, who came and sat with us for several hours!

The first half of the boat trip was great, but as time went on, it got busier and busier and hotter and I was pleased when we arrived in our destination, Gisenyi!

Gisenyi is a small city in Rubavu district in the Western Province of Rwanda. The city is on the northern shore of lake Kivu and has several hotels and three sandy beaches, giving it a more of a seaside holiday resort feel. It also has the only brewery in Rwanda, which manufactures the local beers Primus and Mützig.

We stayed at Inzu Lodge, which is set in the hills with views over Lake Kivu and probably one of the nicest places I've stayed since coming to Africa. We met a couple here from the UK who were in the first week of a 13month trip around Africa and South America. They're going to be in Kampala this week and staying at my flat, so I'm looking forward to showing them round the local area here.



Our tent!

 

View from the tent.

The bar!

Inzu lodge at night

Walking into Gisenyi town

Gisenyi is also borders the DRC and we took a walk down to the border crossing:

Gisenyi beach

 

After two days in Gisenyi, I took the slightly shorter 3 hour bus journey to Kigali and then headed back to Uganda. It was really fantastic to travel around another East African country and to meet lots of people who are living and working there. Thanks Becks and all your friends for being such great hosts!

The country of a thousand hills (part one- the City!).

A few weeks ago I spent six days exploring one of Uganda’s neighbouring countries, Rwanda, starting in the capital, Kigali. I visited my friend Becks, who is doing a two year VSO placement there. Becks is a Education Leadership Advisor in Western Rwanda (see next blog post!) and is training and supporting head teachers to develop their leadership and management skills (you can see Becks' blog here). 

Here are a few interesting facts about Rwanda:

• Rwanda is often referred to as "pays des mille collines" or "the country of a thousand hills". This is not an exaggeration; there seems to be hardly any flat land!
• Plastic bags are banned in Rwanda and you’re not allowed to take them into the country.
• The currency is the Rwandan Franc.
• On the last Saturday of every month, the whole country stops whatever it’s doing for the morning and works for the public good, cleaning streets, repairing roads and building schools. This is mandatory and is known as Umuganda day (literally meaning "community service day").
• There are a number of local beers. I tried out the Primus:

• It’s culturally unacceptable to eat whilst walking along the street.
• Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in its Parliament of anywhere in the world — nearly 64%.
• The main languages are Kinyarwanda, English and French. Up until 2008, French was the main language taught in schools. In 2008 the government announced that English would be the main language to be taught and the curriculum was changed, pretty much overnight. This created some challenges for the teachers! I found that people were very keen to teach tourists some key Kinyarwanda phrases. Here are a few:

 

This photo was taken at Nyamirambo women’s centre, which I visited In Kigali. The centre was set up by 18 local women and runs as a collective, offering training, education and employment to women and promoting gender equality.

In particular the women are trained in tailoring and make clothes, purses, bags etc to sell and generate an income. All the fabrics are very bright and I was struck by the vividness of the colours the women in Rwanda wear; influenced I think from their Western neighbours; countries such as the DRC.

 

I bought the orange dress/ top (next to the flipchart in the pic above) for my niece, Lily. I imagine she will be the only baby in Burton Latimer wearing West African fabrics! (although she did burst into tears when I showed her it on Skype last weekend! (the only time she cried in the hour long Skype call…!)).

I spent a really lovely morning with the staff at the centre learning about the work they do, exploring the area and eating a local lunch. Nyamirambo, Kigali's Muslim quarter, is the oldest part of the City and most multicultural peopled with migrants from across the continent. My lunch was prepared by one of the local women, Rosa, a Congolese refugee who lived in a small house with her son and daughter. It was quite a privilege to eat lunch with her in her home (and she was a very good cook!).

 

Local tailors

 

Local lunch

As we walked around the area, we visited some women at a local hairdressers. They were insistent on weaving my hair. They did two strands:

 

 

(I kept these in until the evening. It took me quite a long time to take them out (I’m not sure what everyone else in the restaurant thought, as I piled up threads of hair on my table…)).

I spent the rest of my time in the centre of Kigali. Kigali is known to be one of the cleanest and most ordered African capitals. I was struck by how less chaotic it felt than Kampala, in particular the roads and traffic (no pot holes, pavements exist, there are lots of traffic lights and signs and people take notice of them, moto drivers wear helmets and don’t load their bikes high with all kinds of belongings (I actually saw a boda in Kampala this week with two people on it and a double bed frame!)).

A couple of pics of the centre of Kigali:

 

I spent a couple of days exploring the city and visiting the sights, which are mainly focussed around the genocide. April was the 20^th anniversary month of the genocide (there has been quite a lot of coverage in the British press about the development of Rwanda and Kigali since the genocide. You can see one of the articles here). 

In 100 days, an estimated one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by the Interahamwe. The Kigali Memorial Centre honours the 250,000 buried there in mass graves and tries to explain how the genocide happened and how it was largely ignored by the international community. There is a section on other genocides that have taken place across the world. The centre is also acts as an international education and research centre; educating school children, delivering conflict resolution training and carrying out research, in an attempt to ensure that genocide never happens again.

 

 

I also visited the presidential palace (now called the State House Museum), where the former president Hayarimana’s plane was shot down; a catalyst to the start of the genocide. I found it slightly eerie and ghost like, with everything left in its place from that day and the plane wreckage still in the grounds.

I went to the Camp Kigali Memorial, a memorial to the 10 Beligian UN peacekeepers who were killed on the first day of the genocide.

 

Each pillar represents one of the peacekeepers that died and the number of cuts in the stone relate to the soldier's age.

 

Finally Becks and I went for a Primus at Hotel des Mille Collines, otherwise known as “Hotel Rwanda”.

After Kigali, I explored the west of the country and its amazingly beautiful rivers and landscapes. Blog post to follow..... 

Coffee making, egg hunting and language learning....

 

I spent Easter weekend at Sipi Falls. In Eastern Uganda, on the footfalls of Mount Elgon, there are three waterfalls (imaginatively named "Sipi 1", "Sipi 2" and "Sipi 3") and some stunning views looking out across Uganda.

 

In theory, Sipi is a 4-5 hour drive from Kampala. However, travelling on Good Friday morning is a bit like travelling anywhere on a bank holiday in the UK, only slightly worse. We travelled by public bus, which was super cheap and totally fine (apart from some confusion in the morning when Gladys from the bus station called us at 6.30am to say that the 8.30am bus we were booked on was about to leave and so could she book us onto the next bus that was leaving at midday. We headed to the bus station regardless and got on a bus just before 8am.  Never quite worked out what was going on there...). However the roads were very busy and it was raining and not much works here when it rains. So it took us 3 hours to travel the first 30km....

 

We stayed at Moses campsite, which has brilliant views of Sipi and the surrounding landscapes:

 

 

The campsite's picnic benches!



 

 

Looking out across Uganda.

 

 

Sipi 1 (I think..!)

 

 

 

 

 

The campsite was a really great place to just relax, read a book and look at the views. It had a little bit of a Fawlty Towers feeling to it, mainly I think because Moses' brother who ran the site seemed to spend most of his time in the local village, drinking Waragi (the locally distilled brew here in Uganda). Once we had gotten over the initial challenge of there not being enough places for us all to sleep, it was all fine.

 

The other group on the campsite were VSO volunteers who were on placements across Uganda, mainly in the north. Two of them I had met before. Russ I had met in Kidepo (at the time, his brother was visiting. For Higham people - his brother lives in Milton Keynes, is a chemist and was friends with William Steele. Random). Ian I had met in Café Kawa, my local café that I have recently discovered joins up with the wine shop next to them on a Wednesday night and sells wine at 4000 Ugandan Shilling a glass (£1...!).  It was really interesting chatting to them and finding out what projects they're all working on. Four of them had taken voluntary redundancy or early retirement from local government before coming out here, including Greenwich.

 

We went on a four hour walk to view all three falls. It was really beautiful, if a little tricky at times (despite walking very slowly downhill and with a stick, I still managed to fall over...). Here are some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baby chameleon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also took part in a coffee tour. Coffee is Ugandan's main export (for anyone that's interested, coffee is the main export at 55%, then fish, tea and tobacco) and the areas around Sipi sell locally and also export fantastic Arabic coffee. The tour took us through the whole process of making coffee. First the beans are picked:

 

 

 

 

and left out in the open to dry for around 3 weeks (this bit had obviously already been done by the time we arrived!). Then, the beans are shelled by pounding them: 

 

 

 



 

 

Then they are roasted:

 

 

 

until they look like this:

 

 

 

pounded again to make the powder:

 

 

 



 

 

and then boiled and simmered:

 

 



 

 

to make one of the best cups of coffee I've ever tasted!:

 

 



 

 

We also had a look round at what else was growing on the farm:

 

 

Matooke (like plantain, this a staple in the Ugandan diet (I eat it for lunch every day!))



 

 

Massive avocadoes  (I'm about to eat one of these for my lunch!) 

 

A chameleon (doing a bit or a rubbish job at camouflaging himself!)

 

We also had a little walk round Sipi town and ate there a couple of times (rice, beans, g-nut sauce and greens of course!). The "town", like lots of Uganda towns and villages is a street of small shops (all with mobile phone company branding), local food places, a church and a boda station! Plus plenty of cows, goats and street dogs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in Kampala, I have just started a course to learn Luganda. English is the official language in Uganda, but of the country's 33 indigenous languages, Luganda is the most widely spoken. I'm taking a course for two evenings a week for eight weeks at the Goethe-Zentrum institute (the German Cultural Centre). There are seven of us in the class and we're just learning the basics at the moment. I've so far learnt how to say my name, where I'm from, what I enjoy doing etc and I can count to ten. Isaac, our teacher, includes lots of games into the teaching (like bingo, speed dating...) so it's quite fun and we have homework after every lesson. Our last homework was to learn how to say our phone number in Luganda. This was a bit of a challenge given that I didn't actually know what my number was! I'm finding the pronunciation quite tricky though so we'll see how it goes.

 

 

At Hands for Hope, we've just finished our first term. We fundraised to run an Easter Egg hunt for the nursery kids and also some activities over the Easter holidays. Some staff from BA bought some crème eggs and mini eggs out with them from the UK. Thanks to everyone who donated. We held the hunt this week and it great fun. The children very rarely get to eat chocolate so this was a real treat for them. Here are some pics: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are about to start our holiday programme for all the children for two weeks before the second term starts. It is actually against the law in Uganda to run educational activities during the school holidays and we get special permission from the ministry to run the programme. The activities include lots of games, arts, dance etc as well as health talks and it's really important for the children as they continue to get two meals a days and are kept away from the dangers of the slum.

Before that, though, Hands for Hope is closed for a week and all the staff get a week off. I'm looking forward to spending it in the land of 1000 hills.....