The Akanzu vs TTC Bicumbi football match

Every now and then the huge Group Scolaire School next door to the TTC, GS Akanzu,  which has about 3000 students from P1 (about 7 years old) to S3 (about 16 years old) takes on the TTC students in a football match. It was serious today as it was the district competition. Classes were suspended in honour of the match so I thought I’d go to soak up the atmosphere and cheer on my TTC team.

The TTC Bicumbi team were in black and the Akanzu team were in any other colour. There was a fairly good turn out of people with loads of villagers, kids from the group scolaire school, students and tutors from the TTC, police officials and basically anyone who is anyone in Nzige was there. I have to say aside from the football it was a great people watching experience. Most of the time people were not really phased by my presence which was interesting. It seems that after a year perhaps I have become less of a curiosity. Now when I got my camera out I was suddenly very interesting as you can see by the cute kid pics but I was expecting that...I just couldn’t resist capturing the experience, I have been wanting to take photos at the stadium for ages but I was waiting for the right occasion.  

You see I am actually quite shy about getting my camera out in the village. I like to have an ‘excuse’ such as taking pictures for the students to see or pictures at work. I am always worried that people think I am prying on them and its difficult to explain to people sometimes as most of the kids (and many of the adults) out here have never seen one before. But it is always easier when there is something going on, ‘an occasion’ that allows me to feel that I can get away with it without upsetting anyone. Most Rwandans understand why you would want to take photos when it is an occasion so I find I can be more voyeuristic and just snap away. 

Now I have never actually taken photos at a football match and I found out its actually quite difficult. The ball keeps moving and so do all of the players. That combined with a big pitch so the players are often some distance away and fading light did make it difficult. Mind you to be honest I was more interested in photographing the crowds of onlookers than the football. Teens rode their bikes through the stadium with little ones on the back, little kids pushed homemade toys out of junk and women swept the track and the stands in honour of important visitors coming for international women’s day tomorrow (I daresay that will be the next blog post).  

Unfortunately the TTC team lost, and the excuse that was given by my handy student commentator who was keen to practice his English was that the Akanzu kids were less serious about studying and so had more time to practice...hmmm....not sure I believe that entirely but it’s a good angle to take! It was one of those great unexpected afternoons in the village. In fact the good times here are always unexpected and ad hoc. You can never predict when you will have one, but if you are here long enough they come by now and then and remind you how privileged you are to live somewhere so different and interesting. I wouldn’t have swapped this afternoon for any amount of hot showers, chocolate fudge cake or brie. An afternoon spent in the sunshine in a stadium amongst the banana trees in the company of lovely young people beats freezing to death back home any day.

The strangest museum...

So for reasons I will reveal to you later, I am doing a lot of research in Kigali at the moment. One place I needed to check out but never have was the museum of natural history. Located down a dirt road not far from the prison, I must admit I would probably not have bothered going if I was not required to research it as rocks and stuffed animals are not really my thing, but I’m glad I did just for the strangeness of the experience. The first thing that struck me as strange was outside the front entrance there looks to be an elephant’s skull stuck in a plant pot. It is actually mounted on a tree trunk on closer inspection, but I have to be honest it is a weird choice of object to entice people to enter. It reminded me of the book ‘Lord of the flies’ and the pig’s head stuck on a stick.

The next strange thing is that the text for all of the exhibits is in German and Kinyarwanda only. Now I’m not intending to diss the German language but how many people in this part of the world can actually speak German? I’ve yet to meet more than one German speaker here in over a year. I think the reason for this is that it was created by a German NGO but I do think French or English would have been a better choice for the second language if the museum was intended to be visited by people from afar or the wider East African community. When I asked if this was going to change I was met with a blank ‘why would that be necessary?’ look...

And the third strange thing was the exhibits themselves. Now I understood the displays of rocks and stuffed animals from the national parks, but if anyone could tell me what the purpose of a glass case full of plastic toy farm animals was I’d love to know. It would be better to take them to the nearest maternelle or pre-school in my humble opinion. That way they would really be contributing towards people’s education. However one thing that was wonderful and not so strange was the view from the terrace at the back of the museum. You can see all around downtown Kigali. You can peek at the clusters of mud houses nestled into the valley and see wisps of smoke rising from settlements. It was definitely the highlight of my day! A museum with a view....

The road trip

Last weekend we went on a road trip to see Kathy, a volunteer who lives of the edge of Nyungwe forest national park. Mark and Tammy drove there in their pick up and I have to say, it was a real treat to be in a car instead of being squished on a public bus or exposed to the elements and pot holes on a motorbike. It was quite a long way, about 4 and a half hours from Kigali, so about 6 hours from where I live in the East. It was amazing just watching the countryside from the window. It had been ages since I made it further than Kigali and it was a timely reminder of just how beautiful Rwanda really is. And where Kathy lives is, in my opinion, the most beautiful part of Rwanda of all.

The forest is stunning. On Saturday Mark drove us to the park entrance and it was amazing how much we could see from the road. The tops of the mountains were ringed by blue mist and the tea plantations formed a bright green carpet in the foreground. We even saw a monkey from the road. What kind it was I couldn’t tell you but it was black with white bits and not as horrid as the baboons in Akagera. And I had a fabulous panorama from the bumpy back of the pickup truck, I could see all around. We are going to try to come back in a few months and camp in the campsite and do some walks. In the forest itself, you can see lots of beautiful wild flowers and it is unbelievably green.

So we spent our evenings in Gasarenda town, where Kathy lives. I wrote about it on my previous trip as ‘the wild west of Rwanda’ and my view on this has not changed. There were still cowboy hats in abundance. We went to Kathy’s local restaurant on the first evening and sampled very special ‘special omelettes’ in the leopard room of love. They escorted us to this room out the back which was painted with hearts and leopards, some were upside down, some not. The second evening we went to her district town, Nyamagabe, and ate Rwandan rabbit. The rabbit here is definitely better than the chicken, more meaty and less stringy, thats for sure.

But one of the highlights was Kathy’s nightclub in Gasarenda town. For the first time I went clubbing in my pyjamas. This was partly because I fell over in Nyamagabe ripping my jeans open and grazing my knee, and partly because, well, I could. Complete with a rather good sound system, Whitney Houston’s greatest hits and a couple of crates of Primus, we all danced the night away in Kathy’s living room come nightclub. We woke up to a breakfast of eggs cooked on the charcoal stove, Gasarenda bread and hangovers, with a lovely scenic view of course! This has to have been yet another one of my favourite weekends here, great company in a beautiful place, can it get better than this?

Camilla and the Kamikaze lizards

I have a fairly tumultuous relationship with the lizards in Rwanda. I do find them quite cute from a distance. They have their big bug eyes and cute little tails. They are fine on the wall. But lately there has been a plague of the kamikaze kind. Not content with keeping their four stumpy little legs on the wall where they belong, they have started launching themselves at me at work. I don’t know if the ones at the TTC are a bit dozy or what, but twice this week a lizard has fallen from the sky and landed on my shoulder.

 Its such a horrible experience. One minute you are walking back into the resource room carrying your ‘journal de classe’ and white chalk like all good teachers do, and the next moment you are flapping around trying to shake off what you think is a lizard but you’re not quite sure as you never actually saw it land. If you don’t want to land on a human (and let’s face it, why would they, they can be quite unpleasant and unpredictable creatures), look before you leap you stupid, stupid things! I’m now wary of walking through doorways as that is where they tend to jump from. Perhaps they are a bit blind, as in fairness they do look pretty traumatised when I do finally manage to shake them off. I thought I’d killed the last one. When I got it off it just froze on the floor for ages. So I’m hoping they develop a bit more sense soon, for their own good.    

Buses and donuts

The other day I was the only woman on the bus. It was just me and 18 men. And predictably I attracted quite a bit of attention. I was gawped at for the entire half hour, some people don’t even blink when they stare which I find quite odd. And predictably, my marital status came up. So as usual I decided to marry myself. It’s just easier that way. Where I always come unstuck is my lack of wedding ring. Now why after all this experience out there in the world I haven’t got myself a fake wedding ring I don’t know. One with a big fake rock and a shiny gold band, the blingier the better. If you’re going to go fake you might as well do it in style. So the best reason I could come up with as to why I wasn’t wearing my ring was that it ‘gets scratched on the bus’. And when you think about it that is a bit ridiculous really. I think when you get to a lie upon a lie it gets harder to sound convincing.

That weekend I also made a very interesting discovery. There is a place in Kigali that makes fresh bagels and donuts and chocolate chip cookies! Ok so I have never seen so many muzungus in one place but it was still amazing. The donuts were warm and sticky and chocolately and fresh from the charcoal stove. I just had to take a picture of the woman cooking them on the charcoal stove. I think thats the best way to cook them as they were delicious. The fact that they were so nice combined with months of donut deprivation made me have to restrain myself from eating a whole tray. I remember once trying to explain what a donut was to a Rwandan and finding it difficult. So if I ever randomly have to explain that word again I have a picture to show them. The place is called the African bagel company if anyone reading this is ever in Kigali. If you are suffering western food withdrawal symptoms I recommend it.

Reflections

It’s been a while since I wrote my blog. It’s not that nothing has been happening...well sometimes it feels that way and then when I haven’t written on my blog for ages a huge stream of things comes to mind.  I’ve just pulled back up from a period of feeling quite down and I think it stopped me from writing. It’s hard to write when you are down in that place. I don’t know why I’ve had a down period at the beginning of this year, I really wasn’t expecting it. Perhaps it is because I expected everything to magically be easier because I’ve been here some time already, but I still have days when I feel like a fish out of water, a totally displaced person in a community where I don’t belong or understand anything that is going on. I find myself feeling vulnerable and alone. I feel irritable, fractious and bad-tempered and I am not so patient, flexible or adaptable, all the things vso expect me to be...

But then I’ll have a moment where I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Some kid will hug me shouting my name, the students will almost make me cry with their lovely singing, I’ll see a student actually use a teaching aid in their lesson or a nice person will sit next to me on the bus and talk to me without any agenda. I thought the rollercoaster ride of doing vso would even out in the second year, but it hasn’t. It is an experience of extreme highs and lows, frustrations and joys, and hardest of all to experience – the flat part of the rollercoaster where nothing seems to happen at all, despite my best efforts.  As I have passed 13 months in Rwanda and I speed towards month 14, I am eternally grateful for all the life lessons I’ve learned, many the hard way, but all of which have made me a different person to the one who left the UK in January 2011.

So here are some of my life lessons from Rwanda:

1) I can survive with chocolate fudge cake, French stick or brie. Ok so I didn’t say it was easy, but I am still here and I have yet to eat anything that remotely passes as a decent chocolate fudge cake in Rwanda.

2) I can spend a lot of time by myself in the evenings and only descend into mild madness. I have not yet got to the stage of Tom Cruise in the film ‘Castaway’, but there is still time...

3) I actually have a culture. I know this sounds strange, but it is only by moving to a completely different culture that I have become aware of my own cultural background and influences. It is only when you experience living life where people behave in different ways to where you are from that you realise what your own cultural norms actually are. No matter how long I live here I will always behave in a European way to an extent. I will always walk too fast, get impatient from time to time and hate tea with too much sugar in it.

4) I can speak some words of a language that is not English. Ok so I don’t do it well, but as someone who always shied away from saying anything other than please or thank you in another language it has been quite a big barrier to overcome.

5) I can survive power cuts and water shortages and life goes on. You just wait or find another way to get what you need.

6) I have loved this experience, but life in a small village is not for me. I prefer the bustle of a town and living somewhere where just leaving my house in the morning doesn’t attract a crowd.

7) My love of chips is not limitless. Yep can’t believe I’m saying this but I have gotten fed up of them.

8) Relationships are everything. Friends and family, both new and old, in Rwanda or in England are what sees you through. I kind of knew this before, but I didn’t fully appreciate it.

9) My career does not define me or anyone else for that matter. There is more to people than the job they have or the salary they earn. When you take that away and you are forced to look at all the other aspects of yourself and your life you find out who you really are. In fact, here people are not even interested in what you do which is so refreshing. Instead they are more interested in whether you are having a good time in their country or the eternal question of whether you have a boyfriend...  

10) The future is important but the here and now is even more important. I used to spend so long thinking and worrying about what was coming next that I never appreciated the small things that happened to me every day. And here, because the future is so less certain, people live much more in the moment and enjoy today rather than always thinking about the next thing.

So there we have it. Some lessons have been learned, other lessons are out there waiting to be learned, day by day.

The end of the drought

I have been without water for nearly 2 weeks. It affects you in more ways that you could imagine. You put off the washing (other than underwear of course!), you use the dishwater and dirty clothes water for ‘flushing’ the toilet...and as for showers, you try to do it with as little water as possible and as infrequently as possible! Toilet paper goes into a bin instead as it takes lots of water to flush down. Shoes lose their shine as it takes water to wash them. Dirt collects in the shower tray as you only have a little water to wash it all down. Drinking is something that can’t be cut really. Being clean and healthy actually starts to become a real challenge. I got someone to fetch me a couple of jerry cans worth of water, but because it is scarce here it comes back a bit muddy. And this is from someone who had no running water at all for my first 7 months here. I wonder how I lived like that all the time now. 

The scary thing is that you can never be sure when it is likely to return. Every day you turn the tap on in the hope that something will come out. And usually what happens is the tap spits out a mouthful of water and that’s it. You know you’re in trouble when everything looks dry and parched around where the tap is. It’s quite frustrating really. To say nothing of people who end up having to walk for miles in the sun to find the stuff. So I was absolutely delighted when the water returned today. I filled up every bucket and water container in the house to the brim and enjoyed running my fingers through it. I must stop taking water for granted. Its so easy after a while to forget how lucky I am to normally have easy access to water. Life really does become difficult without it.