Wandering Jaimee: Last thoughts on Rwanda

Since I have been out of internet connection for a while I wrote this post a while back with the intent of posting it later. I wanted to get the experience into words before I forgot what it was like.

The past few days have been amazing. I haven’t felt yet like I have had time to sit down and write a good blog post. Hopefully I’ll have some more time in the near future to do so. Since I wanted to remember everything about the past few days and we don’t have internet access tonight, I’m writing this post for publishing at a later date.

Yesterday (March 2) we had our presentation to Gate of Hope. I was presenting on the water, sanitation and storm water drainage. The presentation was translated into Kinyarwanda. I have done a few presentations that have been translated so it wasn’t a completely new experience to me, however, it still proved to be a challenge. I noticed that as I was presenting, Paulene’s Mom was laughing so hard she could barely stay in her seat while I was talking about the wastewater system. I’m not sure what was funnier, the fact that I was talking about toilets, or the fact that I had to find 5 different ways to describe a sewage leach pit before it could finally be translated. As I was trying to describe the leach pit, people from the audience who were fluent in English were piping up with what they thought the translation would be. It was like a group effort to translate the toilet language. Overall though the presentation went very good and the ministry was happy with what they saw. We got some useful comments from locals that lived in the village, and one of the local government representatives was present.

Today we headed off this morning to come to a hotel and have our closing and decompression time. Gate of Hope hired a mattatu (van) for us. After we got about 500 metres down the road, the van stopped. The driver got out and had a look and then his assistant, grabbed a cooking oil container, and took off on a boda (motorcycle) to the local gas station to get some diesel because the tank was empty. After he got back they poured a small amount of diesel in the tank. He pumped the gas pedal and couldn’t get it started. So he proceeded to take a mouthful of diesel and spit it over the battery (?). We then rolled backwards down a hill as he tried to do a running start. It finally started and we were on our way. One of our local friends turned around and said “This is Africa.” We all found the situation funny and this is indeed Africa. So the story isn’t finished. We got maybe 5 km down the road and the van stopped again. Perhaps because he only put about half a litre of diesel in it, however the driver said it had no such thing to do with running out of gas and that it was a problem with the carburetor, however none of us believed that tale. We ended up sitting there until they brought a new taxi at which point the first thing we did was fill up with diesel and we were on our way. We are staying at a really nice hotel for the night. Brenna (the other girl intern) and I are sharing a room and just finished raving about the amazing shower we just had. We also went to this amazing Indian restaurant for supper. It was really fancy and all the waiters were walking around in what looked like Aladdin costumes. The food was amazing. It was great to have such a wonderful closing time with the team, however, I can’t believe this part of my journey is over already. This team was really amazing and it was wonderful to see how well we worked together and how all our skill sets worked together to accomplish the final product. It is sometimes surprising to see how these teams somehow end up with people that have just the right skills to get the job done. This team was probably one of the best examples of that.

In the morning we will leave Kigali at 4:30 AM to head back to Kampala. I’ll be on Safari from Monday-Thursday and then I head to Eagles Wings Children’s Village on Friday morning.

I had a hard time picking just a few pictures, but these are a few of my favourites.