Gisenyi

Chiara and Kara cut their hair Friday – beginning of a very interesting weekend.

That night, a bunch of us planned to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner and out to a club afterwards, so we went home early to tell our families where we were headed for the night. Well, my dad wasn’t home, so all of us kids were locked out of the house until he got back with the key. It was so much fun though! We sang a bunch of American songs; they attempted to teach me the Kinyarwanda/Swahili songs that came on the radio, and I taught them some ballet… my brothers got rhythm! They were showing off their hiphop skills, which was especially adorable with my youngest brother, who is too shy to speak to me much. But we finally got in the house, and I finally got to the restaurant at 8:30 – half an hour after we all were supposed to meet in town.

No one else got to the restaurant until 10. They got lost in the taxi or something, going the wrong way, who knows. But the food was great! We didn’t end up going to the club afterwards, though, because we finished dinner at midnight and wouldn’t get home until 1 am anyway. And walking down a dark dirt road at 1 am is scary enough; we didn’t want to make it any worse for ourselves.

The last Saturday of every month is umuganda all over Rwanda. Basically, at least one person from each family shows up at a certain spot in the neighborhood to do community service all morning, and then they gather for a meeting to discuss the community’s problems and possible solutions. My neighborhood was bushwhacking, making another dirt road.

I didn’t really know how to use the tool my brother Robert handed me (something between a hoe and a machete), so a random man lent me his hoe for 20 minutes, and I dug out some weedy bushes/grass. That was about the extent of my umuganda. I didn’t feel too bad about my worthlessness because several women were too well-dressed to do any of this work and were simply socializing. Umuganda, in general, seemed like a useful time for a bunch of locals to get together and talk – and be productive at the same time. It’s remarkable how quickly the road materialized down the hill… seemingly going nowhere, just further into a field.

So I started up a conversation with some man about my age, and he told me that the whole neighborhood used to be a forest. “In ten years, there used to be rabbits. You can find no rabbits now,” he said (in ten years = ten years ago). He said he and his friends used to hunt birds with slingshots in the area. It’s strange to look at this devastatingly beautiful country and know, if I have any hope for a prosperous future of the people here, much of that natural beauty will be gone, replaced by shopping malls or gas stations.

After my exciting stint at umuganda, I met some people in town and hopped on a bus to Gisenyi, a resort town on Lake Kivu. Some girls in our group had left the night before, so we hung out with them Saturday night, slept 4 to one queen bed, and went to the beach in the morning.

The beach is beautiful. God, everything here is so gorgeous! The lake is perfectly blue and backed by silhouetted blue mountains on one side, green hills to the other. To our right, stately houses stuck out into the lake – Goma!! The DRC! Weird, how close we were; we probably could have swum over the border.

The other girls had warned us – they had about 35 men and boys surrounding them at the beach, when they were doing nothing but sitting in their bathing suits. Granted, bikinis aren’t all that common, nor are white girls on the public beach, but STILL. It was RIDICULOUS. In less than half an hour, we had 20 people, mostly kids, circling the four of us. We weren’t even doing anything! We weren’t even speaking, hardly! Normally, I would attribute it to a simple cultural difference and be totally fine, but there was one guy shooing people away for a while, so I know this was inappropriate anywhere. And then, when I was asleep right beside my backpack (I don’t know how I slept with all those people staring at us and talking), someone reached in, grabbed my camera AND my glasses and ran off. My friends were reading, and they didn’t even notice what had happened; some kid had to gesture to us that someone had run off with my stuff. So, camera and glasses gone, people literally encircling us who absolutely refused to leave, plus the fact that I had gotten up like five times during the night, not feeling well... I was not happy.

So we left the beach all in a huff and went to lunch at the Serena Hotel down the road. I felt like I was walking into another world. There were UN cars sprinkling the parking lot, a huge fountain in front of the entrance, white everywhere… white people everywhere, too. And the brunch looked absolutely divine. I think I forgot how amazing hotels can be – it was so nice to use their bathroom and sit on their porch, looking out on their private beach! We couldn’t afford the amazing-looking brunch, so we got the cheapest pasta on the menu and just enjoyed pretending to be hotel guests. Even weirder than the switch from our beach experience to this hotel was that this place was more along the lines of my normal vacation – am I always so removed from the real lives of people around me? I can’t believe that 500 yards made such a difference… naked kids who couldn’t be more curious about these strange foreigners to the occasional (very rich) African not even giving us a second glance.

As guilty as a felt, falling into this fake world of sky blue pools and “traditionally dressed” Rwandan busboys, I felt so comfortable there. And the pasta tasted like home. But then we had to walk back through town, brush off the kids following us and asking for money, and catch the public bus home, and strangely enough, for the first time, I saw another white person using the public transportation.

There is SO MUCH I wish I could put on here – our trip to Nyungwe National Park, our trip to the Millenium Village, stuff that is far more important than Gisenyi – and maybe soon I’ll have enough time to update.