Children in Rwanda

These children captivated my guide, David, and me on our last day in the north. We had driven up to an eco hotel with good views of the twin lakes and had found a bench to sit on that offered lovely panaramic views of the lakes and the mountains and farms surrounding it. We were a few hundred meters up the mountain and there were farms below us, down a very steep hill. David and I talked for a few minutes when sudenly two children appeared out of nowhere and began chatting us up. They had climbed up an incline that was at least 85 degrees, in barefeet. Within minutes and hand full of children appeared and more continued to come until we had a small crowd.


David began asking them about school and their dreams for the future and then he asked them if knew any songs, which of course they did, and so we were serenaded for a bit. Dancing followed and then it was time for us to leave.

David remembered he had brought some pencils for village children so we said we would go to the car and then return with a little surprise for them. When we returned five minutes later, the children were no where to be seen. But as we approached the bench there were shouts, it seemed from all over the valley below as the children informed david that they had been threatened with a beating if they came back up. Sure enough, two hotel guards appeared and said they children were a nuisance and they had told them to leave and not come back. After David explained that he had some pencils for them, the guards relunctantly agreed to let them come up, as long as they promised to stay away after that. When David told the children they could come back up, a few brave souls came half way up, but when they saw the guards they ran back down screaming. It took about fifteen minutes to conjole them all to come back up (when David asked the guard to throw their switches down, we started to make progress) Eventually, they all came up and David conducted an elaborate method of doling out the pencils and the kids, so appreciative, vowed to stay away form the hotel and study hard. Then the scampered down the steep hill.

You can see that they are dressed in rags, and some had clear signs of malnutrition. They all had professional careers in mind (doctors, lawers, engineers) for their futures. Their good cheer and hopefulness belied their dire living conditions

Home in Morocco

Well, I finally made it to Morocco and it is a joy to be here. It's wonderful to be reunited with Ali and see old friends, and I am blown away by how fast the computer connections are here!

Ali has a lovely little villa in the unitersity town of Ifrane high in the Atlas Mountains. It's cold here but there is fireplace and we have heating blankets and will be getting some area heaters this weekend, so it's all good, as they say. I have a number of projects that I am working on for folks in Tanzania, so I plan to just hang out at home and work most of the time while Ali is in class. It feels really good to have a home again!

Ali is enjoying his students at the university and is planning to stay the second semester. He will come home for winter break and then come back to Morocco in January and work until May. I will become an "Agreeing Widow" as they say in Holland. I guess one of us will have to travel over spring break this year.

Now that I have unlimited access to a computer, I have started to post photos of my journey in East Africa. I have put up some from Rwanda trip on the sidebar to your left. You can view these as a slide show, but should choose the "captions" option so you can read about what you are seeing. Tanzanian photos to follow!

Kwa Heri East Africa

I left East Africa on Thursday night and am in a state of shock to be in Amsterdam where it is cold and noisy and modern. On Thursday I spent the day at an airport lodge in a traditional hut-room in the midst of a dessert full of enormous, almost grotesque cacti. I spent time near the pool, in the shade or in my hotel room with the air conditioning blaring. Then, less than 14 hours later, I find myself in Amsterdam at 7:00 AM in the dark with a temperature of about 6 Celsius and nothing but a few layers of cotton clothing.

So, I dashed to the hotel, dropped off my luggage, and hit the stores. Within an hour I was decked out in long pants, a sweater, a warm jacket, gloves and a scarf, and I was ready for Amsterdam. I have spent the past three days walking around the charming streets of this picturesque city, shopping for necessities for Morocco (sleeping blankets, thermal underwear, etc.) and sleeping in! The sleeping in part has been my favorite, as I now feel I am on vacation.

But it was sad to leave East Africa. I have made a lot of friends there and although I was only there for two and a half months, it began to feel like home. At times I get pangs of homesickness for Tanzania.

Visiting Rwanda was an incredible experience. I was hosted by an organization called New Dawn Associates and spent five memorable days with staff from this organization, a charming family of gorillas, staff and children from two orphanages and women from Women for Women International.

Rwanda is a stunning in its beauty. The whole country looks like a finely decorated mosaics of multiple hues of green and red. Outside of Kigali there are virtually no private cars so the highways are teeming with people walking to and from their various engagements. The women here are particularly beautiful and with their brightly colored kangas and graceful figures they are stunning to look at. The country is quite clean, in fact, plastic bags have been outlawed, which cuts down a lot of the trash, and the main roads are pretty good.

The genocide comes up regularly in conversation and there is still concern about the Interhamwe insurgents in the Congo who still make raids across the boarder from time to time. The orphanages I visited were started right after the genocide and many of the children have no idea who their families are, or rather, were. There are youth in their 20s still living in the orphanages because youth don't strike out on their own until they get married, and most of these youth have no family left. Ironically, the children in the orphanages look much healthier and cleaner than the children one sees on the streets as poverty is still a major problem there. It is common in the country side to see children dressed in layers of rags, dirty and many with signs of severe malnutrition. There has been flooding there that displaced hundreds of thousands of families and destroyed crops, and draught conditions earlier in the year also negatively affected crops as most agriculture here is based on rains rather than irrigation systems.

Rwanda's main money making exports are coffee and tea, but the government is in the process of trying to establish the country as an Information Technology hub in the region to diversify the economy and increase revenue. There is controversy as to whether this will work, but it seem like a good move to me because countries that are based on agriculture can't really lift themselves out of poverty. Agriculture just isn't a viable economic engine. Kigali looks a like a modern city in many respects. There are high rise buildings and a very modern shopping mall and very wealthy neighborhoods. They also have a national celebration called "Tax Day", complete with ceremonies and parties in the streets in which everyone congratulates everyone for doing their part to build their country.

I went to the Hotel Milles Collines from the movie Hotel Rwanda, but the manager Paul ...can't remember how to spell his last name, is not quite the hero he makes himself out to be, at least with people I talked to and he is actually vilified in the press, although he might run for president! They say he only really helped those who could pay, and actually turned some people over. There are also really hard feelings toward the French, who it is said, worked the road blocks with the military during the genocide. Rwanda does not have diplomatic relations with France to this day.

I am running out of time on this computer, so more later.

Women for Women International in Kigali

This morning I visited the office of this organization and spent the morning meetings with the women and touring the facility there. This branch of Women for Women is serving more than 5000 women this year. Women receive a monthly stipend from their sponsoring sister in the US and come to the center twice a month for workshops on health and hygiene, business training, human rights, the new laws regarding marital rights of women (they now have property rights and rights to keep their children in cases of divorce), stress management and support groups.

They also come to training classes held at the center which include tailoring, knitting, basket making, beading and jewelry making, and tie dying. Next year they will expand to agricultural production and beekeeping. The organization is also developing a training program for development of cooperative associations so that women can pool their money and energy to achieve greater returns on their investments.ù

I sat in on meeting of women who were fairly new to the program. They talked about their experiences with micro businesses and tried to glean the lessons learned from the failure of these enterprises in the past. They also talked about the importance of working together and helping each other, and the need to become independent financially. Their individual stories were moving to hear and it was great to see them together so hopeful and excited about embarking on this new journey.

Then they had a lot of questions for me. Of course they wanted to know about my family - how many kids, my work, and marital status. Interestingly, they asked about marital status after they asked about kids. They had deeper questions though. They wanted to know what life is like for women in the US and if they work together in associations, if there are poor people in the US, and how people greet each other and work together. They also asked me to thank other sponsors for the help they give to women in Africa. It was very moving to be there with them.

The director told me that women's lives improve dramatically even after they have been in the program a few months. They are more confident and get more respect from husbands and people in their communities. Wife beating is reduced as men see women as economic partners...and people who have the economic means to leave bad marriages if they want to.

Check out Women for Women International on line and see how easy it is to make a difference in a woman's life.

More on Gorilla Trek

I am back in Kigali now. Still trying to get the cash flow problem resolved. In the end the only thing to do was to have my sister send me the money via Western Union. My bank refused to raise my daily limit because I could not remember my password. I am still really irritated by that as I spent $40 calling the bank with no sucess. Anyway, lets forget that because my blood pressure is beginning to rise.

Back to the gorillas. I stayed in a very nice lodge a few kilometers from the park for two nights. The morning of the gorilla trek, as I mentioned earlier, it began to pour before I even got up. At 5.30 someone knocked at my door to wake me up and I begrudgingly got up and wandered around in the freezing cold room looking for my clothes. Because of the cold I decided to leave on my flannel pajamas to ward off the cold. I then put on my long pants, sweatshirt, gaiters, shoes, silly safari hat and my rain slicker and then plodded through the soggy grounds to the dining room.

After breakfast we drove to the park and I was placed in Aygashas group. After our orientation we drove to the park entrance and began to trek up the misty mountain. We walked for about thirty minutes through family farms to get to the entrance to the rainforest. There we met our porters and the security patrol. Here we were informed that we could do "Number one" in the bushes to the right (girls) or left (boys). We were also told we needed to get a hand shovel from someone if we wanted to do "Number Two". After that was taken care of we then proceeded to climb a huge rock barrier to get into the forest.

That done we found ourselves in a thick jungle of bamboo, trees, stinging nettle bushes and lots and lots of hanging vines. For the next two hours we trudged through the muck of the forest floor, often stooped over or crawling on hands and knees. Most of the time the vegetation was so thick we couldnt see more than two feet in front of us. We followed each other by voice alone. Every oncein a while there was a little clearing and we could stand up and see a few feet all around. The mud was intense and abundant and many times I thought of giving up, especiallly at the times I heard the person a few feet ahead of me yell "Oh shit!" We were constantly battling the vines which wrapped themselves around us hlding us in place. Keep in mind we were also climbing up the mountain through all this. I dont think I could have made it withoutthe bamboo. Happily it was everywhere and one could grasp it and pull oneself up the mountain.

At one point the guide told us that we were really close but I didnt believe him. I thought he was trying to humor us to keep our morale up. But finally, we reached a clearing and there the family was. We spent and hour googling at them and then started the climb down which only took about 25 minutes because we were going straight down, no path to follow or anything. I did a lot of slipping and sliding on that part. When we finally reached th rock wall, we were covered in mud from head to toe and we rushed to our respective hotels to take hot showers.

The older couple that was hiking with us; he 65 with half a heart (literally...apparently he had had heart surgery in the recent past) decided that they had had such a great time they were going to repeat the experience the next day! Amaszing.

When they say this was an experience of a life time, I take it to mean, it is something that you would never want to repeat, interesting as it was.

One the way back to Kigali (a four hour drive) we stopped at a wonderful orphanage that was started by an 82 year old woman in August 1994. This American had lived in Rwanda for 49 years, left during the months of the genocide,and then returned as soon as it was over to start take care of the multitudes of children left orphaned after the carnage. The orphanage was clean, the rooms spacious, and the children looked healthy and happy. Rose, the founder,died in 2006 and she is a legend in the area. I was particularly excited to go to this orphanage because I had read about it a few years ago. A photographer had gone there in 2000, I think, and trained the children to take photos. Some of the photos were exquisite and were being sold to raise money for the orphanage. I had tried to buy them online; the site was not working well, but I downloaded by favorite ones on my home computer. Imagine actually going there and meeting the children! Wow. Such a wonderful experience.

This orphanage is so well managed it should be a model for other orphanages in Africa. Pictures to follow when I get to Morocco.

Gorillas in the Mist

Well, I did it. And I have a certificate to prove it. I climbed a mountain to visit Aigosha and his family. And we had a very charming visit with this gorilla family. If you haven't guessed by now, I am in Rwanda. They say that visiting the mountain gorillas is a once in a lifetime experience that one shouldn't miss. I was skeptical last night and early this morning, but now that it is over, I agree.

I arrived in Rwanda on Friday night and spent the first day touring the city and talking about the genocide with my charming guide, David. David was born in a refugee camp in Uganda where his family fled during a violent period shortly after independence. He had pretty grueling experiences to share and clarified a lot for me about this 1994 genocide. More on all of that later.

In the late afternoon, we headed up to the Virungu Volcanic Park which was a sumptuous drive through continuous mountains, every inch of which seems to be cultivated. The roads are pretty crowded, and David drove the route constantly blurting out "Hopeless" as his country men and women wove in and out of traffic, and dashed across the street in front of us. It was a three hour drive and after a quick dinner we headed for bed because we had to get up at 5:30 to get started on the gorilla trek. I was not particularly keen on this gorilla trip but everyone in Tanzania said it was a must, so I signed up. Truthfully, I had been dreading it. I looked at it as a pennence to for the lovely ride I had had up to the park.

My heart sank this morning at 4:45 when a fierce rain storm woke me up. I did buy a rain slicker and gaiters to protect me against the elements, but I was not looking forward to hiking up a volcano in the rain. But luck was with me as it stopped raining just as we began our climb (there were eight of us in Aygasha's group. | was cheered to see an elderly couple in our group and I, of course, hung out behind them the whole trip. That way I gave the appearance of being a caring, rather than an out of shape, hiker.

The hiking goes like this: Trackers start out early in the morning to find the gorilla group you are looking for and once they locate them, they send information down to the guides. When we started out they told us that it would be a half an hour hike, and I was secretly overjoyed. Problem is gorillas don't always stay in one place and our little group did quite a bit of flinting around before we found them.

Now, when I say hiking, you need to understand that there are really no trails here. Sometimes we followed gorilla trails, but most of the time, we forged out own path through the thick, thick, thick rain forest. It was hideously muddy; in fact, at one point, I stepped in mud that reached me knee and when I tried to pull my foot out, my shoe and gaiters remained stuck. The porter kindly dug out my equipment, cheerfully washed it off in a mud puddle and had me back on the way in minutes. So we walked and crawled through the thick vegetation for nearly two hours. Just when we thought we were close, they moved (they were foraging for food) and at the point where I said I can't do this anymore, the gorillas appeared before us. Aigasha was with three females and a couple of kids. He humored us by staring at us and scratching a bit and then he took a nap. Wife number one groomed one of the kids for a while and then she took a nap. Eventually they all took a nap, except for the little babies who played together and alone the whole hour (visitors are only allowed one hour with the gorillas). There much more to tell about this amazing adventure and I have lots of video to show interested parties, but I don't have much time left on this computer.

Here is an item that might surprise you; it really surprised and dismayed me: There are no ATMs in Rwanda. I can't get any money out of the bank and I owe the tour company that I came with beaucoup de money (This,by the way, is an excellent tour company that focuses on educational visits, including volunteer work...more on that later). I hope I can work something out when I get back to Kigali tomorrow. Monday is figuring out the money day and then I spend Tuesday with Women for Women International, and then I am off to Morocco to see my beloved husband, with a short stop in Amsterdam.

More later from Kigali. Forgive the misspellings!

A Tanzanian Wedding

On the weekend a friend of mine who runs an NGO (WEECE)that supports women who operate businesses invited me and a friend from CCS to attend a wedding of the daughter of one of her members. The wedding was a Christian wedding although the bride was Muslim (we assumed that she converted). We only attended the reception as those Christian ceremonies can be quite lengthy, but we had a great time because there was an action-packed agenda and plenty of beer and spirits flowing. It was quite a boisterous affair too, with lots and lots of dancing.

First the wedding car arrived at the hall (YMCA) and the family members of both the bridge and groom danced around the car for awhile while the rest of us watched and swayed with the music. Then we left the car and headed into the hall. A half an hour later the groom's family got up singing and trilling as the raced down the aisle to welcome the bride and groom and then they proceeded to sing and dance as they escorted the couple all the way back to the front of the hall. When the bride and groom were comfortably ensconced at their table in the front of the fall, it was our turn to get up and dance to welcome them, which we did enthusiastically. Later each member of the groom's family was introduced to us and after that was done, they all got up and danced. Then the bride's family was introduced and then they danced for a bit.

Later the traditional African Cake (a roasted goat) was brought in by a large group of cooks who, of course, danced down the aisle to the front of the room swinging the poor goat to and fro with great pride and exuberance. Later, there was a sweet cake cutting ceremony and then lots of good food. After we ate, we guests formed a conga line as we danced down the aisle carrying our gifts to present to the bridge and groom. As I was the only Mzungu dancing, I imagine they were a little surprised when I appeared before them, but they masked it very well and were quite gracious when I shook hands and congratulated them. Unfortunately we have an 11:00 curfew at the home base, so we had to leave early and missed the partying part of the party.

This was considered a small wedding as there were only about 300 people in attendance, but the hall was quite elaborately decorated with bushels of roses and yards of streamers and bunches of balloons. Typically the families will take a few months to fund raise for a wedding (I'm not sure which family has this responsibility) by soliciting monetary gifts from their extended family members to help pay for the festivities because except for the wealthy, most people here cannot afford to put on such a celebration on their own.