Bundles upon bundles

"The usual bypasser is a woman sauntering slowly down the road with bundles upon bundles balanced on her head. These women are pillars of wonder, defying gravity while wearing the ho-hum aspect of perfect tedium. They can sit, stand, talk, shake a stick at a drunk man, reach around their backs to fetch forth a baby to nurse, all without dropping their piled-high bundles upon bundles. They are like ballet dancers entirely unaware they are on stage. I cannot take my eyes from them." (Barbara Kingsolver, "The Poisonwood Bible")

Bee hives

Throughout Rwanda, I've noticed these narrow, barrel-shaped contraptions, mostly in trees, and I've wondered what they are. Recently, I learned that they're bee hives. I never would have guessed.

Flat Stanley

Recently I received a letter asking me to help out a young friend in Greenville, South Carolina, with a project she was doing for school. The letter read:

"My name is Stanley. I am a character from a book titled 'Flat Stanley'...I have discovered that there are many advantages to being flat. One of these advantages is that I can be folded, put in an envelope, and mailed all over the United States and the world. When you receive me, please write a note, take a picture of me, or anything else you can think of to help my friend learn about maps and globes."

I can't think of a cooler school project than learning about the world by sending Flat Stanley out to all corners of the globe and then receiving stories about all his adventures. I'm pretty thrilled to have been able to add the African continent to Stanley's travels.

Gorillas

The Virunga Mountains, a range of six extinct and three active volcanoes that borders Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are home to the Virunga mountain gorillas. With less than 400 members, the Virunga mountain gorilla is the most endangered subspecies of the eastern gorilla, which, in turn, is the most endangered of the two species of gorilla. This subspecies of gorilla is currently classified as "critically endangered", which is a serious classificaiton as the only two more serious classes are "extinct in the wild" and "extinct".

Of the thirty family groups into which these gorillas are divided, there are currently seven that can be visited. Eight permits are available each day for each group to tourists who wish to trek the gorillas.

This weekend, we decided to visit the Susa group, which is the second largest group of mountain gorillas in the world, and the largest which can be visited. The group, which consists of 38 members, including four silverbacks and eleven babies, inhabits the slopes of Mount Karasimbi, which makes it the most difficult of the groups to visit.

The morning started early with the alarm clock at 5:00 a.m. and meeting the guides at the tourism office around 6:30 a.m. At the office, we had a briefing about the Susa group, during which we learned that we were to stay seven meters away from the gorillas (and eight meters away from Hudson before he finishes his morning coffee), as illustrated below.
After the briefing, we drove toward the base of Mount Karasimbi to begin the trek. The volcanos and the hills and the fields and the sky were beautiful as the sun began to light up the area.
Our hike first led us through fields and villages and past huts and homes. After approximately forty-five minutes, we reached the border of the Parc National des Volcans. Here we took a moment to catch our breath and take in the incredible view behind us.
We then continued into the jungle. We continued to gain altitude as the path became smaller and less recognizable. For much of the way, our guide was using a machete to cut back over grown vines, bushes, grasses and trees.
After four hours, our guide turned quietly and pointed to a tree in the distance. Barely distinguishable, we could see a black shape in the tree - a gorilla. We continued toward the shape, chopping trees and vines and bushes, and climbing over and through the jungle, most of the time walking on fallen trees and brush rather than solid ground. Before I knew it, I was almost face-to-face with a tremendous gorilla. The Bradt guide to Rwanda describes the experience well:

"It is difficult to describe the simple exhilaration attached to first setting eyes on a wild mountain gorilla. These are enormous animals: the silverbacks weigh about three times as much as the average man, and their bulk is exaggerated by a shaggily luxuriant coat. And yet despite their fearsome size and appearance, gorillas are remarkably peaceable creatures."

As amazed as I was by a single gorilla, I soon realized that we were in the presence of much more than just one of these giant, magnificent creatures. As I stood there, I noticed leaves rustling, branches falling, bushes moving. I sook realized we were right in the middle of dozens of the group members. It was incredible. These tremendous, mythical creatures surrounded us and moved around us freely. We wandered throughout the group, making our way into clearings that held as few as a single gorilla and as many as a dozen. Some stared directly into our souls; some playfully ignored us; some walked directly toward us. It's impossible to describe how incredible it all was.

I also managed to take two brief videos, one of a female gorilla eating and one of a young gorilla trying to climb a branch. Right now I can only upload the first video, but hopefully I'll be able to add the second one soon.

Because gorillas face so many threats - disease, guerilla violence, poachers, etc. - conservation laws allow trekkers to spend only an hour with the animals each day. So, when our time ran out, we trekked back down the mountain, out of the jungle, through the fields and past the village and eventually made it back to Kigali.

Non profit business

While in Ruhengeri this weekend to visit the gorillas, we stayed at a small hotel named Hotel Muhabura. The place was nice enough, with friendly staff and a decent restaurant, but it had one of the most clever/honest/hilarious signs I've seen in a while.

La maison spéciale

The whole experience with my new house has been a bit of a disaster. On the very first day I came to look at it, I almost walked away crying. The walls had holes in them; the plumbing was a disaster; there wasn't a kitchen; the whole place smelled; the layout was strange; and so on and so forth. The list of things that were broken and/or horrible about the house could have been a mile long. Yet a friend of mine convinced me to give it a chance, and for some reason I did.

A group of workers and shop owners descended on the house and the work began almost immediately. The walls were repaired and painted (the colors weren't completely different than the ones I picked); the broken windows were replaced and given new screens; a sink was built to create a kitchen, and shortly thereafter a refrigerator and stove arrived; gardeners cut back the weeds and plants that had overtaken the yard. Slowly, as all of this happened, I began to see the house's potential. When things settled just a bit, I ordered furniture and shopped for pots and pans and dishes and sheets and pillows and towels and mosquito nets and everything else you could ever imagine needing for a house. Finally, I decided things might not be so bad.

Yet even now, after living in the house for two months, although the house is completely livable, things still aren't exactly settled. For example, when I realized there was a leak somewhere in the plumbing of the house, someone came to the house, dug up all the pipes in the yard, and then replaced them, but, in the process, he switched the hot and cold connections to the house so that now even the toilets run on hot water. The house also has a cockroach problem, even after being bombed with pesticides, and, on occasion, a mouse appears. For the last three weekends, the water has been cut off for no apparent reason, and, on a fairly regular basis, the electricity goes out as well. At this point it's just amusing.

It's gotten to the point that whenever something ridiculous happens, I just look at my domestique, shrug my shoulders and say something like "beaucoup de problèmes" or "un autre problème" ("many problems" or "another problem"). A couple days ago, the kitchen sink quit working even though the rest of the water in the house worked. This time she looked at me with a half smile and just said "la maison spéciale" and it was the perfect description of this place - "the special house".

Call to prayer

My house in Kigali isn't far from one of the mosques in the city, so I frequently hear the call to prayer. Five times each day, the call is broadcast from a loudspeaker at the top of the highest point of the mosque to summon Muslims in the area to pray. Although I can't understand the words of the call, nor do I respond in prayer to Allah, I really do think it's a beautiful tradition.

Witegereza

This billboard is by far the most common in Kigali; it can be seen on almost every road around the city. The title, "witegereza" means "don't wait" and the message below urges parents not to wait to talk to their children about HIV/AIDS.

National Prayer Breakfast

I just finished reading the keynote speech from this year's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The speech was given by Ward Brehm, a Minnesotan businessman and philanthropist who was recently appointed chairman of the African Development Foundation, a United States government agency with a mission to help African community-based organizations and small businesses achieve sustainable economic growth. Although I found his overall speech less moving than the one given by Bono in 2006, I thought I would share a couple exerts:

"On a more recent visit [to Africa], I took a long walk with a warrior-turned-pastor friend named Lodinyo deep into the unknown wilderness along the northern Rift Valley that divides northwest Kenya with Uganda…I fasted for five days on this walk to experience real hunger, but had brought along power bars in the case of, as Lodinyo put it, an “emergency”. At the end of the walk, I collapsed in a borrowed sleeping hut, and when I awoke 12 hours later, I saw a little boy peeking through the door. While he was initially terrified, curiosity eventually got the best of him, and I noticed he was concentrating more on my stash of power bars than he was on me. He succeeded in snatching the bars and immediately ran away. “Kids are the same everywhere,” I thought, until I stepped outside the hut, and found a little boy kneeling over his two-year old sister with a terribly distended stomach, feeding her tiny pieces of protein."

"Solzhenitsyn said that disaster is defined by two things: magnitude and distance. So a small disaster close to home or a huge disaster faraway results in what he describes as “bearable disasters of bearable proportions.” We’ve become too good at “bearing.” Our hearts should be broken by the things that break the heart of God. Specifically in Africa, there are many faraway disasters of epic proportions. 1994. In Rwanda, a country the size of Maryland, the political genocide claimed 9,000 lives per day for 90 days. That’s two World Trade Center disasters per day for 3 months. Today. Darfur, Sudan. 1.5 million homeless, with thousands terrorized raped and killed. AIDS is killing 4,400 per day in Africa, and even more are dying from curable malaria. Epic disasters of epic proportions far from home for most of us."

"Do you remember when Jesus was talking to His disciples, and asked them when He was hungry, why they didn’t give Him any food, and when He was naked, why they didn’t give Him any clothes? And the disciples said something like, “Lord, we never did any of those things to You.” I always thought like most folks that Jesus replied “Whenever you did this to the least of these, you did this on to Me.” Except He didn’t say that. What He said was, “Whenever you did this to one of the least of these, you did this on to Me.” How often do we forget the word “one.” It changes the meaning of what Jesus said completely. In our quest to be helpful, we can rob the poor of their dignity. In order to be of any help to the poor, we need to understand them, we need to know them and we need to love them. They are not a group. The poor is not a species. They are identical to us in their hopes and dreams. They love their families and long for a better life. The only difference is that they are poor. And people don’t suffer and die in groups. It’s one at a time. And each one of those deaths leaves an identical wake of agony to what you and I and our families would experience."

A garden

Since I moved into my house, the front half of the yard has been covered with six or seven giant mounds of dirt. I'm sure this would seem strange, until you consider the tremendous rains that pour down on Kigali almost every afternoon and realize that a garden planted on flat ground would be washed away immediately. So instead, gardens are made in mounds.
Tired of staring at these mounds of dirt, I finally went to town today to the store that sells seeds. After yet another long conversation of broken French and English, I came home with seeds to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, celery, green peppers, spinach, cabbage and onions. Though I still lack confidence in my ability to grow much of anything, the seeds have been planted and there's a slight chance that one day I'll have mounds of vegetables instead of dirt.

Hardware store

Today I had to stop by a hardware store for a couple simple things. When I walked in the door, I was amazed; I never knew so many things could fit in such a small space. There were tools and things everywhere in the store - hanging from the ceiling, covering the walls, stacked behind the counter, piled on the floor. It was so overwhelming that I probably stood there for ten solid minutes just staring at everything around me.

Karama Lodge

After a week of sleeping in a tent, we spent our last night in Tanzania just outside Arusha at a lodge where each building felt more like a treehouse than a hotel.
The lodge was situated such that it had incredible views of both Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro, but unfortunately it was too cloudy when we were there to see Kilimanjaro. Still, though, we were able to see Meru and the surrounding lands.It was a wonderful, relaxing way to end an incredible journey.

Kilimanjaro and safari

I doubt there's anywhere else in the world where, when ordering a beer, you have to choose between a 'Kilimanjaro' and a 'Safari', but it couldn't be more appropriate here.

Arusha National Park

Arusha National Park is about 35 kilometers from Arusha and is one of Tanzania’s smallest parks. Although the diversity of wildlife is much less than in many of the other parks, Arusha National Park still has a great variety of landscapes - alkaline and freshwater lakes, grasslands, craters, hills, wooded areas and, unlike the other parks, dense jungle.
We still saw a number of animals, especially several species of monkeys that we hadn't seen in any of the other parks.The Arusha National Park also gave an incredible view of Mounts Meru and Kilimanjaro. All in all, the entire safari experience was incredible, and I'm still in awe to have seen and experienced all that we did.

Karatu

Karatu is a small town just outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. After visiting the Ngorongoro Crater, we stayed in Karatu for a night before returning to the Arusha area.
Before we left for Arusha, we had a little time to explore Karatu. Knowing that I work with an HIV/AIDS organization in Kigali, our driver took us to visit a local HIV/AIDS organization in Karatu. The name of the organization is WAMADUKA, which stands for "Women and the Struggle against HIV/AIDS in Karatu" in Swahili. The organization was really quite impressive. They have a staff of only five or six people and receive all their funding from the Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran churches, yet they provide numerous services to the community - free HIV testing and counseling, support for people living with HIV/AIDS, support for orphans and vulnerable children who have been affected by HIV/AIDS and education to the community and to local schools. The two women we met were so encouraging as they gave us a tour of their small facilities and told us about their work. It was so interesting to gain some insight into an organization which, though very different from the one with which I work, aims to accomplish the same goals.

While in Karatu, our driver also took us to a Catholic clinic where his wife works as a laboratory technician. The sister who manages the clinic was thrilled to have us there and to show us everything. Although there is no physician at the clinic, they provide tremendous medical care to the people of Karatu. We visited the maternity ward, the children's ward, the men's ward, the women's ward and the tuberculosis ward. I was so impressed at the many services they offer - infant and child vaccinations, tuberculosis treatment, HIV/AIDS testing and treatment and much more. I was very impressed.

I have to confess that I was also impressed with a very different aspect of Karatu. There were an amazing number of John Deere combines and Ford tractors in town. It was really pretty funny to be driving around town and see "John Deere" and "Ford" all over the place.
Just outside Karatu, we passed through Maasai grazing lands. The grasslands and hillsides were speckled everywhere with herds of cows and goats and round, thatched huts. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of it all was that many of the herds were being led by boys who weren't much bigger than a goat themselves.