Mount Bisoke

On Saturday afternoon, one of my friends and I caught a bus to Ruhengeri, a town about two hours northwest of Kigali, to visit the Parc National des Volcans. The national park is just along the borders with Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, and it is home to the Virungas, which Dian Fossey described as a collection of "great, old volcanoes towering up almost 15,000 feet, and nearly covered with rich, green rainforest." Our goal was to climb Mount Bisoke, an inactive volcano with a crater lake at the summit, half of which is in Rwanda and the other half of which is in the DRC.

On Sunday morning, we arose about 5:45 in the morning, had breakfast at the guesthouse where we stayed for the night and headed out to the local ORTPN (Office Rwandais du Tourisme et des Parcs Nationaux) office to pick up our guide. When we arrived at the office, it was just before 7:00 a.m. and the view back toward the rest of Rwanda was incredible since the mist was still settled over the "land of a thousand hills."
From the ORTPN office, it was about a half hour drive down a bumpy, dirt road to the start of the trail up Bisoke. Throughout our drive, we could see the volcano getting closer and closer. When we finally arrived, we could look back down the road and see three of the other peaks, (from left to right) Sabinyo, Gahinga and Muhabura.
It was at the point that we met the rest of our crew. In addition to my friend and I and the guide we had met at ORTPN, we were joined by three Rwandan soldiers (armed with AK-47s, of course) and a porter who carried our guide's backpack. We hiked up a small path through the fields before we arrived at the edge of the forest. There we climbed over a rock wall that's meant to keep the buffalo from entering the fields and village. We hiked through the jungle for about forty-five minutes on trail that was decent and not too difficult. Then we reached a point where the trail splits. One path went down to the gravesite of Dian Fossey (the woman who lived in these mountains with the gorillas until she was murdered in 1985), and the other continued up the mountain to the crater lake.
It was at this point that the trek turned difficult. The path narrowed significantly, became even muddier than it was at the start and turned straight up the side of the volcano. Apparently switchbacks haven't really caught on in Rwanda, so the trail became much more of a climb than a hike. At points we were having to step up over a meter at a time over rocks or roots or whatever else was in the path. Some were so high that the porter had to help pull me up because I couldn't step up high enough on my own. Not only was the climb difficult, but we were also dealing with a significantly higher altitude than we're used to in Kigali. Kigali is at 1540 meters, our starting point at the base of Bisoke was 2960 meters, and we were climbing to 3711 meters at the top of Bisoke. I'm not exaggerating to say that it was the hardest hike I've ever done in my life.

The views along the trail were incredible, though. Behind us, we could see across the valley and into the distance of Rwanda. We could also see the other peaks of the Virungas, especially Mount Karasimbi, on either side of us.
As we climbed, the clouds came and went and we passed through several different levels of vegetation. When we finally reached sub-alpine vegetation and felt the colder wind, we knew we were getting close to the top. About three or three and a half hours after starting our hike, we arrived at the top. I don't think I've ever been so relieved to reach a destination.
The clouds had rolled in over the valley, so we couldn't see much behind us in Rwanda, but the view over the crater lake was perfectly clear. Not only was the view amazing, but it was incredible to think that literally just across the lake (the background in the next several pictures) is the DRC.

After taking a few pictures, we decided to sit down for a rest and a snack, but almost as soon as we did, the clouds started to roll in. Within a few minutes, a thick cloud had settled over the lake and over us.
It was only a few seconds longer before it started raining. We put on our rain jackets but didn't think much of it until it started to thunder and hail. Immediately we grabbed our bags and started down the trail. However, with the cloud and the rain, the muddy path was even more slippery than it was on the way up, so we had to be careful and couldn't go very quickly. Plus, the wind was so strong that the hail was blowing straight in our faces. It was miserable, but I couldn't help but laugh. The storm had come out of absolutely nowhere.

After several minutes, the storm passed and the sun came out again, but we were soaked and covered in mud. Plus there had been so much rain that the entire trail down the mountain was muddy and slick. The hike down was just as challenging and strenuous as the one up, but in a completely different way. It was a constant struggle to find a solid place to step and a constant strain on our leg muscles and even our arm muscles (to hold hiking sticks and trees and each other). We all slipped and fell several times as the rain came and went.

Just about the time I started to think we were getting closer to the bottom, the soldiers who were in front came back and stopped everyone. They started speaking to our guide in hushed Kinyarwanda, and then he started speaking to someone over a radio. The soldiers went ahead again, and our guide finally told us that there was a single, male buffalo ahead in the trail. Buffalo are a serious danger, and they are more likely to be angered and charge when they are alone. After a few minutes, one of the soldiers ordered us to go back on the trail, back up the steep, slippery trail we had just come down. We went back and stood just off the trail waiting with the guide, porter and one of the soldiers for further instructions. After a few more minutes, we realized the buffalo wasn't going to move and we were going to have to go off the trail and through the forest to get around it. Seeing as how we were in the middle of a dense, uninhabited rainforest, that was no simple instruction. But we had no other option, so we left one soldier behind to keep an eye on the buffalo and the other six of us set out. One soldier went in the front with a machete to try to clear a path; our guide followed him to clear out more vegetation; the porter was next and I think the guide gave him the task of making sure I didn't fall, because he held my arm the entire way; Taylor followed me and the other soldier was behind him. It was quite the trek - clearing bushes and trees and vines, hiking over wet plants and leaves, climbing over ditches and dropoffs, avoiding (unsuccessfully) stinging nettles, and trying to be quiet all the while, lest we attract attention from the buffalo.

When we finally met back up with the trail, we were wet, muddy, stinging (from the nettles) and absolutely exhausted. I had already quit trusting my leg muscles much earlier, but at that point, I felt like I was completely done for the day.
After a short break, we continued down the trail. Soon, though, another cloud moved in and it started raining again. Since there were more buffalo ahead and the storm impaired our vision to where we wouldn't be able to see them until we were dangerously close, we eventually cut off the main trail down a smaller one that would lead us out of the forest faster. I didn't realize that once we made it out of the forest we would still have to hike through the fields to reach the main road. I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life.

I was so thankful to be able to sit down when we finally made it back to the car. We drove back to the ORTPN office to change into dry clothes and then went to the bus station in town. We bought our tickets and then found a restaurant nearby where we had a typical meal of brochettes and frites, as well as some hot tea to warm us up a little. Before long, we were back on the bus and, a couple hours later, back in Kigali.

Doctor Claude

On Friday night, we went to Legends, a nice restaurant/bar in Kigali, to see Doctor Claude, a popular performer from either Burundi or Congo (we never figured out which) who is very popular in Rwanda right now. Even though he didn't perform very many songs, it was an entertaining show, particularly when the local traditional dancer who performs at the restaurant every weekend joined in. It was really surprising how well his dancing went with Doctor Claude's music!

Update on failed vaccine

More news came out this week about Merck's failed HIV vaccine trial. Below is an article from TIME magazine that was published today.

Assessing a Failed AIDS Vaccine
by: Alice Park

After 20 years of defeat, it appeared that science may have finally developed a viable vaccine against AIDS. Merck's new drug, V520, was being tested in a huge clinical trial, involving 3,000 people in 15 cities, and it was widely considered the most promising new candidate in the field. But last September, when Merck analyzed its initial trial data, it found that the vaccine had failed — and failed miserably. On Wednesday, the company issued its first report on the V520 trials, revealing that the drug did not protect against HIV, and more disturbingly, actually increased some people's susceptibility to the virus. "I don't think anyone imagined the results would be so definitively negative so quickly," says Dr. Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health.

V520 may have failed, but somewhere in the details of the drug's nonsuccess, scientists hope to find insight into what will make future vaccines work. After all, V520 is just one of about 50 experimental HIV vaccines that are currently being tested in clinical trials, and almost all of them are designed to function the same way. While most vaccines expose the body to weakened or killed viruses, or pieces of them, to boost production of antibodies — proteins that recognize invading cells and flag them for destruction — that tack alone was too feeble to fend off HIV. The new class of vaccines, including V520, takes a more direct route: They trigger cell-mediated immunity, which marshals killer T cells that both recognize and destroy viruses and bacteria, and can lead to a more robust, specific and longer-lived immune defense.

It's not yet clear why V520 didn't work, but one theory involves its vector, or delivery vehicle. Like almost every other AIDS vaccine in development, Merck's drug used the common cold virus to transport its payload — three synthetic HIV genes — into the body's cells. What makes the adenovirus ideal for the task is precisely the reason colds make us so miserable — once inside a host, the cold virus infects cells and starts to replicate quickly. The down side to that efficiency, however, is that cold viruses are so common that most people have developed a certain level of tolerance to them; if the adenovirus fails to excite the immune system, then any bugs piggybacked on the virus, such as HIV genes, will also slip past immune defenses. That's exactly what appears to have happened in the Merck trial: People with the highest pre-existing immunity to the common cold also had the highest rates of infection with HIV.

"It could be due to chance, or to differences in the populations we studied, or to something related to the vaccine itself," says Dr. Keith Gottesdiener, vice president of Vaccine and Infectious Disease Clinical Research at Merck. "The 'why' is still not well known."

Researchers have already set about trying to figure it out. "We have to remember that Merck's was a single product testing a vaccine concept, which is that T cell immunity can protect against HIV infection," says Nabel. "And we know there are other ways to stimulate T cell immunity." Nabel is ready to test one such method, a vaccine similar to Merck's that uses different HIV genes and a "prime-boost" approach that involves two injections spaced a few months apart, instead of one shot, to maximize the stimulation of the body's T cells. Other researchers, like Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City and the recipient of a $25 million grant from the Gates Foundation to study novel vaccine strategies, think that the cold virus isn't the best way to deliver HIV. Ho is exploring the possibility that a different vector, such as the chicken pox virus, or perhaps no vector at all — simply injecting snippets of naked HIV DNA — could yield stronger immune responses.

At the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a non-profit group of public and private partners focused on funding and accelerating AIDS vaccine research, scientists are studying the use of crippled, live strains of HIV — based on the success of other such live attenuated vaccines against polio and measles — which they think might be critical to waking up the right immune system defenses. "There is something magical about the replicating virus, because it has virtually its entire genome," says Dr. Seth Berkley, president of IAVI. His group is also investigating ways to stimulate so-called neutralizing antibodies, a special class of antibodies that appear to be able to defuse HIV.

Despite the ongoing study, experts argue that none of it will succeed without some basic changes in the way it's conducted. Most research occurs in isolation; there's little coordination among labs and no network through which data can be shared, making it difficult for scientists to learn from each other's missteps. Worse, it takes years to get regulatory approval to start a human trial for a new vaccine — not to mention enrolling the volunteers and training the right personnel — so, by the time experiments get underway, the science around which the vaccine was built has long since become outdated. "The trials are not informing science at the moment," says Dr. Alan Bernstein, executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of independent organizations dedicated to accelerating HIV vaccine research. "Science — and vaccine development — is an iterative process, except that in HIV vaccine research, there isn't a lot of iteration going on."

The Enterprise, which was founded in 2005, intends to change that. With funding from the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health and the European Union, it will serve as a hub for guiding worldwide HIV vaccine research. “We want to ensure that the trials are done faster, better and smarter,” says Bernstein. And hopefully, with more success.

Postal system

The Rwandan postal system is an absolute mystery to me, and I don’t think there’s any hope of understanding it. We have a single mailbox at the post office for our project, so someone goes once a day to pick up the mail and distribute it at the office. If you receive a package, there is a slip of paper in the mailbox so you have to go to the post office to pick it up. Going to the post office was confusing in and of itself the first time. I walked into the post office and looked for the window written on my card (number eight) but only saw one through six. Finally someone explained that I had to go back outside and pointed down the street. So I started walking and finally came across the room filled with mailboxes. I didn’t think this was where I needed to be, since I had neither a key nor did I think my package could fit in the tiny mailbox numbered eight. With a man on one side of me trying to sell me postcards and one on the other trying to convince me that I needed an enormous, colorful map of Rwanda, a third man approached who implied he would show me where to go. We walked back out of the building (followed by my new friends with their postcards and maps) and down the street again. This time, I was directed through a small gate into a dirt parking lot, and just as I was convinced that I was definitely in the wrong place, someone saw the slip of paper I was carrying and directed me into a tiny room in the basement of the post office. Amazingly, it was window eight. However, even though the room was barely thirty square feet in size, the process had only just begun. I first walked to one counter where I handed over my package slip. Then I wrote and signed my name in two different places. Next I had to go into the office of the man from customs where I signed another log. Then I went to another table where I had to pay the fee for my package and sign my name yet again. The payment scheme is yet another mystery. The first time I received a package, I had two moderately heavy boxes and my fee was 1,200RWF (appx. US$2). The second time, my slip said that I owed 4,250RWF (appx. US$9), so I was convinced I had an enormous, heavy package waiting for me, and instead I received a box that was a bit smaller and much lighter than either of the previous ones. Still another mystery is that the first package arrived in two weeks while the second took just over two months, and I have friends who have had to wait months as their packages disappeared in Kenya or India. Maybe it’s just best not to ask questions.

Butare

This past Friday I took most of the day off from work and went to Butare, a city about two hours south of Kigali. Although it was once thought that Butare would become the capital of Rwanda, it is very different from Kigali today. It’s still the third largest city in Rwanda, but it has the feeling of an old western town. There is one dusty, main road through town which is lined with tired-looking shops and hotels and restaurants. However, it’s still home to a number of attractions, including the National University of Rwanda, the National Museum of Rwanda and several other universities.

When we arrived in Butare, we first visited the National Museum, which has an impressive collection of artifacts and displays about the history and culture of Rwanda. The museum has several main rooms that showcase historical, artistic, archaeological and ethnographic aspects of Rwanda. The first room focuses on geographic aspects of the country – topography, soil, vegetation, climate, etc. The next rooms feature displays about economic and social activities such as agriculture, herding, hunting, fishing, basketry, pottery and wood carving. In the middle of the museum, there is a room that features a traditional Rwandan hut and shows ways of living and social organization. Clothing, adornment and recreational activities are on display in the next room, and the final room presents information about prehistoric Rwanda. Interestingly, though perhaps appropriately, there is very little about modern history in Rwanda. The six or seven most recent leaders of the country are shown in a small display with a very small description of each, but the descriptions were kept to the basic facts, presumably lest they stir up any controversy. (Note: I didn't take any pictures but I found this one online.)
Outside the museum, there is a small botanical garden, and as we were walking through it, we stumbled across a crafts training school. Supposedly, the school is free of charge to Rwandans who are interesting in learning various crafts such as basketry, metal work, pottery and paper. They come to the school for a certain period of time during which they learn a particular craft, and then they return to their homes to practice their new skills. It was very interesting to see.

We ate lunch in a tiny restaurant that was basically on a side alley off the main road in town – a typical Rwandan lunch of rice, beans, banana, isombe (cassava leaves), meat and sauce.

After lunch, we decided we should visit Murambi, one of Rwanda’s starkest genocide memorials. In mid-April of 1994, approximately 60,000 people gathered in and around a technical school on this hill to seek safety. Many were sent there by the bishop and mayor of the town, who told them they would find protection from French soldiers stationed there. Instead, electricity and water were cut off once they were there and after three days the soldiers ‘disappeared.’ The interhamwe then attacked and, within four days, all of those on the hill except four had been killed. Most of the bodies were thrown into mass graves on the hill so that today the old school buildings are surrounded by mounds containing tens of thousands of bodies. What makes this particular memorial so chilling, however, is that over 1,800 of the bodies have been exhumed and are now on display inside the rooms of the school. Room after room is filled with tables that display the preserved bodies of those who were killed there. Some rooms contain only adults; some contain only children and infants; some contain a combination of both, with mothers still holding their youngest children. We were guided from room to room by two guides, both of whom were survivors of the genocide and one of whom had survived the attack at Murambi. In each room, the scene was a horrific reminder of the events that had taken place. Skulls were cracked; ribs were crushed; bodies were contorted and broken. After seeing the rooms of bodies, we walked through a larger room that was filled with the clothes that were stripped from those who were killed. They created another powerful scene being stacked on bookshelves along the walls and hanging on clotheslines that stretched across the room. Afterwards we walked around the outside of the buildings, past the mass graves, and finally back to the entrance building. I didn’t take any pictures, but I did find a website that has an extensive collection of images from the classrooms if you’re interested: http://homepage.mac.com/stevesimonphoto/Murambi%20Memorial/index.html.

Needless to say, it was a quiet ride back to Kigali.