Ghetto Safari and Other Adventures

Hello from Nairobi, Kenya.
I like it a lot more than I did when I visited for a day last year.
It really is spectacular that as I drove away from the airport I could see giraffes grazing just off the highway in Nairobi National Park.

My last few days in Rwanda were just gorgeous. Friday I recorded the rap as planned, and played a jeopardy-style game with the students to assess what they had learned. After the class, I gave them all little gifts (mostly bubbles and hairclips) and a few of the girls (my favorites--i'll admit it) gave me a present! I almost cried! They gave me a little plastic ring with a red stone. It was the sweetest thing in the world! As we left the "classroom" behind the FVA office, the girls invited me to go back to their school (Remera Catholique) with them for dance practice. Obviously I went. I don't think I've ever enjoyed walking to Kimironko so much in my life. I walked with a group of 15 teenage girls who swarmed around me and urged me to speak Kinyarwanda and dance with them. Other pedestrians just watched us and laughed. I couldn't have had more fun if I had tried. Dance practice was lovely. They rehearsed the traditional welcome dance for me, and integrated me into the song. After, the did "plays," which is basically an improv exercise that they perform for each other. Most of the plays had to do with a cute girl and a boy checking out her butt. Then they got together and collected pocket change for association, just as the PLWHA Association I worked with in Kanombe does. It was so sweet. They played association! It's like if we played labor union in high school.

So, I promised tale of a ghetto safari, and here it is: Rwanda has one real safari park, though it's nothing to speak of in terms of the rest of the continent. Akagera National Park is only about two hours outside of Kigali though, and relatively cheap, so it sounded like a great deal! All of the volunteers who were around this weekend (me, Rachel, Jamie and Thanh) decided to wake up at 3:30 am and go on safari. Hijink number one: the drawstring of my sweatpants broke and instead I wore flowery leggings on safari. (I thought it looked quite "smart," as they say in Rwanda.) Hijink number two (the most major of all the hijinks): we decided to rent a taxi to take us on safari, and Rachel was charged with finding a taxi driver outside of Ndoli's, a local shop. We managed to snag the worst taxi in Rwanda. The driver, Alphonse, was a sweet guy, but he was a very bad negotiator; Rachel brought him down from 60,000 rwf for the day to 37,000 with very little effort. He also forgot to pick us up, and Rachel called him and wound up speaking to his girlfriend to remind him to come get us at 4:30 in the morning. The taxi's windshield had two large webbed cracks, the left mirror had fallen off--not the whole mirror apparatus, mind you, but just the mirror itself. The mechanics beneath the mirror were still in place. Rachel later discovered a hole covered by a pillow behind the backseat. The trunk had a hole in it somewhere, and everything we brought was therefore covered in red dust. The car was half-gone before we got to the park, and we quickly realized that our safari would probably be its death knell. We did manage to see a number of giraffes, zebras, impalas, other antelopes whose name I don't recall, vervet monkeys, olive baboons, buffalo and hippos, incredibly, without trekking very deep into the park. The poor, decrepit taxi was a trooper on the off-roading, though, and managed to survive at least the drive home. Every other group on safari was, of course, in a massive 4X4. When we stopped for our picnic lunch (peanut butter sandwiches, peanuts, a few cheddar pringles and some rank cookies) we attempted to befriend some of the other safari-ists in the hopes that they would take pity and invite us into their massive cars. It didn't work.

My last day in Kigali was immense. I visited the Centre Sante for lunch with Zena and the other nurses, then bought a mattress for one of the Association women, strapped it onto my back with twine, and hopped on a moto to Kanombe. I really thought that I would fall off, but hoped that the mattress would at least catch my fall. I survived, incredibly. My favorite Association member, Paul, met me and we walked to the woman's house to bring her the mattress. After I gave it to her, I gave her son my kazoo. They were really excited by the kazoo, and fairly complacent about the mattress. I wound up staying there for about an hour and helping her shell beans. Then I met Zena at the Centre Sante again, because she told me she wanted to take me out on the town. We had dinner in Union Trade Center and then I met her younger brother, who lives with her and kind of takes care of her. She has had a couple of operations, and is due for another in January, and he looks after her. He is a wonderful man. We had a long talk after Zena went home, and he even invited me to go with the whole family to Gisenyi the next time I go to Rwanda.

I have been so lucky to meet such incredible people on this trip. Rwanda is the most beautiful place I have ever been in terms of landscape and physical beauty, but it also contains some of the most warm and wonderful people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. I can't wait to go back to Rwanda!

But in the mean time, I will make the most of this week in Kenya. I have the whole day in Nairobi tomorrow, then at 6 I take the overnight train to Mombasa! I can't wait. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but the train passes through Tsavo National Park (where the infamous man-eating lions once lived) and I think another game park as well!