papillon auf ausflug

I didn’t know when the first time would be that I will write a blog entry and I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that it would be in one of somebody who is volunteering in Rwanda. But there you go. Just shows you how somebody can pressure you with threatening to take away your new addictions.

Because, although I’ve only been here since one week I already have a couple of new addictions that will be hard to get rid of.  African tea, for example, is one of them. I’m used to only drink tea when I feel quite sick and the idea of pouring hot, rubbish tasting fluid down my throat seems like a good one. But here in Rwanda the tea is a whole different thing altogether and I just enjoy it with lots and lots of milk, sugar and various spices like ginger, cinnamon and so on. If I had to compare it with anything I would probably say it’s like riding on a unicorn while little rabbits fly past to cuddle you and feed you with grapes or something like that anyway. So with that kind of pressure it was of course easy and a pleasure to write this in Ariane’s (Kamaliza’s) blog….

Somebody has told me (it very well might have been Kamaliza) that the first country you visit in Africa will always be the country in Africa your heart is at and it will always shine in comparison to other African countries. Since this is my first time in Rwanda and my first time Africa as well I can’t say if the saying is true but so far it feels like it is.

In the time from when I arrived on Saturday morning to yesterday I’ve mostly taken in the new environment and culture and tried to suck it all up like a sponge. On every bus journey we’ve done I would just stare out the window and look at the country side, watch the people while they’re walking along the road, carrying trade goods, their children and so on and I would try to see every single movement and every face impression. It’s surprisingly interesting and entertaining so even the few bus rides we had that took a few hours went by really fast.

Yesterday we had one of these journeys when we were on our way to Nyagatare, the capital of the Nyagatare District in the east of Rwanda. The reason we went there was simple and astonishing at the same time: we had been invited. We had been invited by a Rwandan named Bertin that Kamaliza had met on the bus from Tanzania to Kigali and accompanying us was Frank, another Rwandan she had met on the same bus ride. During our time in Nyagatare one of them had said that it’s equally amazing that somebody invites another person to their home they’ve only met and spent a few hours with but it’s also remarkable that that person follows the invitation. As Kamaliza hardly know Bertin we didn’t know what to expect at all. All we know was that he was a student of agriculture at the Polytechnic University in Nyagatare, that the east of Rwanda is more rural than the rest, it’s warmer and not a hot spot of tourism to say the least. So when we arrived we could see that the area looks a bit more like “Africa” as most Europeans would imagine it. Blue sky with an unforgiving, hot sun that keeps the motivation to go outside at noon to an absolute minimum and a ground that is more flat and covered in burnt grass which makes it look more like a savannah than the rest of Rwanda with its evergreen hills.

We were happy to see that Bertin came to pick us up from the bus station with a big van, probably one of the nicest cars I have seen in Rwanda so far. We spent the next couple of hours at his house talking with him and some of his family and friends, who came in from time to time, sat and talked with us and then moved on with their usual daily routine or stayed longer. So by the time we ate lunch (delicious with those huge bananas for dessert) we had already met a lot of people and after sitting three hours in the bus and another two hours in the house we were happy to go out for a walk through Nyagatare. We walked to the local university, the local river and back to the university where we watched a student match of two of the faculties (the IT-faculty was destroyed by the faculty of Communication and Media) and thankfully everything took a long time and we kept meeting new people so we could keep on talking about our lives and our cultures. I was delighted to learn so much about the Rwandan culture and look at their surprised faces when Kamaliza and me explained them some of the differences to ours. For example, that for a wedding the groom’s family has to give 3-5 cows to the bride’s family and each cow is worth around 800€. A vast amount of money here. We also talked about why Rwandans have a lot more children and why Germans don’t, how divorce is socially accepted in Germany and in Rwanda not and many other themes. But although we have a different culture and language we still like the same kind of humour, irony and so on (black humour included and if you’ve laughed now, well done, you know what a corny joke is.)

Today (Sunday) we were even introduced to Bertin’s local church community and I think both of us felt that all the kindness and friendly words were just overwhelming and it would be nice to be able to visit them again some other time in the future.

I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of my stay in Rwanda but I don’t think that the one and a half days in Nyagatare can be topped. At least I can drink as much African tea as possible for the rest of the week to help me over that thought.

Written by MUGABO Mutoya