Urban poetry

Street sweeper in Kigali.

Part of Rwandan national pride is keeping the country clean. Plastic bags have been banned, there's almost no litter on the streets, and there's a national Clean Up day every month, in which every able adult is required to participate.

I know I will probably never go back to Rwanda -- honestly, I was so sick there the thought of going back gives me a major anxiety attack -- but I'm still glad I got to spend even those few days in such a fascinating, and mostly inspiring, country. What they have come back from is almost unimaginable, and yet just a few decades later they talk about turning their tiny country into the Singapore of Africa.

Kigali coming and going

Two last views of the city, from a distance the day we left, and from my balcony the day I came back.

A word about pronunciation -- you hear the city name pronounced Chigali rather than Kigali most of the time. And though English speakers tend to refer to the country as Ruh-wanda, when the natives say the name the w is barely there, so it sounds closer to Ronda than Ruh-wanda.

Swimmers in the hotel pool

View from my balcony

A different view of Kigali

There's an annual ceremony where names are given to all the baby gorillas who were born in the previous year. And unfortunately this year it was scheduled for the day after my return to Kigali, so all the hotels were booked.

The agent working with the travel company finally got me a room in a clean but somewhat shabby hotel in the center of town. Fortunately I only had to stay there a few hours as I was able to get a seat on the overnight flight to Brussels.

The room did have a balcony, and I took pictures to kill time until it was time to leave for the airport.

D'être malade en Afrique

Apologies for the radio silence. I am back in New York and feeling much better, though perhaps not surprisingly suffering much more from jet lag than usual. I can't seem to sleep for more than three hours in a row, and so part of my brain seems to have trouble remembering which continent I'm on. I've panicked in the middle of brushing my teeth more than once -- Oh my God I forgot to use bottled water I'm going to die!

But I wanted to follow up on the previous post about language before moving on to the mountains, and the gorillas. This rather florid calendar adorned my hospital room in Kigali -- Rwanda is devoutly Catholic -- and while I was lying there I had ample opportunity to read it over and over again and wonder why it was in English when everyone I was dealing with in the hospital spoke only French (and presumably Kinyarwanda.) It was my first experience of dealing with medical issues in a foreign language, and I'm just lucky that it was French, the only language other than English in which I can say I'm nauseous or I don't need to vomit right now or No, my stomach doesn't hurt.

Which isn't to say that I could understand everything that was being said to me. Everyone was very kind, but all the strange faces leaning over me, speaking half-understood phrases or asking what seemed to be very important but unintelligible questions, made the experience oddly surreal.

(If you can ever use the word “surreal” to describe something as rudely physical as a massive malfunction of the digestive system, that is.)

And this is why we buy travel insurance, boys and girls

This is the view from my hospital bed in Kigali last weekend, where I spent a miserable night having IV fluids crammed into my severely dehydrated body.

I'm not sure if it was a bug or a parasite that got me -- something the travel doctors in New York will have to sort out -- but it came on quickly, and I'm still far from 100% five days later.

Which is why I'm in Brussels, on my way back to New York, instead of in Uganda, on my way to Kenya. I did try very hard to soldier on, leaving for the mountains with the rest of the group the afternoon after being released from the hospital, but the trek to see the mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park took my last bit of energy. (Technically, I didn't actually trek -- it turns out that you can't hike up mountains with only a few bites of oatmeal and half a glass of juice in your stomach, but I'll write more about that later.)

That's a mosquito net hanging from the ceiling, by the way, in case you've never seen one. The hospital was fortunately mosquito-free and it wasn't needed. And if you're wondering why I was taking pictures while I was lying in bed, it was because it gave me something to do besides moaning out loud because I was so nauseous.

Not the African adventure I had in mind, but it was the one I got. And it was definitely an adventure....

Another portrait

This young woman seemed to be be the caretaker for the group of kids in the previous picture. She wouldn't join the group photo, but posed for a portrait.

A word about language

English may be a global language, but I always try to learn at least a few words of the local language everywhere I go. What struck me during my week in Europe was how unnecessary that is becoming. I used French to buy chocolates in Brussels and my train ticket to Ghent, and had to deal with my cab driver from the Frankfurt airport in German, but mostly I spoke English.

And so did a lot of other people who weren’t native speakers. I stopped in a local grocery store in Frankfurt to buy fruit, and the woman in line in front of me had an argument with the cashier about the price of a bag of coffee. I knew this because they were arguing in English — the customer was obviously German, and the cashier looked Middle Eastern, but they spoke English to each other.

It was different in Ghent, interestingly enough. They spoke English by default at my hotel and at Starbucks, but everywhere else it was Dutch, Dutch, Dutch. (For complicated historical reasons, they don’t like to speak French in northern Belgium, even though it’s technically a bilingual country.) Since my Dutch vocabulary consists of thank you (Bedankt!) this was sometimes an adventure. I even managed to buy a flash drive at an electronics store without understanding a single word of the transaction, but since this mostly consisted of handing over a credit card and signing the slip and nodding at everything else, I can’t be too proud of myself.

Then I came to Rwanda, which was a Belgian colony and so has French as one of the official languages, but doesn’t use Swahili unlike most of East Africa. Instead everyone speaks Kinyarwanda, and it’s like being back in Ghent because my entire vocabulary consists of thank you. (Murakoze!)

On my walks around Kigali, I occasionally tried to get children to let me take their pictures. They all said no, except for this group. They spoke French, unlike most of the others, and once they realized I understood them they peppered me with questions: What was my name? Where was I from? Did I like Kigali?

After a few minutes of this, I asked if I could take pictures, and they immediately started mugging for my camera. Which they wouldn't have done if I hadn't been able to talk to them.

Saturday reflections

No luck with birds so far -- I went out with my camera before breakfast, but although I could hear them, they remained hidden in the trees.

But Kigali did provide these fun reflections yesterday -- I love how that tilted window creates a square of sky in the middle of the trees.

Acclimating

Kigali is in the same time zone as Brussels, so I can't claim jet lag, but I am tired. I had to get up at 5 in the morning to catch the train to the airport from Ghent yesterday, and though the Brussels Airlines flight was quite nice -- there was no shortage of chocolate -- it was still eight hours on a plane.

So I took advantage of having a completely unscheduled day. I went for a swim, read by the pool, had lunch. The other hotel guests at lunch were mostly African, except for a pair of missionaries at the next table who bitched endlessly about bosses and co-workers. (Apparently spreading the Word of God is as tediously bureaucratic as any other occupation.)

I went for a walk after lunch but the hotel is up in the hills overlooking the city, and there's not much to see in the neighborhood -- it's mostly a few large hotels amid nondescript office buildings; the liveliest crowd was at the corner gas station. Most people ignored me, but my tourist status was obvious and taxi drivers kept pulling over to offer me rides, and a series of men with identical piles of magazines and Kinyarwanda phrasebooks for sale materialized at my elbow at regular intervals. One young entrepreneur even offered to sell me a counterfeit passport.

I didn't take many pictures -- although I know Kigali is considered safe, phony passports for sale notwithstanding, it didn't seem prudent to flaunt an expensive camera until I had a better sense of my surroundings, so it mostly stayed in my bag.

Greetings from Rwanda

You were expecting maybe a gorilla?

I got into Kigali last night, and so far haven't done anything except check into my hotel, sleep, and eat breakfast. The actual tour doesn't begin until tomorrow, so although I'll probably take a walk around the area today, and get myself adjusted to the altitude -- it's about the same as Denver and I already have a headache -- I probably won't have many interesting pictures.

But this baby palm tree on the lawn here at the Hotel des Mille Collines made me smile. I woke up to birds whistling, and the swish of brooms as workers swept the parking lot outside, and breakfast included tree tomato juice, which tastes something like very tart raspberries, so I know I'm definitely not in Belgium anymore.