"The Ambassador will see you now..."

It was only really in Nairobi airport while waiting for my flight to Kigali that i began to get a bit nervous about my year in Rwanda. I was still not quite over my flu but was feeling much better and a hell of a lot less stressed then i had been in Europe before my departure. I had started the day at my campsite just to the south of Mombassa, I'd decided to be lazy and take a taxi to the airport, to hell with the expense i was still officially sick. After 5 days of blazing sunshine and cloudless skies just as i am about to pack up the tent there started a torrential downpour which lasted an hour. Me and my driver were late laving Tiwi beach but fortunately there were no blockages on route and we arrived to the airport in good time. i might just add here that its little more than a year since someone launch a rocket at Mombassa airport! Worth noting was the fact that they had very manual check in procedures involving some guy at the entrance checking my passport and crossing ,my name off a very large print out. After what seemed like a never ending wait for my connection at Nairobi I was finally on the move again and this time seated next to an American lady who was touring Africa from a base in Kigali where she was visiting the father of a work colleague. This guys father apparently owned an Indian style restaurant in Kigali and i was assured their samosas were to die for. I might just check it out one of these days.

I was met at the airport, one of the few occasions in my travels, by Nellie who was my primary contact in the VSO office in Rwanda, she had been the one to negotiate my placement with the Ministry of Gender and Development which would soon be my employer. She took me to my hotel, out of town but quite near the airport and within walking distance of the VSO offices where i would spend the next two weeks on in country training. Due to some transport crisis, she had to literally drop me and the hotel and run off again with the car leaving me in the capable, if a little overenthusiastic hands of Loren, the hotel manager. I'd hoped to get a shower and a rest before another guy called Bryan from the program office and one of the other new volunteers arrived for dinner. The hotel was pretty nice and the bathroom was clean (hurray!). When I tried to turn on the shower nothing came out, so i called one of the staff to get them to show me how to work it. I had assumed there was some problem with the large and complicated looking water heater beside the shower. The chambermaid came but communication was a little difficult, in the end she said i would be able to have a shower "dans 10 minutes". I assumed this was to give time for a tank to fill or some water to heat and went to rest. I was almost asleep when over half an hour later there was a knock on my door and my shower was "delivered" in the form of two jerry cans of water (one hot, one cold) and a basin! Yip...central Africa was a whole different ball-game.

That evening I had dinner with Liez, a Belgian volunteer here to work with education for the disabled, Bryan from the VSO program office and Mark, another volunteer working as a teacher somewhere rural. We heard that the other volunteer joining us from San Fran had missed her flight and would arrive a few days later. When Sade did finally get here, it seemed it was more of a case that her flight missed her! Apparently the woman at the check in desk decided to have a problem with her only having a one way ticket, despite the fact that she had a letter from the organisation explaining exactly why she had a one way ticket.

We spent the next two weeks having Kinyarwanda lessons in the morning (Mvuga ikinyarwanda bahoro bahoro!) and doing an assortment of activities in the afternoon that were of varying degrees of utility. The description of my job had said that knowledge of English or French was required but it became obvious fairly quickly that without french or the ability to learn the local language at light speed, you'd pretty much be in trouble with communication here.

One of the more interesting parts of the induction training was the courtesy calls on the British and Canadian Ambassadors. Neither of them is what would be called career diplomats and both it appeared had their respective positions due to their in depth local knowledge. British Ambassador is double jobbing as the Ambassador to Burundi but flies down only once a month never leaving the capital. She brought us up to date with the latest political developments in the Great Lakes regions. My head was spinning after only half an hour of which factions were for/against which other factions, I don't know how she keeps up!

The Canadian Ambassador was quite a different kettle of fish, he was a historian and had been in Rwanda for the better part of 30 years. I set to work attempting to impress him with my Kinyarwanda although I'm not sure of my success. Foremost on my mind was the general reservedness and dour looks I'd noticed on peoples faces on the street. It seemed to tempting to blame everything on the genocide - many other parts of Africa had lived through awful events and yet I would see smiles everywhere, but not here. Liez once remarked that she felt as if she was back in Belgium sometimes. I asked the Ambassador his opinion. He first mentioned something so glaringly obvious it hadn't crossed my mind: population density. Rwanda is the continents most densely populated country, which isn't too difficult with the open spaces there are elsewhere but it does have an effect on people. With population density comes attempts to get out of peoples space and so less sociability. Think about how city dwellers behave differently from those in remote areas with less people. He then explained that Rwandan society was traditionally based on the clan, or immediately family like in Europe rather than the tribe or extended family as is common in Africa. Rwandans did not have the custom of greeting people they did not know. They were also primarily hill people and hill societies tend to be quieter and more reserved than the plains people. We went on to discuss the current situation in Rwanda and his perspective on future developments here.
"I for one, am an afro-optimist, certainly in the case of Rwanda", he concluded, "but I might be a little biased", he said with a smile.
And he certainly seemed to have a lot of affection for his adopted homeland...

Rum, Coke and Anti-Malarials

Back when I was in training hell in the UK, I happened to meet Patsy an ex-volunteer who had stayed on to an ex-pat and had been living in Kenya for years. She also happened to be based in Mombassa and so was the ideal person to ask for tips and locations to visit during my week at the coast.

"What's your budget?", she asked
"As little as possible", says I, "I just want to chill out for the week"
"In that case", she replied "Get yourself to Tiwi Beach, south of Mombassa. Find the Lodge, continue past the office and just before you reach the campsite on the right hand side you will find the Mozambican woodturner. Ask him if you can borrow Cath's tent."

Well, this was too utterly bizarre and random for me not to try! As soon as I could get out of bed having recovered sufficiently but not altogether from my flu, I headed south in a taxi. I hadn't realised but Mombassa is an island and rather than bother with bridges, they use ferries to cross the small inlets to the mainland but they took quite a while to get moving and meanwhile I was baking in the car. We got to the campsite and as my luck is as good as ever, Enriq the Mozambican woodturner was nowhere to be found - February is very definitely hors saison on the Kenyan coast. However Habib the beachboy appeared to know where to find him and left me with the camping ground guardsman to enjoy the seabreeze while he ran off to find the man with the tent. I watched two other campers, collecting wood, building a fire and preparing to cook some seafood in it. I marvelled at their energy, I could barely wave my hand without getting heat exhaustion.


It could have been an hour or two later when a short, heavy set man arrived with sweat pouring off him and a tent strapped to the back of his bike. He didn't appear to speak much English and neither my Portuguese nor my Swahili was up to conversational level, so Habib translated. I was very thankful that the lads even put the tent up for me, although this meant I didn't have a choice on its location. I had to move it the next day as the tent had no shade in the morning and by 730am I was already baking.

After the rigours of travelling in the heat, I had just enough energy to get a drink before crashing out. A few hours later I had just about enough energy to cross the campsite (approx 20m) and introduce myself to the two other campers. They were just finishing a meal of kingfish and stingray and offered me a taste. With them was an American lady staying at the Lodge, we'd chatted a little earlier in the afternoon. This was how I got to know Daniel, an Italian nearing the last stage of 9 months travelling and Fred, a German who'd gotten fed up with the grey skies of London and was hoping to find work as an electrician in and around Mombassa. He was staying at the beach to save money while his work permit application went through. Well, that and the fact that it was totally gorgeous at the coast.

The next day I was awake early from being baked in my tent, soon Mr Mango Man came along. He was an old guy with a bike who seemed to make his money from getting a nice selection of fruit and veg somewhere in the locality and selling them to the campers. You might think it was a little lazy of us not to go looking for the stuff ourselves but it was over 4kms to the main road and any civilisation, and the temperature was hovering about 35C with high humidity.

Anyway I wasn't hiking anywhere if I could help it - I was confined to strict shadebathing as I had left my sunblock in Nairobi and a mere 30 minutes under the sun was enough to fry me. I even went swimming fully clothed. That is to say, we went swimming when we could, which wasn't in the morning when we most needed it, as the tide was out. The beach wasn't swimmable until about 2pm so instead we went sneaking into the pool of the Barracuda resort, just 15 minutes walk down the beach but an entire world away in all other senses. Me and Daniel made the trek down to the pool in the morning after Fred had gone off to Mombassa for the day. I think we must have stood out amongst the better dressed resort people, most of whom seemed to be German or French. We were approached by one of the staff who welcomed us most warmly even after we'd said we were from outside the hotel.

By that time Fred, Daniel and I had formed our own mini hippy colony, buying, cooking, eating and everything together. I'd estimated that between bargaining for the fish, bargaining for fruit and veg, finding food, building the fire, preparing the food and cleaning afterwards at least half of our days were occupied. As I looked around at the hotel dwellers with drinks on tap and buffets available, I began to wonder what did they do to fill their time?
I wasn't long in the dark, soon there were multilingual announcements that aqua-aerobics were about to start in the pool. Daniel and I were roped in to make up numbers, it was a pretty weird experience, doing all sorts of (not very athletic) nonsense in the pool, the chief effect of which was to leave me with a burnt nose. Some of our number went dashing off at the end of the class so as not to be late for volley ball - there seemed to be a different activity every half hour.

Fred arrived back with a bottle of rum from Mombassa and I was in the mood for celebrating. It was the first time in a month I had absolutely nothing to do and you couldn't knock the smile off my face. For a whole day I reveled in the utter euphoria of simply being. And things started to make a bit more sense, perhaps I had come all this way just to regain a bit of me. And that was reason enough for anything...

Notes
Mozambique is one of the few former Portuguese territories on the continent. Angola is another and both are terribly poor, even by African standards. I heard tell that the Portuguese took everything that wasn't nailed down when they left their colonies, right down to the lightbulbs! . Return to story

Nickerless in Nairobi

Its rather impossible to describe just how exhausted i was in the run up to my flight to Africa. Life seemed to be an endless todo list and even when i tried to relax i couldn't sleep or rest with my mind running in a thousand different directions. Making it through the day was my main priorty and consequetluy i had no head space for trying to sort out how i felt about the whole moving to Rwand for a year thing. Since i left my home in Switzerland on Jan 16, i had been going through the motions so to speak but nothing seemed real, it all seemed so far away even as the time to departure got closer and closer. It was only really when i was finshed packing at 1am that morning that i really began to wonder what the hell I was doing. Particularly after spending the previous week flying around like a blue aresed fly in switzerland. I was truely heartbroken to be leaving my home and my friends behind. I think if i'd have had any energy the sadness would have overwhelmed me.

And here i am in a hotel room on the Kenyan coast still wondering what the hell i;m doing. I've treated myself to air conditioning but my place in Kigali won't have that and i'm seriously wondering how i thought i could survive much less work in such sultry heat. And still nothing seems real, in this cool, clean hotel room i could be almost anywhere. By the looks of the other guests i must be the first european in years to stay in this place and i walked about the area for an hour without seeing another tourist, which is pretty weird seeing as Mombasa is the resort area of package tourists in Kenya. I;m guessing they are all at the beach. But going to the beach involves giving up the air-con and in my feeble state i'm not up to that yet.

Quite predictably from all the stress of the past month and the severe shortage of sleep i'd endured in the last week, the minute i could relax in my hotel room i was taken with a nasty flu. I got into bed yesterday night exahusted and hot, as i tried to go to sleep i was shivering and shaking, Even turning off the air-con and getting into my sleeping bag as well as under the covers didn't help - it took ages to get to sleep. Then predictably enough a few hours later i woke up from being too hot. And so it continued untill i thought i might as well go downstairs and get some breakfast. After which i went to get some paracetomol to sooth my aching bones, some lozenges for my firery throat and some bottled water. i then proceeded to go back to bed untill it was almost getting dark again...some start to my holidays!! I got up at 4pm thinking that i should get some excercise or risk being unable to sleep tonight. Its now nearing 9pm, the painkillers are wearing off so my head is begining to ache and i can feel the ravages of the flu are making their presence felt in every corner of my body. I,m pretty sure the air-con isn't helping, the large temp and humidity differencial between my room and the outside would probably have given me a sniffle under the best cirecumstances but i need to be cool enough to get some decent sleep tonight. I hope to be well enought to go to the beach tommorrow as i am at that unhappy state of illness being too weak to do much but healthy enough to be getting mightily bored. Also given the overdose of socialising and freinds i (happily) had in the run up to leaving i'm getting quite lonely confined to my room.

In any case even if i was up to going out i would still be stuck here as Mombasa is no place to be walking about at night, and most certainly NOT for a lone female mzungo. I had planned to do battle with the rigours of kenyan public transport tommorrow in getting a minibus and then a ferry and then another minibus to the south coast but due to worries about bandits on the 1-2km of track between where the minibus drops you and the beach front,i was persuaded to get a taxi the 30kms or so all the way there...i'm probably not in good enough shape for lugging my bags around anyway and hell itsonly money - i'd rather not run the risk of getting mugged.

The start of the trip was good, i was by chance seating next to Samuel for the 8 hours flight between London and Nairopbi. He was a younf kenyan doctor and was returning from his first trip outside Kenya, he was doing a specility in surergy throught the uk which would require him to come to london several times to take exams. It was interesting to here about his first expereinces in europe. He'd even been across to ireland where he visited his borther who'd been living in Ireland for 5 years and had recently gotten engaged to and irish women. His parents didn't yet know about this and it would be on Samuel to tell them when he got back. @Of course, they would prefer him to marry a Kenyan girl but in time they will get used to it@, he said. We talked about many things including my experience of Kenya, deveoping country economics, the recenlt change of government in kenya but also of my up coming job in Rwanda and my motivation for going there. The good doctor told me i was different and that he would tell his friends about me and one day dedicate 4 pages of his momeories to me!! At the end of flight we excahnged email addresse and he promised to try and visit me in Rwanda.

SO i landed in Nairobi with a severly malfunctioning brain due do tiredness, in flight boredom and dehydration. I had a little over and hour to catch my connecting flight - a simple task i was foolish enough to think. First, the domestic terminal is different from the international one and for reasons best known to the authorities there is no baggage handling done between them, the result is that you need to pick up all your luggage, carry it to the domestic terminal and then check it all in again. I'd been quite slow in figureing out the passport control proceedures which involved filling in a lan ding card, filiing in a visa application, queing for the visa, then queing again to have it all checked. However when i got to the baggage reclaim it still took 15mins or more before my luggage appeared. it was now nearing 930om and my flight was taking off at 10pm, at least they had issued me with a boarding card in Heathrow. Then i needed to do a quick repack so that i could dump most of my bagss in the airport before moving on to the coast for the rest of the week. I reconed I'd managed that pretty well considering except that i'd omitted two quite essential items: my sunblock and any underwear.!! I was now quite literally nickerless in Nairobi!

I managed quite well with washing my one pair of knickers in the sibnk of my hotel anfd letting them dry every night untili found the Old town markets and got some emeregency supplies :)