Kigali Again

We got back from Kigali yesterday after a very successful trip. We ended up staying an extra day because Monday was another voting holiday (they seem to happen about once every month- these mysterious voting holidays that we only find out about last minute). The car problem ended up being something totally minor and silly so that was easily fixed on Saturday. While Okan was at the mechanic, I went with another Fulbrighter to an art exhibit called "the eyes of hope project". The program gives children cameras and encourages them to take photos of their lives. The project then prints out the best ones (some of which are amazing) for sale: http://www.eyesofhopeproject.com/photographs.php?gallery=muyenzi

Afterward we went to the Remera market where you can find everything from shoes to tomatoes to chickens to electronics to jerry cans. Just about everything under the sun. I practiced my haggling and purchased some woven baskets and some presents for my nieces and nephews.

Then on Sunday we went about a half hour south of Kigali to two churches that are now Genocide memorials. During the genocide, most people gathered at churches or schools for safety because in previous genocides, they were safe havens. Each of the two churches that we visited were sites of massive massacres, one where 5000 people died, the other 10,000. They were gruesome and disturbing: shelves and shelves of skulls and bones, clothes and other mementos (picture below of children's shoes, and of a Tutsi ID card) from the murdered.

It is hard to wrap your head around it all. Both churches are in fairly small villages so you can imagine that everyone from miles away must have gathered there. In addition to the mass graves, one church had every single pew piled high with the clothes that the people were wearing when they were murdered (picture above).

They were both horrific and extremely disturbing, but we felt like we should visit them. I'm not sure how to describe "why" we felt like we should visit them. In some ways to show our respect to the culture, in some ways to learn more about what happened, in other ways, to remind ourselves of the depravity that all human beings are capable of (picture below of the church with hole in wall from grenade).

My meeting with the WCS program leader at Nyungwe got put off until Monday morning, which worked out fine. The meeting couldn't have gone better. I'm really excited about working with them and they said I could use their camera traps! Yay! So I'm hoping to deploy those in the next week or two which will require a week up at Nyungwe.

After the meeting we had all of the rest of Monday free and so we went to the pool at the Serena hotel (the only 5 star hotel in Kigali) where we read and used their pool. On Tuesday we went and paid for my research permit and then headed back to Butare in the early afternoon. Now we are trying to figure out our housing situation and whether we should stay in the house we have now for one more month (until I move to Nyungwe full time), or try and find something else.

Another Weekend Trip to Kigali

We are off to Kigali tomorrow morning. The car has some weird rattling thing going on that we want to get the mechanic to look at. I'm also hoping to meet with some Wildlife Conservation Society folks and convince them to let me use some of their camera traps for my project. Camera traps are these things you attach to trees and they have an infra red passive sensor that automatically takes a picture of an animal once it disturbs the sensor. It is a very good tool for carnivores conservation because they are very hard to capture!

Nyungwe First Trip

We finally made our way to Nyungwe yesterday. It was amazing. This huge, expansive rainforest that goes on and on as far as you can see. It is very cool up at that altitude (2900 m where we were staying for the night) and I wished I had warmer clothes. We spent the afternoon talking with the director of the Kitabi College of Conservation and Environmental Management. They have a great applied school for conservation for park rangers just on the edge of the forest with these very cute houses for faculty or visitors to stay in. The view from the college is gorgeous. There are major tea plantations that border the park that most of the community works in.

We were up this morning at 5:30am for our 6am hike on one of the trails inside the park. The hike was really beautiful. Although there is something extremely humbling about hiking at altitude, huffing and puffing, and DYING of exhaustion (where did all the air for my lungs go?). Especially when Okan and Paul were barely breaking a sweat. The 2 hour hike lasted 3 hours, partly because I was slow, but also because Paul showed us some extra trails along the way (I prayed they would all be flat or down hill, but they never were!). The hike fully kicked my butt and I couldn't help but wonder what in the world I had gotten myself into thinking I would trap carnivores in these mountains!

Alas, we saw THREE separate carnivore scats (poops) which means there are plenty of animals around! That is good news as one of my biggest worries was that I would trap for the entire 10 months and never catch an animal (since carnivores are at the top of the food chain, they need large home ranges and thus are usually at very low densities). So I was really excited to see the scats (much to Okan's chagrin, he doesn't get nearly as excited about looking at scat as I do). I've decided I will start trapping there once my research permit comes in. And that I will happily pay porters to help me deploy my traps! Some of which weigh 45 lbs each!

Done with teaching for now

I had my last weekend of marathon teaching this weekend. At least until May or later. I know that there are many cultural differences that it is my job to adapt to, but I still can't help but feel frustrated when a student wanders up to the front of the class to me in the middle of my lecture, to ask to borrow my pen. On the whole though, most of the students are not like that- they are quite respectful and keen to learn. It is just a few of them that baffle me. Another baffling thing- whenever I give them an assignment to do (as I do in the last 3-4 hours of class when they work in pairs to do an exercise that is usually a hands on activity to practice the material I have lectured on), I literally have to TEAR the assignments out of their hands to get them to turn it in. And trust me, this is not because the assignment is too long or they didn't have enough time to do it. I've never had to literally go up to student after student after student (this is at 7pm when the class is over and I want to go home!) and tear their work from their clinging hands. And the thing is that when I grade them, it's not that they didn't finish. Nearly everyone has finished and done a fine (or good enough) job. There's just something about relinquishing their work that they struggle with! But as I have said, the students are very engaged and generally very interested in learning and so I feel privileged to teach students with this level of enthusiasm.

We are off to Nyungwe tomorrow! I'll be bringing up some of my equipment since it all won't fit in the car in one trip. Looking forward to finally seeing parts of the forest and meeting some of the other researchers. Just hope it doesn't storm like it has been storming here in the afternoon (close to 5cm of rain in an  afternoon!) We even had some hail!

A losing battle

Our house is a mosquito breeding ground and we can't quite figure out why. Every night without fail, a mosquito is able to infiltrate the mosquito net over our bed. Anyone who knows Okan, also knows he can't stand mosquitos. So he wakes up swinging and hitting at the net. I wake up with welts from the mosquitos. It's really not conducive towards a good nights sleep, which I already have trouble with sans mosquitos buzzing in my ears.

Last night, after about an hour of fitful sleeping and periodically turning on the light to find the infiltrated mosquito, I finally squashed it. It left a lovely huge blood stain on the net. My money is that it was my blood- at least based on my welts. The good news is that malaria is really rare in Rwanda and even so, we are on anti-malarials.

Maybe our next residence (wherever it may be) will be less of a mosquito hotel.

Trip to Kigali

Okan and I took the bus into Kigali last Thursday hoping we would be able to buy the car on Thursday afternoon, and then take it too the shop on Friday so we could return to Butare that afternoon. As with all things in Rwanda however, nothing is straightforward and it took another 4 days to finally get the car. But we have a car now! Yay! Okan did ALL the work in finding the car, negotiating the price, and then taking it to the mechanic for 2 days of repairs/tune ups. My only responsibility while we were in Kigali was to apply for my research permit.  Needless to say, poor Okan was exhausted at the end of the 4 days. In my defense, culturally speaking, women are not really welcome during the negotiation process or at the mechanic. Fine by me! I just went to the pool!

It was really nice (for me at least) to be in Kigali for a few days. We stayed at the hotel Rwanda (Hotel des Milles Collines) on our first night (the one from the movie). A fancy treat for ourselves after our first month in Rwanda. The best part of the hotel was that there was no need for a mosquito net! Then we had a reality check and moved to a more affordable hotel for the other 3 nights. But that didn't stop me from utilizing the pools of other nicer hotels while we were in town. A beautiful crowned crane wandered around the gardens of the Leico hotel while I was there.

We know another fulbrighter who just moved into Kigali and after she settles in she's offered to let us stay with her next time we are in town.  Kigali is such a study of contrasts. At night time, looking out at the city lights over the hills, you could practically swear you are in Oakland, or some other hilly US city.

There is a gigantic divide between the have and the have-nots. There are TONS of gigantic fancy SUVs being driven around by some Rwandans. And then there is the other half of Kigali- where people are earning something on the order of $1 to $5 a day. There are also lots of amputees around-more than Butare. Presumably genocide survivors.

There's actually traffic jams in Kigali. It is like any bustling big city. Even with traffic, it was nice to be in a big city like Kigali again, even for a few days.

There are more foreigners in Kigali so you aren't constantly stared and gawked at. There are also some really good restaurants.  We stocked up on a lot of provisions that you can't get in Butare while we were there. Things like lentils, cheese, tupperware, cooking supplies, shampoo (that's right, NO shampoo in our town of 100,000 people), sunscreen, etc.

I'm teaching my final session for a while this upcoming weekend. I really struggle with deciding what material to teach. One part of me wants to just do something super simple and easy. But then I feel conflicted because I know that the students in this program are already really getting short changed in so many ways (too many to blog about) and I feel an obligation to make sure they get some material that I feel it would be criminal not to cover. The problem is that I know the students really have poor preparation for most of these tasks and it's painful for both me and the students when they struggle. And only a portion of the students seem to benefit from covering the advanced concepts.

I'm hoping to make our way up to Nyungwe next week- Finally! Looking forward to seeing the forest and meeting some of the other researchers up there.

Here are a few more pics of our little town of Butare.

Holidays

Today is Hero's Day- a national holiday. So the streets are a little bit less crowded. But the class I teach is for working students, so today we have class (they have class on weekends and holidays). Today was the start of our second module. I have a week off until I have to teach (yay!) so I'm busy trying to get my research permit in order, submitting a few last grants, and finishing my grading from my class.

We went and saw a really lovely house that we are thinking of moving into. It's a little more than we would like to spend, but it's less expensive than our current house, and has a really lovely garden with rose bushes and other flowers.

Last Saturday was also a holiday. I walked to school for my class early and the streets were practically empty. It was the first time I had seen that and it felt wonderful.  The streets here are as crowded as they are in times square, so to have an entire sidewalk to myself (sans staring) was nice.  On the last Saturday of the month, everyone has to go outside and do community service (like cutting the grass with their machetes) from 8-11am. Luckily, teachers and students are excused.

I've given up trying to blend in. I had initially tried to dress more modestly (pants every day or long skirts), but now on hot days I've started to wear my knee length skirts and shorts. I figure I get stared at no matter how I dress so I might as well be comfortable.

I had a great last class on Saturday. We did an exercise that involved math (gasp!) and was fairly complicated- each question required multiple steps to solve the problem. I organized the class a little differently this time and really tried to walk them through all the questions one at a time. Anyway, it worked and they all (mostly) finished! I was so relieved! The other two labs had only been so-so successes so I was glad that they had a good lab that both the students and I felt good about for the final class.