More of week 3

Ok,

so I'm an idiot. Of course I've known I was coming here

for some time, and I knew there was no way to learn the

local language, Kinyarwanda, while in Ithaca. I also knew

this was a Belgian colony and that many people here speak

French, but I STILL DIDN'T TAKE FRENCH LAST
SEMESTER!! My one year of French back in the mid 80s

isn't cutting it.

I went to this town a little ways outside of Kigali, my first

trip outside of the city. It's called Nyamata - there's a

memorial there. It was very sad.

So after I visited the memorial I looked around the town a

bit. Since the point of getting out of the city was to see the

countryside I decided to walk back. A mzungu (foreigner)

walking on a country road is an oddity that attracts a *lot*

of attention, especially from children. The guy in the green

helmets t-shirt spoke English and told me his sister goes

to KIST, the place where I'm teaching. The boy in the tan

shirt and girl in the pink shirt went the same way as me for quite

some time. Even though we had no language in common they

really wanted to walk with me. I need to carry a couple boxes

of cookies with me on trips like this to give them out to the kids.

I had a few that I shared with these two. The boy in the red shirt

spoke French, so we could communicate a little. He came upon

us halfway back and went to Kigali with me. I bought him a coke,

but he probably thought I was crazy - if I had money for a coke

I had money for bus fare. The two little boys

in the distance shot saw me pull out my camera and decided they

were going to be the point of the picture. (I had wanted to

take a picture of the thatched hut to the right). Later I was

waylaid by about ten 6 year olds, who all insisted on telling me their

names and shaking my hand. As they left the road to go home

they gave me an enthusiastic `bon voyage'.

I went up and down many hills,

into a river valley, through several villages and saw several

hundred people walking along the road. If you give people a smile

and a `Bon Jour' you get the same back. A fun day, and seeing the

countryside at 3 mph is very different than seeing it at 40mph.