The Weekend In Gitarama!

Hello everyone. This weekend the two other interns and I traveled to Gitarama (about an hour away) where 4 of our friends are staying for their internships. First let me describe to you our traveling situation. In Rwanda they use taxi's (Matatu's) to travel, basically like a city bus system instead they use vans. It costs a 100 F's (twenty cents) to get a ride and they are usually very very packed. Ok so picture a van with 4 rows of back seats, a driver, and a passenger riding shotgun and then picture it filled with 22 people including 3 Mazungu's (this is the term they call us, it means white person) stuffed in the farthest back corner for a hour an a half. To occupy my time I tried talking to the Rwandan man sitting next to me, but since I don't know Kinyarwandan there was alittle bit of a language barrier. So instead I shared my ipod with him and we jammed out to American music all the way to Gitarama. Fun Times!

Gitarama was a lot of fun. Friday night we basiallly just hung out, which somehow turned into "let's see how ridiculous we can dance" session. So needless to say I dropped down and got my eagle on, but it just wasn't the same though without my partner Craig. On Saturday afternoon we spotted a cool looking tree from our porch and decided we were going to walk to it. The tree looked approximately 3 miles away, something we thought we could handle, so we decided to go.

-I'm going to interupt for a second to tell you about the celebrity status you recieve when your a Mazungu in Africa because we expierenced it alot on our walk. First of all everyone stares. It does not matter where you are at, people are in awe when a white person is in their presence. Then it is followed by yelling outloud Mazungo and pointing in the direction of the white people. This then grabs everyone elses attention who may not of noticed you yet and they begin to stare and point. The children believe, I think, that the white person is Santa Clause. Everywhere we go there is a pact of children following us, we don't know where they come from, they just appear from nowhere. Every afternoon we walk out of our guest house there are literally around 20 children waiting to attack the Mazungo's. Now don't get me wrong it is an enjoyable expierence, but day after day after day after day, it starts to get old. But you can't resist them, they are just too cute! Dangit! So if you want a glimpse of what it feels like to be a celebrity and your white, go to Africa. -

Anyways, our trip to the tree, so as we are walking and things are taking place as I just explained we find a road that leads straight to the tree. The road led us through a valley and up a hill past more rural family settings and turned out to be a very beautiful walk. As we start getting closer to the tree we pass a little rural village, and as we are passing we hear behind us kids shouting Mazungu, Mazungu. As I look behind there are probably 20 kids about a mile away in full sprint towards us, basically a stampede of children. Once they caught up to us the group of kids grew to about 30. The children must of been sprouting from the ground because a few mintues later we were surrounded by 50 children. To entertain all the kids we played Duck, Duck, Goose for a about a half an hour. They then taught us a song where we danced around in a circle singing. The children were hysterical and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
On Sunday we decided to go to a Pentecostal Church. The service was very energetic and lively and caused me to get my groove on in my sit. The groove started to shut down though after the 2nd hour of the service, and then it shut down completely after the 3rd hour, and at 3 in a half hours we left the service early (yes i said early) becuase we had to catch the Matatu back to Kigali. The service last around 4 hours total. Now don't get me wrong I love to give the Lord Praise, but when it is in a different language and Rwandans are staring at you the whole time cause your a Mazungu, a person can only take so much. But overall it was encouraging to watch these people that have been through so much and are still so in love with the Lord. So that was my very eventful weekend. It is crazy to think that I have only been here for 10 days and have 50 more to go, which I would describe as "Me living the dream". HOLLA!