Rwanda's Last Laugh / Arrival in Addis

Rwanda wasn't going to let me go without a fight.

Thursday morning I woke up with a bug bite on my arm that ballooned to the size of a golf ball. Friday morning I woke up with another bite on my face. Then later that day I joined a mob of 60 or so people trying to get on a 30-passenger bus to town from the neighborhood I was staying at in the suburbs. Somewhere in the process of shoving my way onto the bus I felt my arm scrape across rough metal. I ended up with a pretty banged-up and scratched-up arm. Between the potential tetanus and the potential bug-bite poison I'm glad to still have an arm.

There's something a bit unnatural about entering and leaving a country through an airport, like entering and leaving life through a hospital. It just doesn't feel right.

Friday afternoon I packed all my things and headed to the airport. With a 4:15 departure time checking in at 2:30 should be fine - it's a tiny airport with only a few international flights leaving a day. I stood in line for 20 minutes before getting to the check-in desk where the woman studied the computer screen for 10 minutes before informing me that there was a problem with my reservation and I needed to go straighten it out in the Ethiopian Airlines office. Something about I was told that I was booked on today's flight but I was really booked on another day's flight, I didn't really understand. I went to the office to find no one there. After a few inquiries from passing employees the guy I want hurried in, looked at my reservation, made a phone call, told me there's no problem and to go check in. I went back down to stand in line, and the power went out. The power came back on and I was finally the last passenger to arrive at the check-in desk, where the check-in agent was visibly flustered and told me to hurry up because check-in was supposed to be closed. No kidding. She tried to check me in, stared at the screen for a while, then told me there's a problem. No kidding! She called the man down from the office, and he came to study the screen as well. After some debate and more phone calls she crossed her fingers (always a good sign in the airline industry) and printed my boarding pass, and I dashed off to the gate just as the last passengers were boarding. Apparently there was some problem with the confirmation process, and they had to bend the rules a bit to get me on the flight. I need to iron out the problem in Addis Ababa for the next leg of the flight.

I got a seat in the very last row next to the window. My flight went from Kigali to Addis Ababa, with a stop in Entebbe, Uganda. The Kigali to Entebbe portion was only about 20 minutes, and so the seat belt light was left on for the duration of this part. Immediately after takeoff, a man several rows ahead popped up to come use the toilet. He got as far as my seat before the flight attendants berated him for getting up with the seat belt light on and told him to sit in the empty seat next to me and buckle up. He argued a bit and then sat down, but couldn't find one side of the seat belt. He started yanking on my seat belt, insisting it was his. I told him no, it was MINE, it was attached to my seat, his seemed to be missing. He clearly didn't believe me. After a while he gave up and sat impatiently waiting for the plane to land. When we touched down in Entebbe a flight attendant came over and removed the missing half of his seat belt from under the velcro-ed down seat cushion, where it had been hiding.

On to Addis Ababa...

Flying over Addis, the whole city twinkled peacefully like it was covered in Christmas lights.

Once inside the airport it was a different story. Everything was chaos, people shouting and jostling, lines sprouting from seemingly nowhere. None of the signs seemed to correspond with the areas they were indicating. I stood there for a while looking lost before I finally figured out where to go. I got my visa in a little glass room, dashed over to the currency exchange booth, and then was ushered into the immigration line for "crew and diplomats/ambassadors". Perhaps it was my stylishly scruffy converse sneakers that fooled them into thinking I was a VIP. My line was fairly orderly, although there seemed to be a bit of a clash of civilizations as far as line etiquette was concerned. There were a few people obviously of the belief that a line is a place for you to push and shove in until you get to the front, and there were a few of the belief that a line is an orderly thing and that your place in line is a sacred thing not to be messed with.

The other line (for non-crew and non-diplomats) seemed to be a mass of chaos and frustration. One woman in the line was cursing out a woman in my line, another women who otherwise looked like a normal stylish young woman was carrying a white plastic baby doll strapped to her back, a man in a suede suite, pink shirt and dreads to his waist kept wandering around arguing with people. A group of perhaps 50 or more young Muslim girls were moving en masse from the waiting area to the currency exchange booth to the immigration line. Many of them had Ethiopian Airlines blankets wrapped around their heads like hijabs. Then the woman with the doll on her back decided to cut far ahead in the immigration line which prompted an outburst among those around her. Finally I got through, was welcomed to Ethiopia by the immigration official, and mistakenly tried to leave the airport without passing through a security check (silly me, only diplomats can pass through without being checked).

I'm really loving Addis so far. Coffee is cheap and delicious, the culture is so much more enveloping than other places I've been to, it's unbelievably cold except for when you are standing in direct sunlight, the music and dance are unlike anything I've ever seen or heard. It's the first time in a long time where I've felt that I've arrived in a place that is truly foreign to me. It is completely unlike any other place that I've traveled to, and I am loving it so far!

Last Days

This month so far has been a month of goodbyes. I had my last classes a few weeks ago, which were a bit bittersweet. I’m not going to miss lesson planning but I’m sad to not see my students in class anymore. On my last day with each class, the students responded in different ways. In one class, S1A, students left little notes for me in the attendance book I pass around in each class. In my very last class, with S1B, the lesson descended into general chaos towards the end with students bombarding me with questions and drawing “goodbye” notes on the blackboard. I took a picture with each class, which proved to be chaotic in itself… trying to group 45 teenagers for a quick photo three separate times is no easy task! We finally got some passable photos. I’m really going to miss my senior ones – teaching here is so rewarding (as it is anywhere) because I get to know all the different personalities that make up each class. There are the studious students, the crazy ones, the painfully shy ones, the over-outgoing ones, the students obsessed with marks, and the students that just want to goof off.

Following a week of exams, a group of us went into Kigali to watch a student production of Romeo and Juliet. A small group of students and our British volunteer have been working on this play all term, put on as part of Shakespeare International, a single day when student groups are performing different Shakespeare plays in British embassies around the globe. We arrived in the gardens of the British Embassy in Kigali to see the students perform – it was quite impressive! They had memorized an abridged version of the play, but for these students, many of who had only been speaking French and Kinyarwanda the year before, their mastery of Shakespearian English was very good. The play was conducted with some distinctive Rwandan characteristics – students wore costumes in colorful African prints and the drama was accompanied by traditional Intore (warrior) dancers and drummers. The play was interrupted at one point by a rain-and-hail storm, but after a quick break under a tent to let the rains pass the play resumed. Overall it was great, and quite an achievement for an all-science and –math school!

Romeo and Juliet

The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. First exams, then marking, then report-making, then staff meetings and seeing students off, and finally leaving myself. Last Wednesday the students put on an Idol-like talent show, with students dancing or singing for hours. There were some impressive performances, some not so much, but the most surprising came from some of my senior ones.

Two of my students who had hardly ever uttered a word in class took this opportunity to rap enthusiastically for the assembled crowd. And another student, who is a bit of an underdog, criticized by teachers and made fun of by other students, pulled out a dance performance of Napoleon Dynamite proportions, complete with hip thrusting and shaking and rhythm that couldn’t be beat. It was a really fun night, the last chance I had to hang out with students and watch some really entertaining performances.

Last Thursday we had our last staff meeting to decide which students would be advancing to the next grade next year. The meeting was delayed by seven hours because many teachers were still finishing their reports, and finally we gathered in the library for a few hours. It took an hour for us to deliberate on senior one and decide that all the students would pass to senior two, given the ministry of education’s zero-tolerance policy for students repeating grades. Other student problems were discussed, and after about three hours the meeting was convened for the end-of-year staff party.

At the party we ate fried goat, rice, beans, potatoes, cole slaw, bananas, and pasta salad, and drank cokes and beers. Speeches were made to say goodbye to us volunteers and to the group of teachers who are going to university this next year. Gifts were given to all the leaving teachers. I was given a large woven basket (that I had been eyeing in the market for the last year) filled with different household items made locally – banana leaf coasters and trivets, a straw floor mat, and straw earrings. It was a really nice gift, for a large part because it was completely unexpected!

The next morning the students were packed and ready to go, just waiting for their reports. Again teachers were still working on reports, so the handing out of reports was delayed. I had to leave to go to Kigali for a meeting in the ministry of education before the other teachers were finished, so quite sadly I couldn’t hand out my own reports and say goodbye to most of my students. I loaded up my luggage in the back of the school truck and jetted off to Kigali with the headmaster and driver. After about a half hour of driving, it began to pour rain, and proceeded to do so for the remaining hour and a half of the trip. Once we’d arrived in Kigali all my luggage was completely soaked through. I had to unpack everything and lay it out to dry – books, clothes, electronics, everything.

I went back to Nyagatare after a couple days to finish cleaning up my house and saying goodbye to everyone. This morning at 6 am I left Nyagatare for the last time, and as much as I tried to mentally downplay it, it was quite sad. Yesterday as I was walking from town I passed a house with a group of small kids who came running out yelling “Muzungu, BYEEE!!!! Muzungu, BYEEE!!!!” over and over.

So now I am faced with leaving Africa again. I’m leaving Rwanda in two days and will spend a couple weeks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and then back to the States. Already I am feeling nostalgic for Rwanda – as much as I’m looking forward to going back home I think I will miss this place immensely. I was remembering this week how it felt to come back into Rwanda from Uganda in April – the feeling of coming home. I was looking at old women walking down the road, in their traditional Rwandan dress, with their thin frames and dignified walk, and I thought that they were the most beautiful women in the world. Despite any difficulties this year, it has been a more than worthwhile experience, and I am hoping to come back again. I’m hoping that my relationship with Rwanda and with my school will not end just because my teaching year is over.

Good bye Nyagatare!

A Funeral

A few weeks ago, in the first week of school, a student from our school, Olivier, died. On Tuesday he was coming up the hill to school on a motorcycle, arriving for the term, when his moto collided with another one coming down the hill. He was knocked off the moto and suffered some bad injuries. He spent the night in the hospital, with his mother and brother there, and the next afternoon he died, probably of internal bleeding. He was 16. He wasn’t one of my students, but several of the teachers who worked with him were devastated by the loss, and when the news reached his classmates at school, a wail went up from campus. All night we could hear wailing and crying coming from school. The realization that we had lost one of our community

Thursday classes were cancelled, and the school hired a few minibuses to take students and staff to the funeral. Several students had gone the night before to stay at the family home, and the school truck had been shuttling supplies up to the family. We headed off at about 11am and drove for an hour up to the Uganda border, then travelled west along the border a ways to Olivier’s home. A makeshift canopy had been constructed in the front yard, with rows of benches underneath, and a few people sitting. The casket was inside the house, and as we waited people streamed in and out of the house. Olivier’s classmates were having a difficult time, several were sobbing and crying and a few girls had to be taken away for a walk. We waited perhaps two hours for the ceremony to begin. In the meantime seats were arranged, more people arrived, and there was a general dull hush over the crowd. Straw mats were brought for the little old village women who felt more comfortable sitting on the ground than on benches. We were packed in like sardines under the canopy, sheltered from the sun.

After a while two small benches were brought out and set up at the front of the canopy, and like someone had flipped a switch the funeral started. Six pallbearers emerged from the house carrying the casket, followed by several women carrying bouquets of flowers, and finally by Olivier’s two sisters who were sobbing uncontrollably. Within seconds a huge crowd had assembled as if from thin air and pressed close to witness the ceremony. The crowd began clucking their tongues at the sight of the hysterical sisters, then began sniffling, and finally the whole assembly was sobbing. Olivier’s coffin was arranged with a purple and white satin covering that was pulled back at the head in order to see into a small window over his face. Mounds of flowers were laid on top, followed by a large copy of his school photo, and a wooden cross. Several people got up to speak, including the student head and headmaster from our school. The crowd responded in sobs that ebbed and flowed, the sisters wailing all the time.

I was amazed with how many people came for a young boys’ funeral. It seems the whole village had shown up, plus other people from much further. There were several hundred people packed into the small front yard of the home, with the crowd spilling out into and completely blocking the narrow dirt road. Rwandans are known to be reserved people, and until this point I had not witnessed a Rwandese person crying. But now here was an entire community crying together, for a lost member. People who I had known from our school to be stern and stoic were shuddering and sobbing. The two sisters, who had not been crying before the funeral began, were inconsolable once joined with the group. I don’t fully understand the expression of grief here but it was almost as if a key had been turned and had unlocked all the dark feelings. It seems that here there is a time and a place for everything, and this was the time for everyone to grieve.

The service lasted about an hour. Towards the end, one of the sisters broke through the crowd of several women who were comforting her and lunged at the coffin. She had to be restrained by several men and carried away. A path was cleared through the crowd and slowly every person in attendance filed past the coffin for their last view of Olivier. Eventually our turn came, we walked by and looked through the little window but all we could see was a floral shroud. We moved on through the crowd to wait by the newly-dug and brick-lined grave behind the house. After the entire crowd had paid their respects, they assembled around the grave as the coffin was lowered. A pastor spoke some words, there was more crying, and it was time for the burial. Several workers began to furiously mix cement, and a piece of sheet metal and then a wire grate were laid, and they began filling a wheelbarrow and dumping it into the grave. For some reason this struck me more strongly than anything else during the funeral. It shocked me to think that this boy had been alive less than 24 hours before, and now he was being buried in concrete under the ground, and we were all here to witness his last minutes in the light of day. I’ve never witnessed a burial before, and as ridiculously obvious as it is, it struck me how final it is. It didn’t really occur to me that this is it until I saw the wet cement being poured around the coffin.

It occurred to me here at the funeral how Rwanda can be such a place of contradictions, especially between what is and what should be. Here is a boy who at this moment should be sitting at his desk in the cool of a brick classroom, surrounded by his friends, learning. But instead he is here, under the ground, buried in cement under the hot sun. Here also are a few hundred students, sitting and crying in the heat, rather than in their places beside him at school. This sort of thing happens everywhere, all over the world, but it’s difficult to appreciate the normality of it here, when less than two decades ago the entire country was overcome with tragedy. For me, as an outsider, it seemed like the death of a young boy was not only an unnecessary tragedy, but redundant and excessive. You wonder how a people stretched to the limits by pain and agony can possibly accommodate one more untimely death.

Blessings to Olivier’s family – prayers that they may carry on in the knowledge that he is loved and missed.

Broadband in Rwanda - News article

An interesting little article about Rwanda's link to the East Africa fiber-optic network:

Bold Rwanda takes broadband leap

Holidays Part 1 - Kenya and Tanzania

My parents were here a couple weeks ago and they berated me for not being more frequent with my blog posts. So now I know that at least two people read this blog. I think. So here's another one, to be followed by a few more (if I get around to it) - we've already had a lot happen this term!

The end of last term was fairly uneventful, and at the beginning of July I took off for our second break of the year.

This is what happens when you go on vacation

Part 1: Kenya/Tanzania
I decided to go back to Kenya for a third time, to see a few people and to enjoy the country a bit. We were contemplating bussing from Kigali to Nairobi, but when we compared bussing (24+ hours, bad roads, small seats, heat, dust, buying both a Uganda visa and a Kenya visa, overnight in some godforsaken town, eating roadside food, danger of theft and accidents) with flying (1 hour, air conditioning, comfortable seats, food and drinks provided, on-call toilet, relative safety) and realized the costs all told were quite close, we went with the obvious choice.


I just finished a book called Shadow of the Sun (on the sidebar, read it! It's really good) in which the author compares the original modes of travel from Europe to Africa (overland for months) with current transport (flights lasting only a few hours). He discusses how previously the adventurous few who made it out so far would be able to slowly adjust to their surrounds as they descended south, gradually coming to deserts, rain forests, villages, towns, and by the time they reached their destination they were generally fully acclimated. The modern-day traveler, however leaves his familiar home and within hours is thrust into a new climate, culture, society, where he must scramble to adjust, and usually makes a myriad of mistakes before he finds his footing in this new place. Thus, since we had made all previous trips via bus, where we could watch the landscape change and were aware of how different towns became progressively different, the process of lifting off in safe, quite Kigali, and being dumped in the middle of noisy, busy, dangerous Nairobi was quite a shock.

Compared to Rwanda, Nairobi is cold and dangerous. We walked onto the airplane from a comfortable oven of a little city and landed in what seemed like a cold-to-the-bone den of thieves. We were constantly warned throughout the trip to be careful of our belongings, to not be outside after dark, to watch our money, to not be outside after dark, to lock our car doors, to not be outside after dark. Having been to Kenya twice before it had never occurred to me how dangerous it could be until I cam to it after having been in the relatively safe conditions of Kigali. Fortunately we heeded warnings and managed to get through the entire trip unscathed.

We spent time in Nairobi (really cold - probably in the '50s) and on the coast in Mombasa (dripping hot and humid). Mombasa has been one of my favorite places in Kenya. I love the diversity of the culture: it has a rich history of Arab, Portuguese, Indian, Somali, and British influence that is evident throughout the city.

The courtyard at the old colonial hotel we stayed at in Mombasa. The hotel was billed as being "An Oasis of Peace and Quite". It was.

It's a big, bustling city, a bit of a shock when you first get off the bus and are accosted with people clamoring to take you somewhere in their taxi or bus, but after a bit it was quite nice. We visited Fort Jesus, the old Portuguese fort turned British prison that now stands as a historical site.

Down in the dungeons, Fort Jesus

A carved wooden anchor from an old shipwreck

Ruins of the old army barracks, Fort Jesus

Fort Jesus

We ate Chinese food and Indian food and wandered around, taking tuk-tuks (three-wheeled, three-passenger covered motorcycles) up and down the coast. And at some point we looked at a map and realized that we were really close to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and maybe we should go see it.

Our very artistic bus from Mombasa to Moshi

This involved getting on an early-morning bus to Moshi, Tanzania, which drove for about 6 hours (2-3 of which were on nasty bumpy dirt roads) with more passengers than seats (I had a woman practically sitting on my lap for a couple hours, and a chicken someone was holding kept emerging above my head). We got to the border of Tanzania and went through the hastle of visa-getting. Tanzania's visa for U.S. citizens is $100, at least twice that of any other country nearby (Kenya's is $25, Rwanda's is free) and so with a sense of injustice we set about trying to get a discount. We hold green cards for Rwanda and can claim residency in the East African Community, so we often whip those out in an effort to get a discount not offered to mere tourists, but immigration officers are not too impressed by these. So instead we lied and said that we were going to Rwanda via Tanzania by bus and only needed a transit visa. Which was KIND of the truth, we just left out the part about going back into Kenya to take a plane to Rwanda. After many suspicious glares, and after rejecting one piece of American money because it was too old (NO ONE in East Africa accepts bills issued before 2003) we were given a $50 stamp that said we had 2 weeks to get through Tanzania to the other side. And we were on our way.

Once in Moshi we tried to spot Kilimanjaro but to no avail, a thick cloud cover was hanging just low enough to obscure our view of the famous peak.

Kilimanjaro Lager: If you can't climb it, drink it

We soon realized that we were in a town crawling with muzungus, all there to trek the mountain. Moving around among them we felt lazy and poor (treks run something like $500+, not including the cost of getting yourself to Moshi) and decided to distract ourselves by finding every free thing to be done in Moshi and doing it. We accomplished this in one morning - walking the loop through town (40 minutes walking slowly) and wandering into shops to look at things. We then went back to the hotel to watch the Tour de France on TV. That was it.

Tour de France in Moshi Tanzania!

At some point the clouds cleared and we saw Kilimanjaro in all its glory for a full 30 minutes, and to be honest it was quite stunning. It's perched atop these rolling foothills which are beautiful in their own right, and the peak looks oddly out of place, like someone snatched one of the rocky mountains and stuck it here. But it is really beautiful, kind of like you are standing below this bis graceful giant. And there is still snow on top, big sheets of it.

The justification for 12 hours of bussing and $50 in visa fees

So after we ran out of money we decided to head back, and one more bus ride (on a temporary bumpy dusty dirt road beside a lovely, smooth, agonizingly under-construction asphalt road) and one more border crossing (the immigration officer stamped me departing Kenya rather than entering Kenya) later we were in Nairobi.

Sign on the side of a rather obnoxious and slightly dangerous dirt road. Pole pole - Kiswahili for "slowly slowy"

We stayed one more day and enjoyed some real live sushi and hand-fed some giraffes at Langata Giraffe Center (they have sticky rough tongues and they head butt! I almost lost my head!) And the next day we were back on a plane back to Kigali. Which leads to part 2, whenever I get around to posting it!

A 1-1/2 year old giraffe

Tales from a Trying Weekend

As I mentioned in my last post, the power company has been turning off electricity for big chunks of time during the day for a few weeks now, as they are doing some sort of work in the Eastern Province. This has been fairly manageable as we generally have power in the mornings for coffee and in the evenings to cook dinner. This weekend, however...

It all started when I woke up Saturday morning to find that there was no power and no running water. This was a bit surprising and annoying. I kept waiting patiently for the power to come on so I could boil some water on our dinky little hot plate for coffee, but the power never came on. Lunchtime rolled around and all we had in the house that could be eaten without cooking it were a couple half-packages of biscuits, which we downed quickly. Afternoon wore on, still no power. At this point I was increasingly irritable, having to go through caffeine withdrawal for the first time in quite a while. Somehow I've always managed to make coffee in the morning. Sometime in the late afternoon we began to have a trickle of power, meaning our outlets worked weakly but not the lights. I attempted to boil water then but there wasn't enough electricity to heat our burner. Around evening we gave up and walked into town for dinner, only to find out the entire town was without power too. We found a place with a generator and by the time we got home that night the power was back. 

The next morning we awoke to yet again no power, and the prospect of a second day with no coffee and hardly any food wasn't exactly enticing, so I decided to haul out the old borrowed kerosene stove that we supposedly kept for such occasions as this. Now, I have a slightly irrational fear of the combination of kerosene and fire, and I also have a shocking ability to inadvertently start kitchen fires in situations where I wasn't even using fire to begin with. So steering clear of the kerosene stove seemed a prudent choice up until this point. But need for coffee overcomes all. So I dragged the stove to our neighbors who had lent it to us for a quick re-briefing on how to light it, dragged it back to the house and with great fear and trembling lit it up. I did it wrong though (don't ask me how, it seems simple enough) and had to redo it, the result being that it took me an hour to boil a pot of water. But I boiled it! And afterwards, confident in my good fortunes, I even made grilled cheese sandwiches. Then, disaster of disasters: I went to blow out the stove as I had been instructed to do and rather than flickering out like a good fire does, the flame blew up with a great whoosh into my face. Luckily all the damage done was a sooted face and singed bangs, but it was enough to scare me away from using the stove again. We ended up eating dinner in town for a second night in a row. 

Monday morning the power was on as usual, so I plugged in the hot plate and threw on a pot of water. I then stepped outside for a quick shower and I was out there I heard a huge bang and came in to find the hot plate no longer working. Come to find out there were a series of three power surges that morning, one of which blew out our hot plate. Desperate as ever for coffee, I plugged in our electric kettle which had recently started to emit a burned-plastic smell, and started boiling away. The kettle succeeded in boiling the water but in the process melted the plug into the voltage converter attached to it. We had to peel the plug out of the outlet and then surgically remove a prong from the outlet. So now we have no hot plate, no kettle, and I'm scared spitless of cooking on kerosene. So that's our weekend!

God has been expelled.

Crossroads in Eastern Rwanda

It has been far too long since the last blog post, my apologies, but we've been having some electricity problems and plus things have been quite busy so blogging just hasn't been in the cards for me. But hopefully we can correct that...

So here are some tidbits of things that have been going on lately. As the blog title suggests, we had a student named God who was expelled for fighting. Not a major happening, I just thought it would make an eye-catching blog title. And we've been having regular electricity cuts because the lovely electric company is laying down new something-or-another and thus has limited our power to about 12 hours out of every 24. From 6am to 12 noon and from 5pm to sometime in the night. This means less internet time and less access to coffee for yours truly. Living here is often an exercise in learning to do without. First I lost my laptop, then my ipod and camera, but when they took my coffee they went too far. Luckily I've been able to cram my coffee drinking into the times when power is available. 

In addition to no power we're in the midst of another long stretch of water scarcity. We had water yesterday for a couple hours and the day before that for about half an hour but other than that the taps have been perpetually dry for more than a week. I'm not sure why - it's really a mystery. On the upside it rains almost daily so our rainwater collector has been a good standby. We had an almost apocalyptic storm this last week, I thought the trees were going to come right into the house. I swear we got up to hurricane-force winds at times. 

And the big story has to be the illnesses. I'm sure some of you have heard this story, but here goes (and be warned, it might get ugly at times): 

About a week or two after we got back from our break in Uganda, I started to notice a red spot on my breast that started quite small but over the course of a week swelled up and began to get quite painful. I had no idea what it could be. I'd had some of these boil-like things that had developed and then gone away on my legs during the earlier part of the year, and I thought perhaps this could be the same sort of thing. I decided after it seemed to only get worse for a week (culminating in me spending one sleepless night in tears because of the pain) that I needed to go to the hospital in Kigali. So we woke up early on a Friday morning and left the house at 5am to catch a 6am bus into the city. Three hours later I was sitting in the emergency room at King Faisal Hospital in Kigali where I was triaged by a male nurse and then led to a bed in a ward where I was told to wait for the doctor. The doctor arrived after a while and examined me, then said he would have to go make some phone calls and left me alone for another half hour. He came back to tell me that he didn't know what was wrong with me and that I'd have to see the gynecologist, who had been up all night doing c-sections, so could I come back tomorrow at the same time? He gave me some prescriptions for a not-very-powerful painkiller and a cold medicine (he had noticed me coughing) and escorted me out. As we were leaving I tried to get a little more information out of him, trying to get a sense of what might happen to me the next day. Referring to the hideous lump in my breast, I asked if it could be removed, to which the kindly doctor replied "your breast??? Well maybe..." and I hurriedly assured him I didn't mean the entire breast, just the offending lump. 

And then began the checking-out process. I went to pay the consultation fee at the reception for the emergency room, and then was directed toward the pharmacy to get my meds. Except I was directed to the wrong pharmacy, and the woman behind the counter gave me an odd look and told me I had to go upstairs to the outpatient pharmacy. So up I went, where I was dealt my drugs and then instructed to go back to where I had come from to pay. So I went back downstairs to the emergency room reception. Where I was promptly laughed at and told to go the MAIN reception to pay. So I went back upstairs to the main reception where I waited for a while at one desk before they told me it was the wrong desk and I would have to go to the NEXT desk and wait since the cashier was away and would need to be called. Finally the cashier arrived and I paid for my medicine and we left. I spent the rest of that day in pain and irritable, most unfortunate due to the fact that there was a party that night with all our friends that we had been looking forward to for a while. 

The next morning I went back to the hospital where I was directed to the gynecologist's waiting room, which was cluttered with young mothers and pregnant women. I was called in after a bit and found a disheveled doctor looking at my file behind the desk. He questioned me a bit about what was going on and then led me to a table where he ultrasounded my breast. After a quick look at it he told me it was an abscess, a bacterial infection, and that there was nothing he could do about it. I did not take kindly to this information and asked if maybe he could just drain it to relieve some of the pressure, to which he assured me it wasn't liquid in my breast (he then ultrasounded my bladder so I could see what liquid DID look like) and that if he were to cut it (I love the literal language) then it would take even longer to heal. So he wrote me a prescription for an anal-suppository antibiotic and a stronger painkiller. There's nothing like shoving something up your butt to cure a pain in your breast. So away I went, uncured and unhappy, and decided to try the meds and see what happened. 

The next day we boarded a bus back to Nyagatare and at some point on the road all the bumpiness of the bus ride must have dislodged something in my breast and when I got home I peaked down my shirt to see LIQUID pouring out of an open wound in my breast. The abscess had burst and was now emptying itself into my bra. So after a brief moment of freaking out and then feeling faint from the sight of so much blood and guts I bandaged the thing up and waited it out. All in all, between the antibiotics and the self-draining, my breast healed and now the only thing that remains is a bit of discoloration where the thing emptied itself. Sorry for the graphicness. 

So with that over I figured my interactions with the hospital were through. And then a week later Dan woke up feeling terrible and suffering through high fever, sore throat, headaches, muscle aches, chills and all around ickiness. He got to the point where he was freezing cold and shivering despite the hot weather, the two wool blankets he was wrapped in, and the high fever, and so after a visit from the school nurse (who tossed around the word "typhoid" like it was a hacky sack) we decided that another hospital visit was in order. We called the school truck to take Dan, myself, and two neighbors down to the Nyagatare Hospital that night after his temperature had gone over 102 degrees. Dan was stuck with an anti-fever shot in his ass and after sitting around in an office with nurses staring at us we were told to go to the lab so he could get tested for malaria. There the lab tech stuck him with a needle and deposited a drop of blood on a stick while we waited anxiously for the results. After about 15 minutes the lab tech led us over to show us the test - one red line meant no malaria, two red lines meant malaria. It was faint but we only saw one red line. So whoop-di-doo, no malaria! The lab tech wrote out the results in French, and then re-wrote them in English for our benefit. We took the test results back to the doctor who glanced at them and officiously informed Dan that he had malaria. We argued that the test was negative but his logic was that malaria testing is quite ineffectual and given Dan's symptoms it probably was malaria so it was best to treat it like malaria. So he was given a three-day course of malaria meds and an antibiotic and was sent home with the warning that if he still had malaria after three days he would have to come back to the hospital where he was would be admitted and administered quinine. 

So we went home, Dan spent a couple days sleeping, still feverish and in pain, and by the third day his symptoms had lessened but he was still quite feverish and so we decided we could either go back to the Nyagatare Hospital which had diagnosed him with malaria despite the negative test and let him have a treatment of quinine, or we could go back to Kigali. So again we got on a bus and ended up in King Faisal Hospital, where we saw a general practitioner who, after questions and much philosophizing (he had some interesting ideas on human society and how it effects our health) gave Dan a new diagnosis. He told him that he probably HAD had malaria, but now it was too late to restest for it and anyway most of the symptoms were gone so it didn't matter. But what he had NOW was a throat infection that was causing the general bad feeling and fever. So there you go, a throat infection hiding behind malaria. So we got more medicine and hopped on a bus and went back to Nyagatare. 

So that was our week of too many hospitals - two visits for me, two for Dan, at two different hospitals all within a week and a half. Dan is pretty much back to normal now and I haven't seen anymore problems so we are crossing our fingers that this is all we'll have to deal with for now. 

In more upbeat news, this week I attended my first meeting with the gender-equality group on campus (known as TUSEME) and led a very interesting discussion about traditional gender roles in Rwanda and how they are changing. It seems the students involved in TUSEME are very forward thinking, they had very well-articulated views on why women should be allowed to maintain the same roles as men in society. I'm excited for further meetings with this group of students and I'm excited to have more open discussions about the meaning of gender equality. This is a bright spot on campus I had not previously seen and I see good things happening with this group!