Today, we made an excursion.
First, I got up at 3am for no reason and couldn’t go back to sleep until
6 or 7, I don’t know. Then I woke up at
8:30 and made myself get up to try to beat this lag. So, I am so tired today.
I don’t really remember this morning, it feels like
yesterday. I had chapatti and bought,
from a lady who travels around and knocks on doors and sells things, a kilo of
tomatoes. That is 12 tomatoes…for about
50 cents! I washed one really well and
ate it along with the chapatti. Normally
I would put salt on the tomato but the house ran out of salt. So Dinah offered me what she likes to
use: garlic salt with pepper mixed into
it. It was really good. This was a good breakfast.
Then I had like 9 cups of tea, no exaggeration, and worked
on the computer, different things, for a while.
This included my daily lesson in Kinyarwandan. I use the online program Memrise for learning
it. A year ago I found a book by some
missionary out in some province who used it to teach other missionaries and
children. So I just put all these words
in there, over 900, including grammar and spelling rules, and then promptly
stopped even looking at it because I had to work. Now that I am here in Rwanda, I am loving
myself so very, very much for having done this a year ago and am
practicing. And I am around Rwandans at
the house all day so I can test the pronunciation and usage of things a
lot. It’s really nice. Dinah and Evode say that they are really
excited that I am bothering to learn the language. I like it and its fun.
Dinah made me lunch again, leftovers from last night. Oh yeah, last night. Archie will no longer be staying at the house
and will be staying somewhere else, though coming here for internet and because
he knows everyone, because a new person with a reservation for his room came
in. This is Nicole from Canada coming to
study for her dissertation the mass rapes during the genocide and comparing
different ways of prosecuting it and so on.
Anyway, she is nice.
So, Dinah made dinner for her last night and invited me to
eat with them and so I did. Then, for
lunch today she made the leftovers and cooked up a bunch of cooking
bananas. Oh heavenly cooking
bananas! They are green on the outside
and have to be peeled like a cucumber.
After lunch I worked a bit more. Oh, and this morning I took a hot shower in
the other shower. That was ok. It’s basically just one stream of hot water
that comes from the ceiling. But, at
least it’s hot and at least it comes from the ceiling.
So, then later on Dinah took me around the corner to go and
get a local phone. I got a dual sim card
phone for 21,000 francs which is about 30 dollars and that comes with a little
airtime. I need a dual sim card because
after three months it will be cheaper because half the people I know have the
company Tigo and the other half have MTN.
So, now I have Tigo and MTN and can talk to them all.
Then we went to the market where I bought a half a round of
local cheese, a large loaf of bread, a can of tuna, and dishwashing soap (we
are meant to do our own dishes and provide our own soap) and then went to
another local store and bought a pack of bananas, like 15 of them, and a large
avocado. All of this was for 6,600
francs. This is about 10 dollars. Pretty good.
I will be eating some of that avocado and bread and cheese and tomatoes
for dinner. Only now I wish I had an
onion or something as well.
The advice I have received prior to now is not to eat fresh
vegetables or fruits that do not have a peel at all. The advice I learned from Katie who is with
the Peacecorp, or at least the advice that they gave her and that she does not follow
AT ALL, is to take the food, put it in a bowl of clean water and drop a few
drops of bleach in the water. Then put
the produce in the bowl for like five minutes and then it should be ok. Katie lives on the extreme wild side, she
drinks the water from the tap. I did not
wash my tomato with bleach. I just
washed it really well in tap water. Probably
next time I will wash it really well in boiled water just to be careful if I am
going to eat it fresh (cooking kills amoebas).
Anyway, my family will be happy to know that I am living on the wild
side. Not that going to Rwanda in the
first place was a workaday thing to do.
As to the title of today’s post: Kixsy’s name is not
Kixsy. It is Keksy. Because keks means cookie in German and it
was Heike and Martin that found the dog.
They got her into the car with the only food they had on them, a box of
cookies. So far, Keksy will eat just
about anything they try to feed her, rice, some dog food, potatoes, milk,
avocado, and bananas. Yes, avocado and
bananas! But she just absolutely will
not drink plain water. In order to get
her to drink water, they just put all the food in a solution of milk and water
and so it’s a big weird dog-food leftovers soup. It is pretty disgusting but Keksy at least
gets lots of water that way.
In other Keksy news, today, Keksy got her first bath. She didn’t want it, but Heike washed while
Martin fed her half a box of cookies one tidbit at a time. In this way, Heike was able to tough Keksy in
places that before elicited either snapping or yelping. Afterwards, Keksy barked for the very first
time at someone knocking at the gate and she also began to look like she wanted
to play, she sort of hobble-pounced. Baths
make even the saddest of sad dogs a little bit crazy.
But, if you are happy at the current plight of Keksy, be sad
for the bunnies who remain locked in their cage for the second straight
day. We need a collar for the dog and it’s
impossible! As of now, the plan is to
braid one out of twine and use a carabineer to clip it to the leash which is
half rope and half chain. Pray it works
for the cooped up bunnies’ sake.
Random occurrences you will appreciate:
At the kiosk for the phone, the clerk told Dinah to ask me
where he can get a mizungu friend like me.
Apparently I seem like Dinah’s pet to other people.
Dinah bought shoes at what, on fifth glance, was a local
cobbler’s house around the corner. Three
pairs of shoes for 500 francs. That is
less than a dollar.
At the local store where I bought the bananas and the
avocado, a young child ran up to me with the biggest grin I have ever seen and
hugged me around the waist looking up into my eyes with absolute joy. And I said, “Haaalllo!” Then he walked around seeming really happy
with the world. I don’t know what this
meant and Dinah didn’t even bat an eye at the occurrence.
Yesterday I went to return bottles to the shop that is Dinah’s
favorite because her friend Florence works there. There were a lot of young people in the shop
just hanging out or something. Which is
weird because the shop is about as big as my closet at home. Florence began to talk to me. I flailed around trying to think of how to
tell a person that I don’t understand in some universal gestural language and
failing utterly. A young man in the shop
spoke English haltingly and tried to translate, “She wants you to come back and
spend women’s time with her talking. She
says that this will make her much happier than she is right at this hour.” I said to him, “I like to make people
happy. If she wouldn’t mind I will have Dinah
arrange for us to talk and she can translate.”
Everyone agreed. Today, Dinah and
I went to talk to Florence. Florence does
not own the shop. She works and sleeps
there for her boss who lives there. She is
HIV positive. She was definitely alive
during the genocide, but what ethnicity she is, is just not asked. Her daughter was born in 1995. Her daughter has been going to school and has
been able to pay for school fees through a program that President Kagame put
together that pays for school fees for 9 years of schooling. This year is Florence’s daughter’s last year
of paid for schooling and she wants to continue. But Florence cannot pay the fees. She wants to me to find someone to help
her. Dinah deals with most of this
conversation for me, explaining that I am not an aid worker. I tell her that I will ask some other friends
if they know of programs that can help her and I will let her know what they
say. A broken heart…it just keeps on
beating, relentless…
I can't wait to see pictures, Lacy! It sounds wonderful!
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