Changing plans, seeing the gorillas early, spraining my ankle hiking…
JUST KIDDING. Both my ankles are perfectly functional. Hopefully the other two parts of the title are almost as interesting though :)
I wrote this part on Wednesday…
While we were on site interviewing today, we got news from Epiphanie that we had to reschedule the date we’re seeing the gorillas to Thursday instead of Friday, so we had to cut our interviews short and pack up early. We’re staying at the Gorilla Nest hotel tonight, hiking up a small mountain to see the world-famous gorillas tomorrow, and staying at Epiphanie’s house tomorrow night. We’ll stay in Kigali on Friday night and we fly out Saturday night. It’s incredible how quickly everything seems to be winding down now that we unexpectedly finished doing interviews.
I had the most interesting interview today ever. It was with a man who lives on a friend’s porch underneath their rabbit hutch (the rabbit droppings literally fall into his bed – a bed consisting of cardboard pieces on a dirty cement floor). He has no job because he’s set on going to school therefore he has no time to work, and has no means of making money anyway without animals, land, or any sort of vocational training. No health insurance, no consistent access to a toilet, no siblings… his family on both his father’s and mother’s sides reject him. The whole community is well aware that his uncle will beat him if he ever stops by asking for assistance. He’s an outcast in the community as well because he’s never invited to weddings or funerals, which is a very large part of Rwandan society. He gets water from wherever he can find it whether or not it’s clean. When he had malaria, he couldn’t afford to get any medicine even though the hospital would’ve given it to him for 1000 Rwandan francs (less than $2). He wants to go to church but rarely can because he is ashamed of his dirty clothes. When he told me that, I told him that God doesn’t care what he wears. I hope the community would believe this too and not make him feel out of place simply for wanting to worship God.
Although we’ve heard stories similar to his, I think it was the way he was telling his story that was so remarkable. He was very expressive, he looked at me when he spoke even though I had to wait for Martha to translate before I understood, and he used a lot of gestures so I could sense how desperate he felt and how he knew his living conditions were unacceptable.
After we finished, I asked Martha what she thought of the interview. She said she thought he seemed like a drug user, which surprised me since I didn’t really get that impression. I guess it makes sense though because he probably looks for escapes from the suffering of his everyday life. I told her I thought the whole story was just unbelievable, and she might have taken me literally because she asked the driver to stop by the place where he was living and had him show us the porch, rabbit hut, bed, and all. As we left, she asked, “now do you believe he was telling the truth?” And I was like, “Of course! I never thought he was lying!” But I was very glad to see it anyway to have a visual to match his story.
There are so many aspects of Rwandan culture that surprise me – mainly little things that I didn’t notice right away, or took them as just individual occurrences before I realized they’re reoccurring trends…
• Nobody cares about flies here. People let flies land on their clothes, arms, hair, and even their faces, and they don’t brush them away. At home, people get so annoyed if there’s a fly even near them that they try to kill it almost right away.
• Picking your nose is completely acceptable, no matter who or where you are.
• Since most people wear imported second hand clothes, it’s amusing when we see people in the middle of the countryside wearing “Charlotte Symphony Orchestra” t-shirts (true story) or sweatshirts from Harvard University or something like that.
• All the children in primary and secondary school need to have a school uniform, and this is probably the biggest discouragement for most families who want to send their children for school but can’t afford the uniform. I think it’s very sad that thousands more children could attend school if only they didn’t have to wear a uniform.
• It’s generally OK to answer your cell phone at any time. In the states, if you’re eating dinner or in a meeting, it’s definitely frowned upon if you chose to answer your phone, even if you say, “excuse me” and step away. As far as I’ve noticed here, if someone is calling you then it’s probably about something urgent so it’s OK to answer your phone at any point – dinner, a meeting, whatever.
• I thought that few people would walk around outside at night since there are no streetlights and few people own flashlights or torches, but in fact the streets are pretty busy at night. As we’re driving along, I’m stunned to see huge groups of people, and even lone children, walking down the street as if it were broad daylight. Our headlights hit them, and then I turn around to watch them pass and realize it’s pitch-black outside and they’re impossible to spot. I don’t understand how they can find their footing while carrying heavy loads on their heads in complete darkness.
The hotel we’re staying in tonight is incredibly beautiful. There’s a main lodge area with a fancy “thatched roof” and marble floors, and all the rooms are in little cabanas at the end of stone walkways that lead away from the lodge and towards the forest. SO cool! Ahhh and the beds are so soft… mmm I think we’re gonna sleep well tonight :)
Wrote this part yesterday…
Have you seen the movie “Gorillas in the Mist,” about the Rwandan gorillas? Well, I haven’t, and I’m glad, because I’d want to rename it “Gorillas in the RAIN.” Haha no, more like deluge.
At the start of our hike, the guide told our group it would take about 45 minutes to track down the specific gorilla group we were looking for. This sounded like no problem since it was a comfortable, cloudy day and the rainforest looked beautiful and inviting. Well, about an hour later…still no sign of gorillas… But I didn’t mind at that point because the jungle was everything I’d imagined and I was loving it: bamboo everywhere, vines spiraling down from the canopy, birds calling from far away, moss growing thick on every tree limb… I felt like we were walking through The Jungle Book, George of the Jungle, and Mighty Joe Young all at once. Haha yeah, I know I’m weird.
So, about two hours after the start of our hike, and we found out that we were walking over day-old elephant poop and there were some buffalo in the forest about 20 meters away that we couldn’t see but could hear… but STILL no gorillas sightings.
And then it started to rain.
At first I was excited ‘cause I thought it was a perfect touch to the aura of this exotic wilderness (what’s a rainforest without a little rain?) But after a while, as our pants started to soak through, our gloves got soaked, our fingers started freezing, and I realized my awesome Safari hat from the kids’ section of REI – I mean um my hardcore camping headgear – wasn’t actually waterproof and my hair was sopping wet… the fun started to drain a little bit. Not to mention how we were trekking through paths cut just seconds before by a trailblazer dude with a machete, so vines and thorn-hedged-branches and God knows what else kept thwacking us in the face every other step. And our pants were dark brown all the way up to our knees thanks to the lovely gooey mud the rain made. Yeah, a couple hours of being dirty, wet, cold, and lost made us a little impatient.
But when we found them, it was all worth it. The gorillas were so amazing. The silverback (the big daddy of the group who’s the only one allowed to mate the females and will potentially kill them if he catches them cheatin’) was huge and intimidating, but completely chilled out, munching on some roots and keeping a watch on his little herd of seven other gorillas (including three babies!) The littlest guys copied the older ones in the hunt for food. One of them was particularly mischievous and kept nudging and kicking the others to try to get them to play with him, but they shrugged off the poor guy and kept eating.
We took lots of pictures since we’re only allowed to watch them for an hour and wanted to take full advantage of our time.
AHHH my favorite part came when I paused from the picture-taking ‘cause one of the babies was coming really close and I was preparing to move away since we’re supposed to keep 7 meters between us and them (which we never did though)… AND THEN HE CAME OVER AND PUNCHED MY LEG!! It was pretty soft and fast, and I barely had time to react before he ran off. I think he was trying to tease me to get me to play with him like he was doing with the other gorillas. Ahhhh it was SO cool! I was so surprised – and ecstatic, of course :) We’re not supposed to touch the gorillas, but I guess who’s to stop them from touching us, right?
After our hour was up, we started the journey back to our army of Land Rovers. It was still raining, and the mud was worse than ever. We fell down tons of times (Jessica caught one of my falls on camera, which is hilarious) so everything was completely drenched by the time the rain finally stopped… which happened only about 20 minutes before we got out of the forest. Haha go figure.
It was about 3 pm when we finally sat down to eat lunch in Ruhengeri, and we hadn’t eaten since 6 am, so we were pretty hungry. When we were hiking, we’d fantasized about our favorite warm comfort foods, including hot chocolate… and lo and behold, this restaurant was serving some! Yayyy!
We left after lunch and now we’re driving south to Epiphanie’s house in Gitarama to spend the night. Tomorrow is her son Peter’s birthday and Jess brought some cake mix so we’re going to bake him a cake…well, she’s going to bake it, and I’ll do whatever I can to help without burning down the kitchen. I’m notoriously a horrible cook. Mariah inherited good kitchen skills, but definitely not me. Haha that reminds me of yesterday when I was interviewing that last guy… Before we started the interview, I explained our research to him and asked if he had any questions. He said he did have one, but it was about cooking and he didn’t see me as the type who cooks, so he wouldn’t ask it. I couldn’t help but to laugh even though Martha had no idea what was so funny. I mean, seriously, even a Rwandan dude I’ve never met before can guess I’m culinarily-challenged at first sight? Sigh.
Home in two days… !!
