Jet-lagged first outing

Hello from pretty much the center of the African continent.

We are in Rwanda! I know some of you are asking “where?”, and “what the hell are you doing in Rwanda?”. Well, the answer to the first question has already been answered in the first paragraph, and as to why are we here, we’ll have an entire blog over the next several days that will answer it.

So, we arrived last night, after an extremely long flight that took nearly a full day.

Of course we got practically no sleep on the plane. Customs and passport control went way smoother than we had anticipated, and the gentleman that promised he’d deliver our rental car was waiting for us outside. Truly, everything went without a hitch, even the GPS complied and we found our way to the hotel trouble-free.

I still don’t know how or why, but when you are so overtired and jet-lagged, it is so difficult to fall asleep. But, amid the tossing and the turning, we managed to get a few hours of sleep in, and, still in a stupor, we headed to the restaurant for our first Rwandan breakfast. Not bad, not great, but decent.

I wanted to use a flash so Diane would be brighter, but for some reason it didn't work.

Then we were off for an easy “get acquainted” with Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) tour on our own.

I’ve been following a youtuber who had been touring through Africa, and he had met an Italian gentleman who had moved to Rwanda to start a Mozzarella cheese factory. The youtuber had claimed it was the best mozzarella he ever tasted, so I made that our first destination. We found the place, not without considerable difficulty, and met Claudio, the young owner who welcomed us. He prepared for us a mozzarella and a burrata cheese portion, which tasted as if they were made by the hand of God. The cheese had just come out of being processed. Never had we had a fresher or better tasting serving, albeit this is not a restaurant, so we had to eat it very spartanly on an office table with open cans of paint on it.

From there we drove to a market nearby. It was not the market we had intended to visit, it was much smaller, but it was interesting nonetheless. Everyone being very curious about us, and extremely nice, as usual.

Everyone seems to be busy working with their hands, making and repairing all sorts of things.

This is but one of several open-air aisles where people shop for lumber.

The market was in an area where the city streets are way worse than you might imagine. Dirt roads barely wide enough, with many uphill or sharply downhill inclines, with trenches that our 4x4 could barely clear. Oh, I wish I had taken pictures!

Last on our “getting acquainted” tour was Kigali’s #1 attraction, the Genocide Memorial. Many of you may remember that crazy period in 1994 when 1.1 million Tutsis were killed by members of the Hutu tribe. Many of you might have seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, which reported these events. The memorial is not a “wow” place, it is simply a memorial which has a small display of photos and memorabilia from the event, and where 250,000 people are buried in mass graves, ¼ of the people killed. It is a place where people come to pray and pay their respects.

It was extremely touching, especially the introductory movie that contained spoken remembrances of the time. A woman described how her mother had heard over the airways that an order was given by the government to kill all the Tutsis. The mother ran to a neighbor friend who was a Hutu and asked if he could hide her small children; the lifetime friend refused and had her mother murdered on the spot, then had her family go to the lady’s house to retrieve her children; they were also brutally killed, with one exception, a little girl who grew up to tell the story. I left the showing with tears in my eyes.

Remembering 31 years since the genocide

250,000 bodies are buried beneath these grounds

Mass graves doubling as a rose garden

One writing on a banner stuck in my head. It said: “As long as there will be people who think they are better than others, the possibility of similar events happening again is always very real."

This is definitely not be the most pictorial post, but certainly there will be many better ones.

Tomorrow we are starting our road-trip. All the best, faithful friends.