We left Kigali in the early afternoon on Tuesday, after spending the morning working on our field collection methods – Samsung tablets with a GIS data collector installed, with custom surveys built and distributed to the five student researchers. I went out to take care of some housekeeping – got cash from the ATM, a few groceries and then to […]
This question comes up fairly regularly. Rwanda? Why Rwanda? There are a number of reasons for that, the first one being that I’m a masters degree candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and this opportunity came to me through RIT. This trip is funded through a National Science Foundation grant, with a two-fold purpose: give American students international research […]
It’s Sunday, a bit of a day off after a week of meetings and introductions, exploration and adjustment. We finished up our meetings with the UNHCR on Thursday, and then the US Embassy on Friday. After that meeting, we went out to a Rwandan buffet, which was tasty and cheap, then walked back to the house through some neighborhoods, really […]
Sitting out on our house’s terrace as the day gets going. The house is on the side of a hill, like almost everything in Kigali, looking over a valley to another hill a half mile away. To my left is the roofs of more large houses with fences and gates (some with razor wire atop the fences), which seem to […]
After months of Zoom meetings, reading and uncertainty, the day finally came. I finished a few home projects, then hugged the kids – with some tears – and drove toward Boston with Bean. It was a sunny, warm day, and we stopped once in New Hampshire. Then, suddenly, I was pulling to the curb at Logan, and we were hugging […]
We turned west again through upstate New York, heading towards Elmira for my oldest, best friend’s wedding. It was raining hard again, waves of water smashing into the windshield, and we passed through the downpour into the gentle hills just north of Pennsylvania. There were no hotel rooms for 100 miles – it was Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, […]
The week wore on. We played a game of tap-dance with the moving; after renting a U-haul to bring our stuff to the Dome, we unloaded our belongings at the end of the driveway and returned to Novato to pick up the trailer hitch at the Advance. We’d hook it up there, then drive to Woodland and pick up the […]
The week before we left California, we began to get phone calls from Tim. “I’m bringing a trampoline cover,” he said. “And a come-along, and some drills and tools. Do you have any tools?” The calls were ominous. We’d packed dozens of books and other things into boxes, hauled them to the post office, and sent them off to Vermont, […]