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 for a long time, and then Colleen got in the car and I picked up my bags and headed for check in.
The flights went quickly, although both the flight to Newark and the one to Brussels were delayed by an hour or so. When we landed in Brussels, the captain asked that we all hold on and let the people with tight connections get out first – and listed the connections. It was a bunch of places that sounded, as always, like a place I’d like to visit, even if it was to just walk around for a day or two, sample the local food, and then take off again.
I slept little on the Newark-Brussels trip, then napped off and on through the Brussels-Kigali trip. We crossed the Mediterranean, and I watched the orange-brown earth pass below, broken here and there by a green patch or a winding green trail through the desert.
Over Egypt, Sudan, and South Sudan, the landscape was mostly unbroken by green or by features like mountains or even hills. Closing in on Rwanda, over Uganda or Kenya, clouds closed in and I watched huge thunderheads climb toward the plane. Then we were turning and circling down, until we touched down; I exited the plane and walked across the jetway. The rest of the group was there, waiting, and after an hour’s or so wait in the line to immigration, with a stamp in my passport, we collected our bags and went out to the reception area.
After waiting, coordinating, and double checking that we had everyone and all the bags, plus the address of our rental home, we withdrew some Rwandan francs and found two cabs to drive us into the city.
The drive was over quickly, although we had some maneuvering to do through construction which was happening on the road to our house, even at 8:30 p.m.; our cab pulled a u-turn and almost got stuck on the median in the middle. After a deep scraping, he made it off, and we made it to the rental house. The house is a big, 5-bedroom, 2-story cinder block house with a wall around it, a gate and a 24/7 guard who sleeps in a shed next to the gate.
That first night we looked through the house, and then drew cards to decide who would get which bedroom. I lucked out with the Ace, and landed the big room on the second floor. After unpacking, we headed up the hill to the closest restaurant, The New Jungle Trees, and had beers and fish and chips. It took almost 90 minutes for our order, so we all got to bed around midnight.
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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. We have RIT/ NSF-...
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