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 our first chance to see things outside a cab or a business district.
We stopped by a little art center, and spoke with one of the artists, who said they do a lot of mixed media work out of necessity, and that almost all the art is informed at least in part by the lingering reality of the ’94 genocide.
We passed a flock of young chickens foraging in the street; when some of my fellow students stopped to take pictures, several women passing by thought this was the funniest thing. We laughed and joked about it for a while, the foreigners checking out the celebrity chickens.
There are other brief, fascinating interactions. We’ve mostly used cabs to get around; there’s a ride-hailing service here called Yego Cabs (‘Yes, Cabs”), where you call to put in a request, they ask you where from and where to, then they send you a text with the driver’s information. Then the driver shows up, usually in 3-5 minutes, although we’ve had some misses on that. The other night we got a driver who spoke almost entirely French, and so I was sitting in the front seat trying to give directions in my almost non-existent French, and he would correct me as we barrelled down the dark and dusty streets. I learned how to say “go straight”, an he corrected my pronunciation of “to the right,” (‘a la drOIT!’).
Then we got out, paid, and went inside the wall of our house. We heard a banging on the metal door. It was our driver, telling us that we owed 12,000 francs, not 22,000, as we’d misunderstood the French. He returned the 10,000 extra, more than a typical day’s wages in Rwanda, and took off before we thought to get his WhatsApp number to request him again.
We had dinner with a local who works with refugee education – a prior contact of our primary investigator, Brian – and he told us the recently departed US Ambassador was much respected and loved in Rwanda. Other people we’ve met have spoken about him too, because he learned fluent Kinyarwandan and would give interviews in the language on national TV. His social media feeds were of national interest, as well, because he would use his weekends to visit all corners of the country and meet locals on the streets, posting pictures. The saying about him was that if you applied for a US visa at the embassy, he’d be the one to check it because he knew everyone in the country down to their mother, grandmother or cousins.
Friday we also met about the project, and settled into some more specific work. I’m on a two-person sub-group that will be building a method in Python code to do what’s called disaggregate data down to the local level. We have a lot of data at the district level (equivalent to a US state, roughly), but not down to the sector level (roughly a county entity in the US). There aren’t a lot of easily-available tools to take the district level data and extrapolate it down to the individual sectors, which is the next best thing to having actual sector-level data. So we’ve started writing a script to do that, which will also weight the disaggregation based on other factors we do know about the sector. I will post more about that later, as we develop the process.
Anyway, interesting stuff, but kind of dry to explain it. Yesterday was a lazy morning followed by work on that scripting project all afternoon. Today I’m about to go out to walk around a bit, then come back to work more on the script. The city is abuzz with the impending CHOGM conference the Commonwealth heads of state, including Prince Charles – which kicks off in two weeks. They are working almost around the clock on the main roads up the hill from us (everywhere is a hill in Kigali), toward the embassy district.
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 get a few documents printed.
Work on the street...
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-...
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 raz...
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,...