New Digs

Three more people arrived at the house yesterday: Mardge, our medical director, Mary, a psychologist and trauma counselor, and Roseanne, an art therapist. With the new arrivals we now did not have enough beds in the house for everyone, so Heidi, Marianna & I were shipped off to an apartment in a different neighborhood, Kimihururu. Despite Henriette’s assurances that this new place was walking distance to the old house, the office, and the clinic, it’s very clear that she meant “walking distance if you have some really comfy shoes on and a good two hours to kill.” So I guess there’ll be a lot of moto-riding in our immediate futures! The three of us were a little pissed off, because a) we had no say in this decision and b) it would make a lot more sense if some of the other people in the house had moved over here instead, just logistics-wise. But whatever – the apartment’s actually pretty nice, and we’re apparently in NGO-central. We’re just down the road from the MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders) office, and there are a bunch of other orgs nearby.

Oh, one last thing. We have no electricity. All our lights went out dramatically last night, leaving us kind of up a creek. (Our lack of power also meant that we had to give up on our “boiling water so we can drink some” project.) Luckily I had a flashlight stashed somewhere in my bag, so the three of us headed down the hill, light in hand, to see if we could rustle up some candles and a couple cokes at a little tin roof hut-type place that had appeared to be a store when we passed it earlier on the road. No luck - it was closed, and we didn’t really want to venture into the sketchy-looking bar next door, so we headed back to our place and managed quite well, if I may say so, in the dark.

p.s. in true polite Rwandan fashion, all the ads for Sprite say “Please Obey Your Thirst” – how nice of them :)