Nice weekend - and it isn't even over yet!

HAPPY TIMES
As we gear up for Christmas it has been a really nice few days! On Friday I popped into Butare at seven a.m. to check the post and found, not just the long-awaited examination papers for Enoch's diploma exam but TWO parcels when I wasn't expecting any! One from my god-daughter Naomi's family in Greystones (Belgian chocolates!) and the other from my friend Seosamh (wind-up torch, book of folklore from Oileán Chléire, seven-page letter). Awesome! Then at work I spent a long time helpong a colleague put the final touches to his MA thesis on the effects of different kinds of mulching on banana plants and we spent an hour trying to figure out how to include standard deviation on Excel charts (Alfred: those of you who have only a passing acquaintance with Ruairí or know him only through this blog may need to be told that he is not being sarcastic or (as Alannis Morisette would say) ironic here - he REALLY enjoys this kind of thing because he can now 'enliven' conversations with his fellow VSO colleagues by saying things like "Well, of course, in most areas of Rwanda they are still mulching with hill grass but a 5cm layer of Elephant grass properly applied significantly boosts nitrogen levels and can increase fruit output by as much as 16.4%". The complete silence that greets such interjections shows how deeply impressed the audience are by such utterances.)

Then it was off to Butare on the work bus and up to Gitarama to visit Rebecca Young, another VSO volunteer. She lives in a really nice house that she is about to be moved out of as the water supply seems to be hopelessly contaminated - so far, she and Karen who shares the house with her have had typhoid (both), amoebas (both), giardia (Becky) and parasites (type unspecified - Karen). Tom from Food for the Hungry was also there. Anyway it was a wonderful evening, one of the most pleasant in ages. As soon as I arrived in dinner was served - chicken fajitas, guacamole, carrot salad, chips, beer, fruit salad and yoghurt and it was gorgeous. And the fajita mixture was made with real chicken sent all the way from Canada and the USA and tasted really nice. Then we chatted, played a game called Jenga Truth or Dare which involves removing wooden blocks from a large structure without making it collapse and then answering the question written on it (Truth) or performing the action (Dare). All new to me if old hat to others and a very pleasant evening.

Next morning I slept in until NINE O'CLOCK!!! Karen had made coffee and left it in the electric coffee machine and I had it and bread and bananas and an egg. (Alfred:The egg turned out to be uncooked when he cracked it open so there was a wonderful five minutes while he wandered around looking helpless with a cracked-open raw egg in his hands while Becky set up the hotplate and found him a frying-pan!). Then the bus back to Butare, meeting another VSO Helen on the way, met Sarah in Butare who is now back from Kigali after her three weeks working for MINEDUC (Alfred: and a wonderful. character-building experience that was, from her accounts). Then we met up with our landlord who drove us out to Gisagara and spent an hour there with his nephew-electrician discussing all the wiring that is going to be put into our house so we will have electricity for the early New Year!!

PHOTOS
The photos I put on the blog are, of necessity, very compressed. I have now uploaded some of my favourites onto my page in Flickr if anyone is interested. Only some of them are up yet as it takes a VERY long time - each photo is between 1.5MB and 2MB and at an upload speed of 2-3kbps ... well, you can do the Maths yourself. (Alfred: Emmm, surely 'yourselves'? Or do you think there is only one person out there reading this blog?) So if you are reading this and are in Rwanda, avoid the page. If you have a good connection speed you can find them at http://www.flickr.com/ and just type 'Ruairi' and 'Rwanda' into the search and you should find me.


TIGER WOODS
Alfred: Haven't exactly been able to keep up with all the details of what the hell happened here but I thought this one was rather clever:

Tiger, Tiger, bleeding bright
In the driveway of the night
What small Swedish hand or wrist
With a three-wood your head kissed?