Wild weekend ... and other stuff

LONG WEEKEND

Got the bus to Butare after work on Thursday to meet my friend from Gikongoro (whom we all refer to as South African John even though the other Johns have since left) for dinner. A very pleasant evening in the Chineese restaurant, where the service was slightly less slow than normal and we were undercharged on the bill. Mukesh, an Indian co-worker of John’s, came with him and we had a really nice long chat, staying there until 2300.

One of the reasons for coming in was that I needed to go to the District Immigration office in Huye and get my green card renewed. But first I went to the post office to see if anything had come in – and quelle surprise: THREE large parcels!! OK, two of them were my Amazon order which they had sent in two packs and the third was a parcel from New Zealand for another volunteer, Jane Keenan, who used to work in Butare. In fact Jane was leaving Rwanda in two days’ time so one the one hand at least the parcel got here before she left but she was unlikely to be able to use the contents much!

The reason for going to Butare for my green card was that my local immigration officer never seems to be in his office so I decided to go to the District Office in Huye (Alfred: Huye = Butare: Another of these places that now has a new official name and an old, traditional one which is still what most people use. These things take time, when Mukesh told Ruairí that he was from Mumbai ,it was probably the first time that he didn’t mentally translate it into ‘Bombay’ in his head). Unfortunately, even though I had gone through the entire process with Sarah a few weeks before, I had completely forgotten exactly what I had to do and went to the offices in the wrong order. The procedure is as follows (for this district, I hasten to add, it’s different elsewhere):

Get a photocopy of your passport and current visa and two passport-sized photographs
Go to the bank and pay the RWF5000 fee and get a receipt
Take the receipt to the Rwanda Revenue Authority Office and get a receipt for the receipt
Take the receipt for the receipt to the District Immigration Office between 0800 and
1200 on a Friday morning with the two photographs and they will complete your card.

Anyway, I went to the Revenue Authority first, who turned out to have moved offices. By the time I went to the bank there was a queue of seventy-four people waiting to be served so I gave up (Alfred: Yes, he actually counted them. Words fail me …). Headed off to Kigali, called in on my Kenyan friend Abraham and gave him the three volumes of Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy (we are fellow SF fans but he has a hard time laying his hands on books), met Martine, went to a Rwanda Revenue Office and got my receipt (it’s easier in Kigali – you don’t have to go to the bank as well),went to the bank anyway to get some cash out of the machine – the machine gave me my cash but kept the card and they told me to come back Saturday morning – and then lunch in a place called La Sierra which I had never been in before , went back to Nyamirambo to drop off the bag and then off to Pasadena to meet Jane Keenan and her friends for farewell drinkies.

It was my first time in Pasadena, a restaurant/bar somewhere in Gikondo-Nyenyeri and I can’t say I was impressed overall. Service slow and inefficient as usual, some interesting dancing to watch (they do salsa nights here as well) but a nice group of people (Alfred: I persuaded him not to actually go through each of them one by one, no need to thank me, I did it for my sanity as well as yours). Then six of us got into a taxi to head home – four of us to Martine’s in Nyamirambo (with Jean and Jane) and dropping two friends/cousins of Jean’s off along the way.

Well, I have taken many interesting, strange and frankly scary journeys around Rwanda in my fifteen months here but this one was definitely in the top five. You forget that there are roads right in the centre of Kigali as bad as anything out in the rural areas. The big tarmac roads loop around the city and in between them is a dense network of tracks and paths. We took these to get to where Jean’s friends/cousins lived and a slow, tortuous, bumpy route it was. The Toyota Corolla’s suspension was OK but not designed for these roads with seven people on board – the soreness of my rear end was only mitigated by my having to focus on not getting concussion from banging my head off the roof.

Once we dropped John Bosco and his companion off I figured things would get better but almost immediately we got to a really steep climb, at the bottom of which the car got stuck in a sandy bit. So everyone piled out, the car backed up and then tried to take a run at it (difficult given the holes, crevasses, gullies and whatnot that the road ‘surface’ was comprised of). After a few goes he managed and roared away, pursued by us who were now worried we would get left in the middle of nowhere. When we caught up with the car again, there was no driver in it but he shortly re-emerged from the bushes doing up his fly – glad to know it wasn’t only us who were nervous (Alfred: Really? You think it is more comforting when the driver is ALSO scared? You need to think this one through, mon vieux).

Eventually we came to where the dirt track joined the main road to Nyamirambo and the driver immediately pulled up and said that he had run out of petrol. It seemed rather sudden (it would be far from the first time that I have been in a vehicle in Rwanda that ran out of fuel) but we got out of the car anyway. As we did so, we noticed there was a police checkpoint at the junction we were heading to and the reason for the sudden fuel loss became clear!!

Anyway, we got four motos home and then sat up to all hours chatting – Jane opened her big parcel and then shared out the contents as she could hardly bring them home with her. I got a bag of TVP for Sarah, popping corn, falafel mix, and some ground cumin and coriander.

Saturday was mostly frustrating – into town latish, went to the bank and queued for forty minutes to be told the cash machine maintenance guy hadn’t turned up the previous day and I would have to come back the following week, then went to Kisimenti to meet Jane for a farewell lunch but she got behind schedule so eventually we all just met up at the airport. And even then she was running so late that when she got there she went straight through to check-in so we ended up just waving at her through the security barrier. Then Martine and I went to visit Cathryn in Kirsti’s house and I met the most wonderful dog called Buffet, an enormous black Labrador who I think I have now volunteered to walk at various stages over the Christmas when I am free.

Then I went to join Thom for what turned out to be the highlight of the weekend – watching Chelsea getting beaten and playing miserably against Manchester City at the Chez Lando hotel. Actually the game wasn’t the highlight. Both of us were hungry so I ordered an omelette speciale (Alfred: for the uninitiated, an omelette speciale is an omelette containing pretty much whatever has been left around the kitchen bound up in eggs. It always has tomatoes and onions in it, almost always chips, and sometimes can contain any one of – or all of – the following: rice, peas, spaghetti, cheese, green beans) (one of my staples) and settled back. Eventually it arrived and … well, how do I describe it?

Imagine a Scottish amoeba, from a tough background that has fallen on even harder times. Imagine it going on a binge in a seedy pub in the backstreets of Glasgow where it got embroiled in the amoeba-equivalent of a fist fight (a pseudopodia scuffle, I suppose) in which it came off second-best. Staggering from the pub, bruised and battered – that’s what the object on my plate resembled. At the very least an omelette should be round – this one (hence the amoeba comparison) was anything but. Frankly, it looked as if it had been dropped and not very expertly reassembled on the plate (I did actually check the underside for gravel, hair etc). Anyway, I was hungry, it tasted OK and I ate it.

Then came the bill. You always have to check bills here VERY carefully and there was obviously something wrong with this one. I called over the waiter: ‘C’est quatre milles francs pour l’omelette speciale?’ I said in a slightly falsetto tone that tried to convey the obvious absurdity of the rhetorical question I was posing. ‘Oui, monsieur, quatre mille’ said my impassive counterpart, no doubt reciting the Kinyarwandan equivalent of ‘Here we go again’ in his head. Well, I figured it was my fault for not asking in advance (another thing you always do if there is no menu available) and paid up with a minimum of cursing and swearing.

The cursing and swearing resumed once I got home to Nyamirambo and made a beeline for the toilet, an object whose acquaintance I came to make in a more than usually intimate degree over the next twelve hours (thankfully Martine had had the plumbing repaired the previous week so it was no longer necessary to flush it by slowly filling buckets of water from the shower and pouring them in).

Sunday – well, uneventful. Pottered around, then into town, a bit of shopping, bus to Butare, a beer (Alfred: ah yes, just the thing when you have a gippy tum, pour in a 72cl bottle of chilled Turbo King!) and then headed home. As I hadn’t seen my friend Enock all week I gave him a buzz and invited him for a quick beer. Bad mistake. Suffice to say I didn’t get to bed until 0120 and when your alarm is set to 0520 that’s a toughie.


SCIENCE CHAT-UP LINES (I nicked this from a Facebook group thanks to Freddie Hayden):

Would there be any resistance if I took you ohm?

I’ve had my ion you for some time.

Would kissing you increase global warming and damage the Arctic irreversibly, or is it just enough to break the ice?

You're so hot you denature my proteins.

If I was an enzyme I'd be DNA-helicase so I could unzip your genes...

You're so sweet I am developing insulin resistance.

Girl, I want to be your differential because then I’d be touching all your curves.

You fascinate me more than the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Let's convert our potential energy to kinetic energy.

How about me and you go back to my place and form a covalent bond?

Seismically speaking, geologists make your bed rock.

You are sin2 X and I am cos2 X and together, we are one.

I less than three you….. (I <>

Your love is sweeter than 3.14159265...

How can I know the 100 digits of Pi and not the 11 of your phone number?

I'm not being obtuse, but you're acute girl.

I need some help with my calculus; can you integrate my natural log?

Your skin is as smooth as an endoplasmic reticulum.

You’re like telophase, I admire your cleavage.

Hey baby, want to form a synapse with me and exchange neurotransmitters?
Hey baby, can I be your enzyme? Because my active site is dying for a chemical reaction.

Can I plug my solution into your equation?

Baby, you turn my floppy disk turn into a hard drive.

I think my heart just lagged.

You’re so cute you make my zygomaticus muscles contract.

I’m POSITIVE I’d like your electron, want to bond?

I heard you're sin because you're always on top when we make tangent.

Looking at you, creationists may have a point after all.

Hey baby, I think you are 1/Cos C (Sec C)

WORST EVER NEWSPAPER MISPRINT?

I have always had a soft spot for these, part of my proofreading OCD probably. Anyway, surfing the net with Enock the other night, we were looking on Google News for any news from his home district of Kabale in southern Uganda and came across this item in the New Vision, a Ugandan daily newspaper:

A number of schools in Kabale District, Southern Uganda, were closed last week when three students tasted positive for dysentery.

GISAGARA DISTRICT RULES OK!
I may have mentioned before that I was the first ever overseas volunteer to work in this district. Well, it took them a while to get used to me and me to them but I have to say overall they are a pretty good bunch of people. There are thinks that infuriate me, things are incredibly inefficient from time to time but, judging from what I hear from other areas, they are doing a pretty good job.

And then two pieces of information – one to explain it and one to underline it. Firstly, the present districts date from 2006 when the old provincial, prefecture and sub-prefecture structure was scrapped. Elections were held in 2006 for a mayor in each of the 30 districts of Rwanda. The next election is scheduled for 2010 but, of the original 30, 28 have since been removed from office for corruption, inefficiency or whatever. Only Nyaruguru District and Gisagara District still have their original mayors! Nice one KAREKEZI Léandre! And not only that, we still have the same Executive Secretary. No wonder we have gone from 16th to 10th to 4th ranked district in Rwanda in the space of three years. Next year number 1!

Secondly, when I went to see the Executive Secretary yesterday (Wednesday – the timeline has got a bit confused) I was told he was in Kigali with the mayor to receive our award for being number one district in the anti-corruption campaign. And the prize? A certificate and a medal? No – ten million Rwandan francs (about €12,500) – a huge amount of money. Interesting idea – pay people not to be corrupt. Next question is what to do with it, eh? Watch this space.

THE RETURN OF JEREMY?
Some people may remember Jeremy, a bat who lives in my attic with his hundreds of cousins and who made a brief appearance in this blog some months ago (and wrote a comment too if I remember correctly). Well either he or a cousin reappeared the other night, flying wildly around the sitting room and crashing into the walls, window, my head, some books, the door and the sofa before eventually running full tilt into one wall and knocking himself out. I thought he had actually found his way out and went back to reading my book by the light of my head-torch. It was only when I was going to bed that I noticed something lying on the floor (JUST before stepping on it). Bats look really strange on the floor so it took me a while to figure out what it was. Anyway, having had previous experience I grabbed a big square lunchbox, whacked it down over him, slid the lid underneath and released him into the garden. Once he was in the box he certainly woke up and moved around like the bejaysus so I am hoping once released he soared off into the night air and freedom. If not he probably got eaten by something as he lay in the grass. Life is tough.