Just got back down to the village after spending the night in Butare. Went around Butare this morning saying goodbye to various people - Pascal and Chantal in the Africana Lodge, Hamed in the Casablanca internet cafe, the waiters in the Faucon, Olivier in the phone shop and so on. Now, here in Gisagara, for some strange reason everything looks the same way it was the first day I arrived - the landscape strange and exotic, the little shops strange and mysterious, the view from the back of my house fresher and even more beautiful than ever. The kids greet me with their usual cries of 'Good morning' and 'komera' and, if I am lucky, 'good evening'! I run into a bunch of men clambering down off the back of a lorry, obviously not from around here. Unlike the locals, they freeze, then stare and then start up the usual cries of ‘amafaranga, muzungu’. But that’s just like it was at the beginning too!
Even coming into my house seems a different experience. All my stuff is up in Kigali, I feel like I am staying over with a friend with that slightly intrusive feeling you always have when you let yourself into a friend’s house with their key and they aren’t there. And shortly I will head down to the bar to meet my moto driver Alexis and my best friend Enock – hopefully Sarah will join us later when she gets back from her workshop in Save – for my official goodbye. Strange days indeed.
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