Whirlwind 2.0

PHEW.

Crazy. Forty-eight. Hours. And we've barely even done anything yet.

But here I am! In Rwanda, in a guest house with running water (though it is, regrettably, not drinkable), electricity and WiFi--praise God for technology. Sometimes.

So what have I been doing? Well after about 17 hours of flying, a very disappointing Nutella confiscation, vomit-inducing (and possibly record-setting) turbulence and learning how to "manually" flush a toilet, we finally got some sleep...but only about 4 and a half hours for me. Solid hours, but I still woke up wide awake at 4:45 in the morning and ended up writing 8 pages in my journal waiting for everyone to wake up. When it got close to "normal people" (an awkward adjective I seem to have taken to describe a large number of things here--i.e. "oh so this is the normal-people-entrance") wake-up time--meaning 6:30, yeah, yuck--I decided to tackle the curtain-less shower concealed by a bathroom door with a four inch gap between its bottom edge and the floor. Wouldn't seem that crazy, except that Karen told us ahead of time we'd probably get water pretty much everywhere--and she was so right. Some of the holes in the showerhead seemed to be plugged in such a way that caused them to shoot water out in random directions, then one of the plastic pipes that connected to the showerhead (and seemed to be rather extraneous, actually) came loose and water was pretty much gushing down the wall--

But hey, maybe that miniature swimming pool threatening to edge its way into our room drowned the cockroach I found last night.

Anyway, our team got cleaned up as best we could and headed out to the lobby for a breakfast of tea, a huge slice of pineapple, a tiny but surprisingly delicious banana, white bread with jam (or "Medium Fat Spread," probably a close relative of "Butter; it's not!") and the kicker--papaya. Now this was my first time trying the raw "fruit," and up until that point all I had heard from my team members was that it tasted like feet, onions and something very non-fruit-like. After consuming one large forkful, I agreed with the first description as much as I could imagine what feet taste like. But I ate it anyway, figuring it had to be good for me if it was organic and tasted nasty.

After breakfast we went through some more team stuff, I led a devotional (which I came up with at somewhere between midnight and 7 in the morning) and the GAC girls had an awesome impromptu worship sesh which may or may not have included a dance to a "campy-camp" song (led by Emily) which required moves resembling the chicken dance in the middle of the common area of the guest house. Obviously that's what cool people do when their team leader is talking with the host (whose name is Willy, by the way, which I thought was pretty awesome and totally fits him, because he's awesome) about what the heck we're going to do for the rest of the day.

So what did we end up doing? Well after an hour of playing Phase 10 and sneaking pictures of Karen and Willy, we finally set out to have lunch at a buffet restaurant called Karibu with our "chauffeur" Bosco. We stuffed ourselves on delicious, genuine Rwandan food, then headed into town to exchange our good ol' USDs for Rwandan Francs (which Karen did, actually, while we all sat cooking in the Land Rover and got badgered by an old woman with really bad teeth who couldn't seem to do anything but smile and moan but was apparently asking for money). Then we were off to our real destination: Kigali Memorial Centre.

After a sobering 2-hour sojourn through the history of the Rwandan genocide, we reconvened at the memorial café and left the premises for a lovely driven tour of Kigali--and found a place to run! I think the Amahoro Stadium will be my new favorite place :)