Two Weeks

It's Saturday again which means it's been two weeks since we got here.  It feels like a lot longer and it's also gone by quickly... time warping in the way it does when every day is different and we're still constantly learning and adjusting and trying to find routines where we can.  The walk to school and back has been one of the most stable and consistent parts of our weekdays, and school in general has given the kids a lot of structure, though their schedules vary day to day (and even include some big field trips... more on that later).  We go to Question Coffee nearly daily (sometimes multiple times a day, with and without kids).  We know where to get the main things we need (though we're still learning about new spots, including the enormous Kimironko Market we went to today... more on that later too).  So we're settled in in some ways, but still settling in many others.  

Some new things this week.  The kids started some after school activities.  Lexi had gymnastics on Tuesday, and said it mostly went well.  Athena thought she had table tennis on Tuesday but when she showed up they told her it was on Thursday, which is when she was signed up to have football (soccer).  She tried to go to football on Thursday and couldn't figure out where that was meeting, so went to table tennis instead.  We think she can do football on Monday.  Mazie also signed up to play football but that hasn't started yet.  We think she might have a game this coming Friday.  Her big event this week was a field trip to Akagera National Park, where she saw elephants and giraffes and zebras and even more excitingly GOT TO CREATE HER FIRST INSTAGRAM POST.  

We'd been holding out on letting her get IG but gave in when she convinced us that she needed it to communicate with her new friends she's made here.  She's clever, that one.  

I had a field trip this week too.  On Thursday I went with Lambert and some of his colleagues to Muhanga District, about an hour southwest of Kigali.  Their team is starting a new project distributing water filters to schools around the country.  The project is being financed through carbon credits, with the rationale being that filtering water to make it drinkable is a substitute for boiling it, and thus avoids carbon emissions from the fuels that would be used for boiling.  The purpose of this trip was to visit a couple of schools to test out the setup and see whether there was sufficient water pressure at the taps for the filter system to function.  The first school we visited was a public Catholic school (K-12 I think), near the main road and a small town.  The filter setup took a while - it was the first one they had done and they had to make a couple of runs to town to get all the right parts.  Meanwhile, we had lots of time standing in the sun and chatting with the dean of the school, who was very excited about having the filter.  I also got to be a big attraction for the kids, who were curious about the muzungu (white person) and crowded around me to observe and touch (I firmly asked them not to touch) and practice their English (How are you?  What is your name?).  I also enjoyed seeing the school buildings (I love seeing the educational paintings on the walls), and watching their lunch routine (kids were in charge of carrying large bowls of a maize porridge and beans up the hill from the kitchen to the cafeteria... one poor kid tripped and spilled his bucket of beans).  

In the end, they got it all set up and the water pressure was good.  They took it apart and will bring the keeper back in a few weeks.

We then drove to another school that was down in a beautiful valley off the main road.  I was even MORE of a novelty there ("Please don't touch me") and the attempts to connect the filter there were observed by a big group of kids.  Unfortunately that school's system was supplied by a large rainwater tank and the water pressure wasn't good enough for the filter to work.  Lambert mentioned a potential fix, but said it's quite expensive.  We packed up again and drove back to Kigali

Today's family field trip was to Kimironko Market, accompanied by our friend Gisele.  As I anticipated, it was a large and overwhelming place... packed with vendors selling fruits and veggies and beans and household goods and hardware and souvenirs and clothes.  Gisele was a huge help, bringing us to her preferred vendors and helping us navigate and translate.  We bought black beans, ALL the fruit (two types of passionfruit, bananas, mangoes), cauliflower and bell peppers and hot peppers and onions and tomatoes, a rechargeable lantern (for the frequent power outages we've been having), and a decorative walking stick with gorillas on it.  (Back home, we have a joke every time we're going to Costco - Caleb will tell me to get some walking sticks, meaning "pick up whatever random thing they're selling that we don't really need."  I realized after we left that he ended up walking out of the Costco of Kigali with... a walking stick.)  We did not manage to find a small digital clock, which is something Athena has been wanting for her bedside table.  Sometimes even Costco doesn't have what you're looking for.

My other big adventure this week was taking a moto-taxi for the first time... I'll put that in a separate post, since I've also been meaning to answer Papa's curious question about bikes and how people get around.