I've given myself 15 min to write this post because we have A LOT going on right now. T minus 5 days to departure. No time for reflection - just the facts here on our very eventful last weekend in Rwanda.
Chapter 1: Ingagi
For our final wildlife experience here, we planned a trip to see the mountain gorillas (ingagi) in Volcanos National Park. Since you have to be 15+ to do this, we timed our adventure to happen after Mazie's 15th birthday. Sadly, Mazie tested positive for COVID on Friday morning (she'd been home sick the day before and had some symptoms starting Monday)... we debated canceling the whole trip, but since Caleb and I felt ok, Mazie said she was ok with it, and Anaclet was adamant that we should go, we decided to forge ahead with just the 2 of us.
We drove up and stayed near the park on Friday night, and then woke up early on Saturday. Checked in at the park headquarters and were assigned to a group of 8 plus a guide. Anaclet drove us about 40 min to the drop off point, and we set off on foot with our guide, our group, and a few porters. About another 50 min walk through farmlands to the park entrance, and then a muddy uphill 1.5 hr hike into the jungle. A group of trekkers were up ahead scouting out where our gorillas were. We eventually met them on the trail, left our backpacks and walking sticks, put on masks (to prevent giving or getting diseases to/from our primate relatives), and bushwhacked off the trail for a couple of minutes until...
INGAGI!
We got to spend an hour with them. It was magical. There were apparently 14 gorillas in this troupe - I think we saw about 10 of them. First was the lead silverback with a 1 year old baby and another juvenile... also one in that tree over there.
Then there was a mama & 3 yr old baby, and another juvenile that came VERY close to Caleb on the path.
Then in another spot close by there was a second silverback (the "vice president") with another mama & 6 month old baby. The adults were trying to rest but the baby was awake and playful. I joked that the baby was taking a "nope," which is what we used to call it when our babes refused to sleep at naptime.
Time's up! Chapter 2 will have to wait. Full Ingagi photo album here.
...
(Waiting for lunch with Caleb... taking a few minutes to get this started.)
Chapter 2: Block Party
We got back from our ingagi trek on Saturday evening and found the kids all intact and happy. On Sunday, we had a "block party" at our house with our neighbors. Caleb has successfully set up SACCO accounts for 22 families at this point. The original intention for these accounts was to support the families of the kids we've gotten to know on an ongoing basis. We made a list of kids names and found the mamas who went with them. (It was also fun to figure out which kids are from the same families - Diane, Jadot, and Paci are all siblings, huh?) That came to about 17 families. Then we added Theo and Violette. Then Vestine brought over a couple of other mamas and insisted that we knew their kids too and needed to add them. (Then Odette the landlord called and said she'd heard that Vestine was recruiting families and taking a cut of their payments and asked us not to add any more of Vestine's friends.) So that brought us to 22.
The idea for the block party was to have a celebration and BBQ with those families, which we estimated would be about 30 kids and 40 adults (mamas and papas). We talked to Odette about it and she loved the idea. She talked to Theo, and they came up with the plan that Theo would go buy 2 goats, and then a guy who has a little corner bar on our street would bring his grill over and cook them up at our house. (Aside: I pictured Theo buying two already-butchered goats, but then he showed us this picture on Saturday night...
and asked to borrow our knife... which we brought with us from the US and is a special one that Ty & Sara gave us... we told him, as best we could, that it was special and we needed it back, and we did get it back, but with some signs of wear and tear because it was apparently used to do this:
End of aside.)
Anyhoo. On our way back from the gorilla trek we stopped at a big roadside market (near one of the Bridges to Prosperity bridges, actually) and bought 4 large bunches of bananas, 4 pineapples, 4 kgs of passionfruit, and some gooseberries. We also planned to get a bunch of Fanta. So with 2 goats-worth of bruchettes and a ton of fruit & drinks, we thought we were all set.
We originally thought we'd just have the gate open and have the party in the driveway, but we quickly realized that once word got out we'd have an unmanageably enormous crowd. So we decided to have the party inside the gate and just let in the people we invited. A little before the party Caleb went out to grab drinks (54 Fantas and 18 beers) and came back with a report that the crowd was gathering outside and they were very dressed up. Which was good info since we were definitely planning on casual BBQ attire. Kevine came over to help with setup around 3:30, we finished getting ready, got fancy, and at 4:30 Caleb and Kevine went down to let in the guests.
A couple of surprises. First, there were A LOT of kids... about 54 vs the 30 or so from "our" SACCO families. Definitely a lot of kids we'd never seen before. At some point I think one of the mamas said they'd brought family members? Nieces/nephews perhaps? In any case, a lot of children. Second, almost no papas - just one or two, and a lot of mamas... mostly from our families, with maybe 5 or so extras? I think at some point Theo counted 98 people in total, which was more than we had planned for...
What happened from there is a little hard to describe, especially from my intention to write this quickly and just-the-facts (though... we're still here waiting for our lunch 1 hr and 45 min after we got here).
The kids and parents all sat down in the seats we'd set out.
(Oh, looks like food is finally coming! Let's pause.)
...
(Wow, that lunch was a whole thing. Ended up waiting for 2 hrs for food... great way to spend one of our last days here. Phew. Now I'm at Question - gotta wrap this up in 5 min so I can actually do some work today.)
So everyone sits down. We've got some music playing. That's fairly normal for a block party. The not normal thing is that we can't let everyone just come and serve themselves food - from experience, we know that would likely lead to a big scramble with everyone grabbing as much as possible. So we go around handing out one banana each, and then one passionfruit, and then one slice of pineapple.... With the unexpected guests, we didn't have enough Fanta or brochettes for everyone, so we got 2 more crates of Fanta from Mama Big Tony (not to be confused with Little Tony) who owns a shop a few yards away, and had some of the families share brochettes with the littler kids instead of giving one to every person.
Brief reflection: no matter how much we have or give, it is not enough.
Somewhere in there, there was a little bit of dancing...
and some speeches (with translation thanks to Kevine and Lambert, who also came with a friend who is a pastor... and gave us a blessing at the end of the night that included telling us that God told him a. we should stop drinking beer and b. we will be returning to Rwanda to live here for 2 years and will continue to do lots of great things for the people of this country... but I digress), and some picture-taking (we wanted photos with each of the SACCO families, which took a while), and some gift-giving (also unexpected - the neighbors got Rwanda art for me & Caleb and nested baskets for the kids).
Eventually, the neighbors left and there were just a few of us left... Lambert and the aforementioned pastor, Kevine, and Odette's cousin Ninisa and her brother, who stopped by unrelated to the party to try (for about the 5th time) to install the security cameras Ahya brought back in Feb post-TV theft. Caleb and I hadn't eaten anything at this point... there was a platter of brochettes and goat ribs that had been set aside for us, so we brought those out and managed to have a few bites (I think I had a full brochette but Caleb only got maybe one bite).
And then the rest of the guests left, and we went to bed.
That's all I have for today. Thoughts and Feelings about all of this will have to wait. Full photo album here.
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