Hello everybody,
here finally some news from Rwanda. After a long journey we finally arrived in Kigali. We had to fly from Munich to Frankfurt, where we had to wait 8 h for our flight to Addis Ababa. When we arrived there at 7 am we had to wait again until 11 am for our connecting flight to Kigali.
At the airport, we got picked up by a driver of the KIST (Kigali institute of science and technologie) who drove us to our guest-house.
The guest house is very comfortable and luxurious. Besides us two, there are two Americans two Asians and one Italian guy living here.
Thursday and Friday, we had lots of meetings with different people, but everything went very well. Despite, that we are not accustomed to the typical African delay of each meeting. And us, being on time (you know me, allays 15 minutes late), everything normally is shifted at least one hour later. But knowing that, the easy lifestyle gets quite comfortable.
Yesterday, we had to go get our money for the project from a local NGO. So we thought, it might be quite an adventure to take a motor-taxi. These are normal motorbikes, where you drive with a driver through the chaotic kigalian traffic. Unfortunately, we didn´t know, that the NGO was located 300 meters up the street, so we jumped on, payed 300 RWF each and hopped off 30 seconds later. It was quite a adventure…
Yesterday at the evening, we wanted to buy some stuff. Unfortunately, we forgot to bring enough money. So we had to calculate exactly, how much it would cost. Obviously, not knowing that bottles (don´t tell you what the content of these bottles was…;)) have a deposit, we didn´t have enough money. So there we were, two white people, in an African supermarket, who couldn´t afford to buy basic groceries and a beer… That was pretty embarrassing. Fortunately, some other tourist, helped us out with the money, that was missing.
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- View from our appartment
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- Breakfast
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- View on the city
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- I´m singing in the rain
Anyhow, since the internet connection is very bad, we probably will only write on our official bloc at: http://www.ingenieure-ohne-grenzen.org/de/Regionalgruppen-Kompetenzgruppen/Kompetenzgruppe-Bruecken-und-Hochbau/Ruanda-Blog
Hope you are all fine.
See you
Greetings
Mathis