Alès, Frankreich; Barcelona; Und noch mehr?

Hello everybody,

it is super late (half past eight) and we are close to falling asleep standing… 😉 Everything here is happening earlier. People start working at 7 am. at latest, so everybody goes to bed at about 9. This is quite a change, but we are getting used to it. Today, we slept in, so I woke up at 6:45, which is late.

Its Sunday, and on Sundays, the whole town is filled with the music coming from the people singing in the churches. As soon as we will find the time, we will definitely participate on one of these messes. They really seem to be a great party.

We are slowly getting used to the cultural differences and changing our German timetable to the African (very flexible). But still, we are overrun every day by new impressions.

Monday:

Normally, we should have had a meeting with somebody, who would show us the workshop facilities. But they figured, we could very well see them in the afternoon so we had to organize our transportation for a meeting with the authorities of the district, in which we are going to do our work. Therefore we went to the bus station at Nyabuogo, which is a part of Kigali. You better don´t think about one of the nice, organized European bus stations. There were about 10 000 buses, each one at least 20 years old, and at least as many people, selling anything you needed. There is no timetable. Buses leave, when they are full. That means again, when the people sit in between the seats so nobody can move anymore.

From the bus station we walked home. We passed though a very poor, but cute hoot, which was basically a huge marked. So we got some fruits and vegetables and other small supplies.

After a nice big plate of Rwandan food in the cafeteria (mashed bananas, mashed beans, mashed pees and mashed white stuff and green spinach-like mash) we could finally see the workshop facilities, where we could lend all the tools and welding equipment for our project (no problem).
Drilling is unfortunately not possible.

Luckily we were able to reach the district engineer of the district our bridge is in, with whom we tried to arrange a meeting in Karongi (3 hrs bus ride) on Tuesday or Wednesday (no problem)since Saturday. He told us, that he had made all kind of appointments for us at Thursday and that he is in Kigali on Wednesday. After some thinking, we decided to shift all our meetings from Thursday to Tuesday and Wednesday and arranged a meeting at Wednesday night with the district engineer, so we could go with him to Karongi this night. 10 min later, he called, that we had a meeting with the major of the district on Tuesday at 11. Unfortunately we didn´t have the possibility to fly there…

Tuesday:

We have to buy our material. Fortunately we have Guillaume, a local technician, who is going to come with us to help us out. We have to decide, weather we go to the luxury store „sonartube“, where we can buy high quality imported European steel, or weather we go to the junk yard to get cheaper, used material. The decision was pretty easy to take, after we passed at „sonaretube“ to get the price list. Therefore we arranged a meeting for the next morning with Guillaume at the junk yard.

Wednesday:

Since Tuesday morning, we didn´t have any electricity or water. Therefore we went unwashed and stinking with Guillaume to the junk yard. As soon as we left the car, we were surrounded by people, trying to sell us their goods. Guillaume speaks Kinyarwanda, and that is very good. After some hard negotiations we got our steel profiles and brought them to the technical center where we can cut them.

Coming home from the market, we had to cool down our brains and take a little nap. At half past four, we were sitting on our packed backpacks, waiting for the district engineer to arrive. We met him at half past five, and he was telling us, that we are leaving tomorrow at 8.

Our plan, to drive to Karongi, meeting the vice-major and going to the bridge-site afterward, seemed to be impossible. We negotiated with him to leave at 6 the next morning, hoping we still can hold on to the same planning.

Thursday:

After we were getting up at 4:30, we were ready to go at 5:30 to catch the bus. Almost on our way, the district engineer called us and informed us about a change of plan. So we finally left at 7, which allowed us to enjoy the sunrise with a coffee.

The road to Karongi leads though many hills and small villages. The people, that are with us in the bus, are very nice and are talking loud with each other in order to drown the music. The women next to me suddenly has a tiny baby in her arms, I don´t really know where it came from, feeds it and falls asleep on my shoulder afterward. When we arrive in Karongi it is raining and so we are sitting in the district engineers office, waiting for the major to have time for us (only a matter of some minutes as they told us). After 3 hours, we can go see him. We present our project and the memorandum of understanding and he seems to be very happy and to appreciate it. Unfortunately we can´t go see our bridge, since it is raining too much. So we have no choice than to drive back to Kigali, where we arrive very tired and fall asleep right away.

Friday:

On Friday evening we go trying some ruandesian beer and food with the members of engineers without boarders Rwanda. We have a great evening and drink and discuss. Engineers without boarders Rwanda is just being implemented so we give them advice. We have a great night, and at the end, I am surprised how many local beers there are….

So everything goes very fine. As you can see, we have some trouble to get used to the African way of thinking. But we are learning. The people that we meet a very friendly and open minded and after many changes of plans, everything goes its way.

Hope you are fine

See you soon

Mathis

This entry was posted on Sonntag, Mai 8th, 2011 at 22:16 and is filed under Allgemein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.