since Wednesday we are at the bridgesite and everything is working out pretty good. We are accommodated in a very little village near the bridge. There we don´t have near water nor electricity. Since years, we are the first white people (musungu) that have penetrated that far into the country and when we arrived, the whole village came together, stood around us and just stared for 20 minutes, coming closer and closer. After a while, the first ones were courageous enough to touch us and some started to pull on my hair. Since our Kinyarwanda is still limited to the most basic needs, it was hard to communicate with them. Few people can speak some French, hardly anybody knows English. However, we were warmly welcomed and fed by Mr. Moise, who is giving us accommodation and food. As expected the food isn´t very different from the food we know from the cafeteria in Kigali. Basically we eat mashed bananas, potatoes, beans and some green stuff every day. After we spend the first night in this new and very unfamiliar environment, we discovered, that even breakfast doesn´t really differ from lunch or supper.
The works on the bridge are going surprisingly well. When we went working the first day, a crowd of 40 people followed us, bringing their spades and other tools in order to get a job. Since we weren´t prepared to this enormous man power, we had to tell them, to come back the next day. So the next day, they helped us to dig a drainage and we were cleaning the bridge and preparing it for the reinforcement work. We as well accomplished all maintenance work.
Now I am back in Kigali for 2 days. Tomorrow I will get the welder and the equipment and drive back through the very bad mud road. Just hope it will not rain…
Hope you are all fine.
See you soon…
Mathis
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- Preparing the steel
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- The Kirambo bridge with the local people in the background
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- Our accommodation and lot of rwandesian food
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- The markedplace of the village where we are sleeping
