Thursday, March 23

Today was awesome! It started off a bit on the rainy side. Pouring rain. When it rains here, the city takes a pause. Moto’s stop working. People don’t go into work. This was what happened to me! I was supposed to be at Akilah at 9am but it was raining. Once the rain stopped, I went to leave and happened to be locked in my home! We have a gate that surrounds the house, and no one was here to let me out! Seems like a silly problem, but it’s the reality. I ended up just hanging until Ange came home. By the time Ange came home, it was 1:30 pm. I would have worked for like 2.5 hours so we called it a wash. I ended up hanging out with Ange all day! We went to the market, walked around the neighborhood, picked up some food essentials for the week and then went into town!

The highlight was making a meal with Ange! It’s just crazy to think how crazy we live in the States. We made dinner with one fire pot, one knife, two bowls – one for the actually making of the food and the other to wash our hands/food/etc. We, as a household, have 7 pieces of silverware, two plastic bowls, two plates, 2 dishes to put food in and 2 mugs. I actually purchased a mug so now we have 3. It’s all we need! We didn’t have a cutting board, or crazy kitchen gadgets. We didn’t dirty every dish in the kitchen to make dinner. It was super easy, efficient and made for little clean up! It was amazing!
We made the fire to do the cooking. Ange made it look so simple. I can’t wait to try it on my own! With this fire pot we made tea, an egg for a pre-dinner snack, our meal which was a potatoe soup with tomatoes, onion and green pepper, and then water for my bath.  

It’s living simply… Something that many of us might be able to understand conceptually but living it is quite a treat actually. The city is beautiful. I enjoy walking around and seeing the people. Ange taught me two words today, bité which means hi and rockozé which means thank you! (For the record, these spellings are phonetic, not the actual spelling!) I actually used these words while walking around, a little fearful that they might not be received well! But, it was quite the opposite. I was greeted with warm smiles and laughter. Appreciation.  Smiling and being a friendly face when traveling has definitely come in handy. 

It was a wonderful day and I’m happy to be in Kigali! 

Until next time!

A