Weekend

I don't know whether to begin with my experience listening to a bad lounge singer screech Celine Dion songs in the bar of the hotel des Milles Collines (a.k.a. Hotel Rwanda) on Friday night or the quest for a place to live that took us from the depths of a rat infested guest house (though only $4 a night) to an extremely wealthy rwandan who heads up the WHO immunization program in Rwanda.


I guess I will start with the housing. So as mentioned earlier, unfortunately it looks like the host family that had originally agreed to house Alana and I fell through so we began looking for other options, starting with guesthouses. The hotel that we had been staying at with access to sports center and BBC news as well as hot showers was a little too rich (at $40 a night) for our blood so we decided to check out some "shoestring budget options." We started at the bottom of the barrel at $4 a night by looking at a room that consisted of two beds in a BO smelling closet no more than 10x10-with a shared bath. We decided that we could probably afford to bump it up to $8 a night and looked at a room across the street that maintained the lovely BO smell, but at least we had a window overlooking the hills and our very own bathroom. This option was much more appealing, but we decided to check out a few on the outskirts. The winner is the one I am currently writing from now which for a mere $12 a night we have our own room, bathroom AND internet connection! (where i am writing from now) this is apparently the back packer joint in town and there are quite a few other grungy "Mazungo" (a.k.a. white or foreigners) staying here.


After finding this lovely, yet still slightly smelly, accomodation we set off for the Tulane office in town to check email...this is where we met "tharcisse" or as we like to refer to him as: thicaris. Tharcisse is a relative of someone who works at the Tulane office, whose politically connected father was killed in the Congo when he was 9 years old, and he made it his personal mission to find housing for us. Long story short, he ended up, after calling this poor man incessantly, putting us in contact with dr. rugambwa (the WHO dr.) and his family. We ended up meeting with the family-his wife, three sons age 16 and twin 14 year olds, and 12 year old daughter. So i thought the other compound (i.e. swimming pool) was impressive, but this house put the other to shame.

Thar. then proceeded to take us bar hopping, as we hit every joint in town where you can have a beer while over looking a swimming pool in the presence of rich expats. This wasn't exactly the scene we were going for, especially since we had several embarrassing moments with him sending the money back "because it was too dirty", yelling at the waiter because there was a speck of dirt on the napkin, and making the owner of the restaurant clean the bathroom before we were allowed to use it...umm...tres uncomfortable...

Regardless, it is through Tharisse that we ended up at the Hotel Rwanda (it needs renovations according to him) and sipping Guinness at the hotel lounge and listening to what at first we believe to be karaoke but later realized it was just bad lounge singers singing early 90's American pop and thankfully later, Congolese music.


It is slightly odd that Hotel Milles des Collines (hotel of a thousand hills) has ended up a popular late night dance/lounge venue for local 20 somethings. We were the only Mazungo in the place. From what I’ve encountered people are very open about talking about the genocide, though I guess its not polite for westerners to bring it up. When asking one of the local Tulane staff about her family she casually mentioned her father was killed in 1994, though we didn’t get into the details. Actually most of the people we have met, Tharisse included, did not grow up in Rwanda. Their families had moved away when the violence began in the late 1950’s usually to Congo, Uganda, Tanzania or Europe and then returned after 1994 when the current president Paul Kagame came to power.

More on this later. Since the internet has been a bit sporadic I will post now...pictures to come soon!