kigali, rwanda ndaba kunda

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Kigali (a much faster internet cafe than yesterday), near one of the main roundabouts, trying to send an email to my new work to tell them that I am arriving at Kilamanjaro Airport on Monday at 1900h, but for some reason the school website won't let me compose messages. Someone is yelling down on the street in a tone of voice that tells me he's either preaching or making a prophecy. I'm hungry, because I'm always hungry in Kigali in the mornings because I never eat any whole grains for breakfast here. I have to decide in the next few days whether or not I'm coming back to Rwanda before I go back to the US. I'm tempted to come back through Rwanda just because my plane back to Nairobi stops in Bujumbura and I've never been to Burundi. Maybe I can schedule a stopover. I'm carrying my entire life on my back (okay, just my clothes and stuff that I brought to Kigali from Kibuye). The air smells of exhaust and horns are sounding constantly.

I got bitten by a dog for the first time last night. It wasn't very much fun, but it didn't hurt (didn't even break the skin), so it wasn't too bad. The story is this: I arrived in Kigali after a death-defying trip from Kibuye in an NGO car driven by a woman who was probably a great driver but who didn't know the road. YOU HAVE TO KNOW THE ROAD. This road anyway. The curves are often far tighter or wider than they look and you have to know when to slow down and when to maintain your speed. And the road was wet. In addition, every trip to Kigali is death-defying, in that every trip involves an average of one death-defying experience. This one involved two. The first one was in Gitarama, when a very large, very fast truck decided that he owned the middle of the road, no attention paid to people, bikes, or, say, oncoming traffic (us). The second was closer to Kigali, when a minibus decided to pass another minibus completely blindly and the road was not wide enough for three across. Anyway, we got here, alive, and I ate lunch at the most riduculously expensive restaurant possible because it was near where the people who drove me were going and it had the (aforementioned very slow) internet. But I was starving and didn't care about the price until I saw that they had charged me $2.50 for a bottle of water, which irritated me a lot and resulted in my vowing never to go there again. (This is the famous Hotel des Milles Collines, which you know of if you've seen Hotel Rwanda - why they raised the prices from the normal 50 cents to $2.50 for a bottle of water, I don't know. I don't know of anyone else who charges more than $1.50 for a bottle of water. Bad for business. Even an international movie cannot make up for that.)

So then I met B and some of the rest of the cadre of Ethiopians and we went to One Love restaurant, which is a Rastafarian sort of place that used to have camping and now has Ethiopian food because M bought it, but kept the Rastafarian theme because people associate Rastafarian-ism with Ethiopia. They chewed qat and I, for something to do while talking because I didn't want to drink any sugar or chew any nasty qat, sorted qat into piles of good, young, soft leaves and bad, old, stiff leaves. There was a lot of incense and in the course of blowing on the coals to liven them up, I managed to burn a tiny round hole in the front of my Manhattan Portage bag. We drank the best coffee I've ever had - M's daughter roasted the beans and brought them, smoking, to us to smell their freshness before grinding them and making really strong espresso-like coffee. I put milk in it and sugar and then this green little herb that didn't smell that great but turned the coffee into something so delicious that it probably ruined all other coffee for me for the rest of my life. Everyone else left out the milk, but I tried it without and with and the flavor of the little green herb was much magnified by milk. We played pool and I won both of my games, once pocketing four balls in one turn. Then we ate injera (finally - I love injera, also had been trying to leave to get to D's (my former boss) house before everyone went to sleep) and shro, which turned out deceptively to have smoked beef in it, but was really good anyway. I'm eating beef at the moment.

By this time, I knew that it was too late for anyone to be awake at D's house, where D is not right now, but his wife and daughter are and I was supposed to stay with them. R (his wife) told me that she left the small gate open for me and I could just come in. Now, they have a big scary dog, named Zulu. I'm not usually scared of the dog and the dog doesn't usually bite white people (another racist dog), so I assumed it would be fine, until I got to the gate, upon which I froze, completely. Zulu was at the top of the stairs and I had to walk up them and I had a vision of the dog leaping for my throat. I couldn't go it. So we (including the neighbor across the road and the guard next door) had to make a hideous lot of noise to wake R up, which I felt very bad about and which completely riled Zulu up. When I finally came in, even though R was there, he made a run for my leg and latched on for the second it took me to yell at him. He only caught my corduroys and didn't even scratch me, but it scared me but good. It was my first dog bite.

This morning, I learned all about how Zulu mostly just grabs a leg to stop you as a good guard dog should and doesn't actually sink his teeth in and I think I can walk in past him next time, even alone.

Something else to add to my list of all the things I did for the first time in Rwanda. It could go on forever: lived alone, drove in a country other than the US, had Ethiopian coffee, did accounting, got bitten by a dog, stayed in a hotel alone, drove across a border on my own...