Weekends in Rwanda

My friend called me the other day and was very sympathetic, thinking how bored I must be at night and during the weekends. If you recall, I’ve been in Rwanda for about 3 weeks, and I didn’t know anyone when I was coming here. She thought by now I’d have finished all my movies and series (I have about 500GB worth of stuff to watch) plus I brought a number of novels. Wrong. I’ve only managed to finish one book so far, 2 or 3 movies and maybe one or two series.

I leave work around 5p.m. but remain at the office to surf and read blogs, you know the drill, tweeting all the while. Then I head home and read about 2 pages of my book, have supper and by 9p.m. am feeling sleepy already. If am lucky, I have the energy to read another page of the book I’m currently reading or perhaps watch one episode of 90210. That’s some American high school drama series.

Weekends: mornings I may sleep in or go to the tennis court, where I miss more balls than I hit. I stay there for one hour, playing for half and resting the other half of the hour. Then afternoons I may go visit a co-worker at their home (you know, tea, sugar, bread kind of visits that usually occur at around lunchtime. The timing is not a coincidence.)

This past weekend, I was invited to go visit an island on a lake near here. A friend of a friend of a friend bought the island on Lake Burera and we were going to see it. We carried a little food for a cookout/picnic.

 

Lake Burera. Image from tomallen3.blogspot.com

The occupants of the tiny island were bought off (a little sad) so when we scrambled round the island, we found abandoned houses where they used to live. Their crops are still intact so they do come round to harvest them. There are also some birds on the island. The East Africa crested crowns.

Photo by Mahdi Kazzazi. 

 

The owner of the island has not officially started living there but there was one house where he had built discernible path. There, we left our bags and took a walk around the island, getting lost in some maize plots and emerging unscathed except for some blackjacks. You know, those plants with black ‘seeds’ that cling to your clothes?

The view was magnificent…and if you got the house at the highest point on the island, the view was panoramic. The sun shone on the water and you can only imagine the spectacular sunrises and sunsets that will be witnessed there. Hope I get another invite when he finally builds a gazebo and has a fridge full of cold drinks.

We were starting to feel hungry, since some of us helped to row the boat….it was of the most basic kind, which took us about 20min to get to the island. Someone went and brought maize from the farm and guess what? Some of the guys ate it raw! I shook my head and took the rest to be roasted…..then we had roasted maize and beer as we waited for the meat to cook.

Then we had ourselves some boiled matoke, bread and meat and beer for lunch.

I took a short swim, so cool and refreshing but it began getting cold and as we were leaving in the afternoon, the rain caught up with us just as we stepped out of the boat onto the mainland.