First day in Rwanda

After a good night’s sleep in under a mosquito net in my private room at the hostel, I woke up, cleaned up and headed to the back porch for breakfast. I met 2 Canadian law school students and a few US law students from Pepperdine who are here not only for internships but a 2 week in depth study of the genocide. I also made friends with an Australian who is working on traveling elsewhere in central Africa. Breakfast was tea, milk, cereal, bread, and omelet. Because the electricity was still out, the coffee maker and toaster were not functioning. After chatting with the other people at the hostel for a bit I head out on the back of a motorcycle taxi along with two of them to visit a place in town called the UTC. In the UTC is a large grocery store that is pretty much the Target of Kigali as well as a bank, foreign exchange office, clothing shops and a coffee shop. After stocking up on the essentials we head over to the coffee shop where I discovered the best new coffee drink I’ve ever had. On the menu it was called African coffee and it consisted of espresso, fresh ginger, chocolate, and steamed milk. Delicious! We checked email since they did have electricity and then head back to the hostel.

In the afternoon I met a few more people staying at the hostel including another intern who is with one of PSI’s partner programs that focuses on behavioral change social media. It seems like a really great project and I am looking forward to learning more about it. Six of us walked to a club called Mambo and spent the afternoon playing volleyball, throwing darts, and being lazy. It was definitely strange being in a place that was 99% foreigners after spending the majority of my time in Africa with locals. We ended up grabbing dinner at Mambo and I had grilled goat skewers and an avocado salad. So good! When we returned to the hostel the electricity was back on. We all hung out for a bit, played bananagrams, and chatted until a storm came through and the electricity went out. We were about to start playing a game that we just invented when the lights came back on again.