bololam: Love, From Bungwe

Some of the teachers I worked with this year sitting infront of our administration offices at school.

the kids are playing on what the adults use to move some of the heavier things around town or down the mountains.

Motos are the best way to get around all the huge hills of the "Highlands" in Rwanda. One America Day there happened to be 5 of us roving about the hills all together.

This is a really typical "Highlands" village tucked between hills, shrouded in trees, covered either in dust or mud depending on the season.

These are the fields (crops of corn, wheat, beans, peas, potatos, or tea) and valleys we have to go through in the "Highlands" (so called because we're the hightest elevations in Rwanda--Bungwe is one of the highest in the region at 3,000m)

Leaving Bungwe with all the love and good wishes from my villagers included thanking and regifting a few kilos of sweet potatoes, hurridly eating a gigantic bunch of bananas, and the moto being 30 minutes late.

Since I'm helping for 3 weeks with our newest group of trainees (they've been here 1 month!), I had to pack all I'd need for now, leaving the rest of my stuff locked in my house for my eventual move to Kigali (the capital). That means a backpacking backpack stuffed full of 3 weeks of professional clothes, work out stuff, and the most important things I own, strapped down to the back of my moto, and me leaning against it on our 1 hour motorcycle ride down, up, across, down, and up the mountains.

You'd think its pretty simple: sit on a moto and enjoy the scenery. No. Of course I'm all emotional because I just said good bye to my closest family and friends in Bungwe, and am leaving behind a year's worth of fun, laughter, hard work, and effort. So I start singing to myself ("Leaving on a Jet Plane") and my moto guy decides HE needs to sing too. In Kinyarwanda. Loudly. So, before I know it, we're singing the latest Rwandan pop songs as loud as we can, zooming down the mountain roads, dodging children in awe that there's a muzungu, and startling people as they hear and see a muzungu girl crazily coasting on by singing in their language at the top of her lungs. Phew!

Naturally we have to take breathers to think about the next song and maybe catch a bit of our sanity. In these breaks I hear the hysteric calls of children near the road, enticing their friends to come see the white girl: "Dore muzuuuuungu!!!" (There is a white person!!!). Or elderly people sharing their shock and calling to God that a white girl is on a moto: "Mana yanjye! Reba muzungu!" (Oh, my God! Look at the white person!)

Sometimes our singing was interrupted because of the holes and ditches in the roads. The entire hour ride down, up, across, down and back up the mountains is on a dirt road that may or may not be smooth and/or passable in less than perfect conditions. That's when the nifty little handle on the bottom of the seat is quite necessary so I don't fall of the moto.

Finally, after experiencing some amount of exasperation, joy, fear, sadness, excitement, and meloncholy on my last moto ride through the unbelievably steep and beautiful mountains of Northern Rwanda, we made it to the big city. Byumba has restaurants, internet, paved roads, buses, and lots of people. From here it was 1 rainy hour on a winding paved road to the capital and authentic Chinese food (they ran out of dumplings because their dumpling chef went to visit family in China. Good for him, bad for me).