Ruhengeri Day 2

Uraho! Amakora ni mesa.

Rwanda is great. I once again slept a lot last night, a solid 10 hours. Woke up feeling like I got hit in the back of the head with a brick though. Heh, bricks. I'm fine now. I think it was mostly dehydration.

This morning we left in our small group of just 6 of us (Mickey, Dann, Mary, Kelsey, Ms. Overbo and myself) to go work at a brickmakers' association about 4 miles outside Ruhengeri. Greg (our Rwandan friend from Amahoro Tours) gave us a lift, after we pushed his land rover a couple blocks to get it started. The association is in a large clay quary on a bluff above a road and a swamp down below. While we were there we learned how to do all the basic jobs in brickmaking and got more than a little dirty.

To make bricks, you first use a giant hoe to scrape clay from the side of the pit in whioch you're working, then as one person turns the clay, others come with 20-liter jerry cans with water from the swamp. You keep doing this until it's the right consistency. Similar to mixing mortar with dad, only we down have a mixer and we're making hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it. Then the clay mix is formed in a mold, shaped, and left out to dry. After a couple days, enough dried bricks have been accumulated to make a giant brick kiln, 6 meteres cubed, with a a small tunnel into the back, in which a fire is lit and kept burning for 20 days. After 20 days, the bricks are done. THe associations sell the bricks for 31 RWF and pays the brickmakers 5 RWF per birck the mold, who in turn pay the kids who fetch the water 1 RWF per liter (550 RWF = 1 USD) The brickmakers work 12-14 hours a day, and can produce up to 800 bricks a day. We each took turns doing all the steps, while the Rwandans mostly laughed at us. The agreed that Dann was the best a forming the bircks, while I was the best at digging the clay and carrying the water. They also agreed that Mickey doesn't eat enough. They just thought Ms. Overbo was crazy (Mizungo oya sawa sawa!). Hussan (another Rwandan friend) got some video of it with my camera. It's hilarious.

We walked back to town at the end of it, stopping in some village along the way for water. The people there thought Rahcel and Sarah were my daughters when I showed them our family picture. Normally, we are greated with "Mizungo" which originally meant rich person, but has now become synonymous with white person. On the way back, we were so dirty and mudcaked from making the bricks that instead of calling us mizungo, they had some other word, which Hussan said meant "white" but not "white person". Apparently we weren't mizungo because we were caked in mud. We saw some eucalyptus and sugarcane farms on the way back in addition to the usual sorgum and bananas. In Rwanda, sorgum is used in place of wheat. We saw another member of the Rwandan national cycling team out riding.

I was totally dehydrated and felt like I was going to throw up. I had four bottles of water and two fantas and I'm feeling great now. Another great thing about Rwanda: no diet pop!

We had our first brochettes today, and while they were good, I was dissapointed in how similar the flavor is to beef. It's kinda a mildly tough version of extra-lean beef, with a similar taste. It was certainly great, just more mundane than I expected.

One thing that I forgot to tell yesterday was that along the entire length of the road from Kigali to Ruhengeri there were people digging a ditch for the installation of a fiber-optic line from here to the capital. It was somewhat strange to see a long-distance fiber optic line being installed in a country with very few paved roads and an average income of less than 400 USD.

While we had been in Kigali there had been some speculation among the more pop-culture tuned women in our group regarding whether or not the cast of the show "Lost" had been staying at the Iris with us. Apparently the group who saw the gorillas today (and had a great time!) met an actor from Lost (who also played Pippin in Lord of the Rings) at the national park office. This seems to confirm that they were in fact at the Iris with us.

Going to a soccer game tonight at Ruhengeri Stadium. We met the head of the local soccer organization last night, and he invited us to attend today.

Until next time,

Drew