5/26/2018 0 Comments My Daily CommuteAs part of my job I am doing a lot of travelling by moto. As we get a lot of rain I seem to get wet fairly often but the scenery is stunning. I thought I would share with you a taste of my journey to work in the district of Nyamasheke with my trusty and skilled moto driver, Thomas. Thomas lives in an area called Rangiro where it seems it is always raining. He has nearly an hour's journey to get to my house in the morning. I visited Rangiro sector with him one day and experienced his daily mud! Now I understand exactly what he means when he sends me a text to say he will be a bit late - "Sorry Mary I am stucked" Wherever we go in Nyamasheke the road twists and turns and gives us so many views of Lake Kivu. We can always see the vast Nyungwe rainforest in the distance. This rainbow over the tea plantation was really impressive (and you can see the shadow of us on the moto and the rainforest in the distance) ![]() The main roads in Rwanda are in good condition but some of the side roads into the more remote areas are not so good and a journey along them is known as experiencing an african free massage! Sometimes the roads are so bad the local school kids can keep up - "Chase the muzungu" is very popular! Some of the schools in Nyamasheke can only be reached by boat. As it was raining we chose to use the covered boat with an engine rather than the open boat powered by paddles. (cost 50p instead of 20p) Not so good when we tried to get the boat going back though. The boat was there but no driver who said he wasn't coming until the rain stopped - which fortunately it did - an hour and a half later! In the photo below my colleague, JMV, is speaking to the driver of the boat. I really enjoy these journeys - so many interesting things to see. Rice fields in the valleys.. ![]() And schools on the hills.... And after a 'hard day's work'... It's home to watch the sun set over the lake (well - occasionally - sometimes the rain is so bad we can't even see the lake!)
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We are now over four months in and keeping really busy. I am in the middle of a load of maths trainings and it was lovely last week to meet up with three of my former students (from 2014) who are now teachers in one of the schools I am working with. Florentine (standing next to me) was goalkeeper in the netball team I had started at the college in 2014. ![]() As Glyn is without a bike at the moment it isn't quite so easy to pop out and buy food and Nyamasheke is a bit limited. Biscuits are readily available in Rwanda but they are different from back home. We have tried many different ones. Last week Glyn spied some 'digestives' in a shop in Kamembe that were in packaging very similar to McVities and bought them. I was doubtful. They tasted of cardboard and clung to the roof of your mouth. It was a large packet and between us we had eaten one! Even the chickens that wander around our garden wouldn't eat them! What were we going to do with them? We live in a beautiful, big house. There are only two of us living here but we have 5 bathrooms and four showers with hot water boilers. But for various reasons we have not been able to get the boilers to work. Since we have moved in we have had half a dozen plumbers / electricians spend hours here trying all ways to get one boiler to work and then to get the hot water to come out of a shower rather than a random hole in the wall. It is, as they say in Rwanda, a challenge! Yesterday our most persistent boiler man, Nick, seemed determined to get it working. He arrived at 10am with a mechanical engineering teacher from the local technical college. After dismantling one of the other boilers and combining the parts they got one of them to produce hot water. Yey!! But then when they turned on the shower a tiny trickle came out. The pipes run through the walls. It was a mystery to begin with to work out where the water was going until we noticed the corridor was awash with hot water. The water is going through the wall. Plan B...... they decided to move the now functioning boiler into one of the other bathrooms. But the powerpoint next to the boiler didn't work (and is hanging out of the wall) so they chopped a cable off a defunct boiler, twisted the wires together and ran a cable at head height across the bathroom. It took several hours for the tank to fill and the water to heat up but it seemed to be working. While they were waiting they sat on our verandah and had a coffee......... ...with a packet of Rwandan digestives. Between them and Gilbert our guard who came to join them, they ate the lot. I was spending a few hours making some bottletops counting sticks to use with primary maths teachers and had collected a massive number of bottletops from the local bar. Sabin, the Mechanical engineering teacher, looked scathingly at my rather pathetic hammer technique and took over (fine by me) and by the end of the afternoon had hammered holes in all of the bottletops so Gilbert and I could thread them onto bamboo brochette sticks. As far as bottletop counting sticks are concerned it was a very productive day! Even little Cariad who came to visit us today with Emmy and Noella was impressed! But what of the boiler? Having helped me make my bottletop counters and eaten a meal, they continued with the mystery that is our bathroom boilers. The boiler was working, the water was hot, our electricity meter was registering not much so I had topped up....... but water would not come out of the hot tap. They came to the conclusion that again there was a problem with the pipes in the wall and said they would buy a load of pipe and return the following day (today) to try again. They had been working on it for 10 hours! This morning they arrived and continued with the work but now so much water has been used out of our storage tank that the water pressure isn't high enough to make it work. We now have to contact the water company to top up the tank! I am beginning to think this just isn't going to happen. Bucket baths it is then! And finally the bike..... Glyn has been given a motorbike to use for his hour's journey to and from the Rwanda Aid office. It is a tad unreliable - No speedo, mileometer or fuel gauge so it can be difficult to judge fuel level (and he has run out once) Often wouldn't start, failed electrics (on our way home in the dark - I was waving a torch over his shoulder so we could see the track), engine plate fell off, chain came off, chain snapped, puncture, clutch cable snapped and there are probably more things that I have forgotten. The times he has been stranded on the side of the road he has always been rescued by friendly helpful Rwandans (and even the chief of police!) but when the clutch cable snapped a few miles from home when we were both coming back one evening he has decided enough is enough and now we have said farewell to the bike. A mechanic came to our house to fix the clutch cable and then he rode the bike to Kamembe. We followed in a van. The bike didn't quite make it though - at the edge of town the chain fell off. So we have been bike less for a week but hopefully there will be a new one coming from Kigali next week. I And once we have the new bike, we will be mobile again and can go off in search of some decent biscuits!
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December 2018
Preparing to go back to our second home
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