Tennessee Bye Week = Trip to Akagera National Park

With the Vols off this week, we are headed on safari (Rwanda style) in Akagera National Park.  The park makes up most of the Eastern border with Tanzania and is a similar landscape to the Serengeti with potential sightings of elephants, lions, giraffes, hippopotamus, buffalo, zebras etc.  We have hired (we think) a 4WD vehicle with driver for two days and will be staying at the Akagera Game Lodge.  The lodge is the only hotel within the park and the closest town is an hour away.  It has been "recently under new management" for quite some time (a Mantis Group Hotel) so we we can only be cautiously optimistic about what is to come.   There are also boats for hire on one of the lakes so you can go swimming with the hippos which I am very excited about but Lucy is less so.  Matt (he did most of the organizing himself which I very much appreciate) and Nena from TechnoServe and Emily from ISK are coming along as well.  We will leave at 5 or 6am tomorrow morning and return Sunday night.

Lucy had yesterday and today off so has had some time to relax and write some lesson plans that should cover the foreseeable future.  Last night I went to supper at Handee (one of the two Indian restaurants here) with Matt, Nena, Zach (VolCon), Cory (Rwanda Monitoring & Evaluation Manager), and Cory's wife Radhika.  Lucy also went to supper at Handee with Emily, Cady, and Shannon from ISK.  Tonight we are going to the Crocker's house for pizza night which is always quite tasty.

I will leave you with a picture of last night's sunset from my office window. Have a nice weekend.

My International Class

I have seven (!!!) students in my class right now. Four boys and three girls. It is a joy. Really. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to go back to teaching a big class. Here are the nationalities of my kids: Eritrean, American-Nigerian, American-Brazilian, American-Russian, Rwandan, Tanzanian, and Dutch. Between them, they speak English, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Tigrinya, Dutch, and Portuguese. And they're learning French at school. As the ISK motto says, I'm definitely "Educating Global Citizens."

Bagels!

This past Friday was bagel Friday, a VERY exciting day for me. Some American missionaries here have started an organization that trains widows and orphans to make bagels. They come to ISK every other Friday to deliver them, so we get two bags at a time, freeze them, and then eat them for breakfast (me) and lunch at work (Jon) until they run out. They make plain, everything, cinnamon raisin, and a flavor of the month. September's flavor was Cheesy Onion (it didn't taste much like cheese or onions, but it was delicious) and October's flavor is pumpkin. This week there was added excitement because the bagel man brought his friend the tortilla man. We bought 30 frozen tortillas from him for about $5.50. Not a bargain, but not too bad either. The discovery of tortillas opens up new culinary options for us (burritos, enchiladas, quesadillas) which is great since the other things you need for mexican food like rice, beans, cheese, tomatoes, avocados, peppers etc. are all available here. The tortillas also give use something to eat our guacamole with. Since avocados are everywhere here and very cheap, we've had guacamole a number of times. But we've been eating it with bread, or just spoons, since you can't get any kind of chips. We are very excited about both the tortillas and bagels!

Our House

Here we go with the background info. For those of you who are interested, here's some info about our housing situation. Even though Jon is working on the coffee project, we're living in the Dairy "Volcon" (volunteer consultant) house since the Coffee Volcon house is full. It has four bedrooms, a living room/dining room, a kitchen, and three bathrooms. Our house is also currently full with the two of us, Matt and Nena (my age, formerly worked in consulting in Boston, working on coffee), Pamela (Jon's age, Irish, working on the dairy project) and John (about my parents' age, from Australia, working on dairy). The two dairy people, Pamela and John, work in a small town in the Eastern province from Monday morning to Friday afternoon, so they are only around on the weekends. The house is a 25 min walk from school, up and over a hill and back down the other side, a 15 min walk from Jon's office, and a 10 min walk from a big intersection with lots of shops. So its really quite convenient. We have two guards, Frank during the day and Patrick at night, who are very nice and we all really like. We also have a lady who comes to do our laundry a few days a week, and some lovely bushes in the yard where the laundry gets dried.

We have a blog!

It took a little while, but we finally have a blog! Thank you to Jon for conquering the mysteries of the internet and coming up with a witty(?) title. Its a pun...get it? Anyway, I'll write some recap posts in a bit, but for now I'm going to post current news. This weekend we are cat sitting for Jon's boss and enjoying his internet and his beautiful house. His cat, Castro, amazingly looks very very much like Beecher. Sadly though he is very shy and anti-social. One highlight of the house is the collection of cooking magazines. I've been reading Martha Stewart Living and Saveur to my heart's content. I even found an article (with recipes!) about Maida Heatter, whose baking books I love. Last night Nena and Matt came over and we made Mexican-ish food and a chocolate cake for Matt's birthday. The cake was not quite as successful as I had hoped, but given our lack of equipment and ingredients and our inability to regulate the oven temperature, I think it was a pretty good showing. On the agenda for today: a walk to the "Italian Cheese and Harm" shop (that is what the sign outside used to say), where I've never been and an attempt to make pad thai for dinner.

Touchdown Kigali

Well we made it.  After a smooth check in at LaGuardia and a standard three hour delay on our flight to DC, we had an uneventful flight on United to Brussels (I do not recommend I Love You Man, The Soloist, or domestic airlines for that matter).  After falling short on our search for gaufres (waffles), we raided the chocolate aisle at Duty Free and headed to our Brussels Airlines direct flight to Kigali. 

The eight-hour flight was only about 50% full and we enjoyed the amenities of the only direct European flight to Kigali by primarily sleeping.