Cock-Blocked!! And other animal adventures...

Last week, some nice folks from Engineers Without Borders posed this insightful question: what is the most exotic animal you’ve seen in Rwanda?  The honest answer is, of course, other white people. But Rwanda is not without its own unique set of creeping, crawling, flying, scuttling, and bleating creatures.  So it’s time for an all animal edition of my blog!  For those of you who are not such fans of the cute and fuzzy critters…well, you’re in luck.  Those do not exist here.

Many of my fellow PCVs have adopted kittens or puppies. I too have acquired a pet.  His name is Brandon, and I spent the first week of our cohabitation making futile efforts to stab him with a knife.

Imagine a large brown strawberry.  Now picture eight spindly legs coming from it.  That basically describes Brandon.  The first time we met was when I rolled over in bed one morning and found my nose mere inches from whatever passes for a nose on a spider.  Needless to say, I tried to kill him.

After several days of increasingly Shakespearean stabbing attempts, my arachnicidal tendencies began to move in the direction of blunt force trauma.  I had the perfect shoe for it.  It had recently been washed, all the better to show the splatter.  There was one slight problem.  Despite his size, Brandon is fast.  I quickly realized that there was no way I was going to get him.  Instead, we soon fell into a comfortable routine.  Before blowing out my candle at night, I would pick up my shoe and make a few half-heartedly swipes in his general direction.  Brandon would just sigh heavily, and saunter nonchalantly to a new location a few inches away.

Right now, he is hanging out next to my shopping bags.  He doesn’t even pretend to move when I grab one of them.  We’ve basically become an old married couple.  As least I don’t greet him with a resounding “Honey, I’m home,”…yet…

Four-legged animals are mostly limited to goats, sheep, and cows.  Back in March, the mama goats started popping out babies, and the hills were filled with frolicking little goat kids.  There is nothing cuter than two little baby goats curled up around each other in a sunny meadow.  It’s so sweet, it might even make Walt Disney vomit.

There are a few varieties of cow in mooing around Rwanda.  In my village, we have the more traditional variety: stick-thin, with giant horns and a thirst for human blood.  I was walking home from school one afternoon, innocently enjoying the warm sun, when a little girl ran past me, screaming.  Now, my presence does sometimes provoke reactions  of terror  from children, but this seemed excessive.  And the fact that the dudes in front of the barbershop were yelling too…well, I figured that something bad was about to go down.  I turned, just in time to jump out of the way of the young bull that was barreling down the road, horns blazing.  Following him, shouting wildly, and waving a giant stick, was the village cattle wrangler.  Fortunately, the bull was caught before he did any damage other than the psychological kind.

Occasionally, the pigs appear in the compost pile.  There are also rabbits, but I mostly only see them as Alice is hacking one to bits on the back porch.  That doesn’t really bother me so much…although, I do wish she wouldn’t look quite so happy while doing it.

We also have geckoes in Rwanda, but not so many live in my village.  One day, during umuganda, some girls found a chameleon lurking in the bean field at school.  Batiste, one of the science teachers, showed the students (most of whom wouldn’t get near the thing) how it change colors depending on the background.  I was tempted to hold it up to my skin and see what would happen, but I resisted the urge.

So, those are the major land animals that live in or around my village.  But Rwanda also boasts an amazing variety of birds.  Most of them are quite small, and come in almost every color imaginable: bright orange, emerald green, dark blue, electric yellow—you can always  catch a glimpse of some spectacular hue flitting around amongst the trees.

There are also larger birds like hawks and ravens.  I have a bit of a personal vendetta against the latter.  They like to sit outside my window and pontificate at all hours of the day.  “Gwark?” one will inquire.  “Gwaaaaaarkkkkk!!!!” the others will agree.  Then they will fly up onto my roof and riverdance for awhile.  Just try to sleep with a group of ravens stomping around above your head.  Just try.

However, because I have roughly the matury of a 7^th grade boy, my favorite animal in Rwanda is the cock.  Oh, the times I have explained to Rwandans that “rooster” might be a better word to use.  Of course, then I would lose the opportunity to hear things such as “Does the cock exist in America?” or “I think, in America, the cock grows larger.”  One day, as I was walking to school, a rooster ran into the road in front of me, impeding my progress.  I had to laugh, because I had literally just been cock-blocked.

So, on that delightful note, I think I’m going to wrap things up for now.  But readers, I have a question for you!  What do you want to know about my life in Rwanda?  I feel like so much happens in my life here that to really explain it all would take ten pages and be painstakingly tedious.  So, aspects of Rwanda do ya’ll want to know about?  I have no shame, so ask about any topic.  Food? Religion? Markets?  Things I have used for toilet paper?  Let me know what you want to know, and I will do my best to answer your questions in my next post.

p.s. I wrote most of this blog while wearing a Burger King crown.  Thanks mom and dad!

From point A to point B, with mild detours to points C, G-P, and R-Z: A tale of Rwandan transport.

I've heard it said that it's the journey that counts, not the destination.  Such a statement was probably made as a sort of desperate rationalization of the Rwandan transportation system, given that here, the destination is not always reached, and the journey can stretch so long as to provide one with the opportunity to indulge in the entire pantheon of human emotions.  Excitement, hope, awkwardness, frustration, rage, exhaustion, despair, and finally resignation--just try to travel anywhere in this country without experiencing at least half of these emotions.
I've blogged a bit about the buses here before, but today I want to take you all with me on the harrowing, uncomfortable, and often hilarious trip from my village into Gitarama.  Every time I travel this route, something happens to surprise me, scare me, or just plain bewilder me.  There's never a dull moment, that's for sure!
The average bus here might not be quite street legal in the U.S.  There are larger, Greyhound-esque buses that run between the major cities, but they very rarely venture out to my main road.  Instead, I usually take a twegerane (translation: "we squeeze") as far as Gitarrama, where I can get a slightly more reputable mode of transportation into Kigali.  As much as I dislike riding on the twegeranes--they are more than aptly named--they certainly do provide ample opportunity for entertainment.
All the twegeranes have the same basic body.  They are more or less glorified vans, with 20 seats.  The number of seats is in no way related to the actual number of people that can fit in side.  One of my favorite things about twegeranes is the way that they are decorated.  I can't believe I was ever capable of functioning in a country like America where public transport didn't involve tassles and wall-paper and beads.  Some of the decor looks disconcertingly like the inside of a slightly seedy New Orleans brothel.
Obviously, each bus has its own name plastered across the windshield in bright letters.  About half of the names are religious themed, and most are in poorly conceived English.  Jesus is caming? Er...sure.  Many of the rest have something to do with celebrities or sports.  I am still waiting for the day when the Chris Brown bus crashes into the Rihana bus.  And my life will be complete the day I see the Kanye West twegerane cut off Taylor Swift in traffic.
Legally, the buses can only hold as many people as their are seats.  Side note: it was very difficult for me to type that last sentence, as my fingers were hampered by my spasms of uncontrollable ironic laughter.  Space is an illusion, bus space doubly so.  This leads to an interesting litte conspiracy between the bus drivers, the bicycle taxis, and the traffic police.
As the buses trundle recklessly down the road, usually with passengers practically hanging out the windows, the drivers signal to each as they pass, especially if there is a police check point coming up.  If there is, the bus pulls over and unloads passengers until the legal limit is no longer exceeded.  Often, these excess passengers will hop a ride with a bike taxi, or be forced to jog down the road and meet up with the bus again once it passes the check point.  It's quite possibly the most obvious things in the world, and makes me laugh every time.
There's usually about a fifty percent chance someone will vomit on the bus, an old lady will start screaming about her smashed tomatoes, the entire bus will be delayed several minutes while passengers bargain for pineapples out the windows, or you will either sitting on someone or having someone sit on you.  The one advantage to this form of transportation?  It's cheap, and it sure makes you appreciate walking!