It’s been an eventful time here so far. I headed off to my school in a small village called Zaza to discover that my house which I’d been assured was ready and habitable was actually derelict because the school didn’t have enough money to repair it and VSO hadn’t checked it. After a few heated discussions I returned to Kigali for a few days.
When I returned to Zaza I miraculously found a dozen workmen working on my house! For three weeks we worked dawn to dusk, concreting the floor, putting windows in, painting, putting electricity in, fixing locks on the doors, digging pit latrines, putting a fence up, repairing walls etc.
Once they’d finished and I’d spent another couple of weeks painting, building surfaces to cook on etc and bamboo guttering to collect some water, and planting my vegetables it was really coming together and feeling like home. Even if it there wasn’t another house in sight, my garden still had three exposed old pit latrines and there was a mass grave of genocide victims 100m away!
Zaza is a beautiful tiny village on a hill top overlooking a gorgeous erratically shaped lake. However, you can’t buy anything there (except honey from the bee man, fresh milk from the cows and bread I got the school cook to bake for me), it has no market, the only water supply was the sky which was fairly unreliable, the electricity would disappear for a week and then return in short spats and spurts, and the only transport out of Zaza was a solitary taxi-bus which left at 4.00am every morning during the dry season, and only carried 19 people (plus whatever livestock would fit in as well), and returned at 4.00pm. I had to hitchhike a couple of times and it took me 5 hours on one occasion and 8 hours on the second occasion before a car passed!
Something unpredictable and odd always happens here – it’s freeky! A herd of goats stormed through my front door the other day, freaked out by a storm, and knocked a can of paint all over the floor. I’ve turned up at school twice to find there were no students because there was a public holiday which was announced at the last minute.
When I returned to Zaza I miraculously found a dozen workmen working on my house! For three weeks we worked dawn to dusk, concreting the floor, putting windows in, painting, putting electricity in, fixing locks on the doors, digging pit latrines, putting a fence up, repairing walls etc.
Once they’d finished and I’d spent another couple of weeks painting, building surfaces to cook on etc and bamboo guttering to collect some water, and planting my vegetables it was really coming together and feeling like home. Even if it there wasn’t another house in sight, my garden still had three exposed old pit latrines and there was a mass grave of genocide victims 100m away!
Zaza is a beautiful tiny village on a hill top overlooking a gorgeous erratically shaped lake. However, you can’t buy anything there (except honey from the bee man, fresh milk from the cows and bread I got the school cook to bake for me), it has no market, the only water supply was the sky which was fairly unreliable, the electricity would disappear for a week and then return in short spats and spurts, and the only transport out of Zaza was a solitary taxi-bus which left at 4.00am every morning during the dry season, and only carried 19 people (plus whatever livestock would fit in as well), and returned at 4.00pm. I had to hitchhike a couple of times and it took me 5 hours on one occasion and 8 hours on the second occasion before a car passed!
Something unpredictable and odd always happens here – it’s freeky! A herd of goats stormed through my front door the other day, freaked out by a storm, and knocked a can of paint all over the floor. I’ve turned up at school twice to find there were no students because there was a public holiday which was announced at the last minute.
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