Excesses and consequences

Yet again it feels like a life times worth of memories have been made since we last wrote…. Some good, some bad, and some ‘ugly’. The art classes are slowly progressing, although some kids are certainly easier to teach than others, as it turns out that some of them hadn’t even used a ruler before…. Kinda difficult when you’re trying to teach them the precisions of card making, but hey we’re getting there. A good sign is that they are guaranteed to ask for ten more minutes at the end of every lesson. Also we always have a group of onlookers, desperate to try out all the materials, today the little deaf boy, Petite, was highly entertained by pritsticking a paper mask to his face, which remained there for the rest of the day- we’re just glad we didn’t have superglue lying around!! As for English, that’s got slightly more scary as we have wound up separating to cover both the intermediate and the beginners classes…we’re not sure what’s more challenging: trying to teach a class that want to learn grammatical rules that we didn’t even know existed and asking questions like ‘so what’s the third party past tense of that word then?’ or trying to teach a group of kids that quite clearly do not understand a single instruction you give, still Jaz has landed herself with the intermediates while Nell is tackling the beginners. Hopefully we are doing something right as they are still guaranteed to all be there, pens at the ready every lesson.

Last week we took a trip to the local market, which could certainly be described as an experience! We were with Santiana, one of the local volunteers but this didn’t seem to make to difference to the amount of attention we got. We had a little gang of boys traipsing around after us asking us for jobs, money… anything! The women at the market didn’t seem terribly impressed by the fact that Santi was trying to barter for us and kept telling us if we were being charged a muzungu price or not. Still it was fascinating to see the hubbub of people and the mountains of fruit, veg, flour, beans ect… it was quite an impressive sight. We managed to come back with a weeks worth of fruit and veg for £2.50 which is pretty damn remarkable although we’re not entirely sure we’ll be able to cope with that much attention every week.

Last weekend was an eventful one. We had kinda gate crashed a friend of Nicky’s birthday party the previous weekend and managed to make a few contacts there which was handy. Friday night we cooked dinner for Nicky, Kine and Alison (two girls we’ve met though work) which went down nicely with a few cocktails. Nell however was feeling a little worse for wear so she did not accompany us out clubbing later that night. The rest of us however went on to Cadillac the biggest club in Kigali, where we joined a few of the VSO’s we’d met previously. I (Jaz) was really quite impressed with the real ‘clubbness’ of the place…. I had in mind a bit of a shack with loud music coming from a few dodgy speakers but it was just like going clubbing at home… well almost! There were a few notable differences, mainly in the way of dancing. One group of Russians had a Carlton from the Fresh Prince kinda style going down which was very difficult to take your eyes off! But a lot of wuragi (local gin) was consumed and before long I was busting out my own bad ass moves! The following night Nell was feeling better so we went for drinks with the volunteers from the centre to get to know them better, which again turned out to be a really great night…. They have assured us they will be coming with us the next time we go clubbing and teaching us Congolese dancing, which we’re told involves a lot of butt wiggling and not much else! The same night just as we were about to go to bed we got a text from Laurence (a VSO) who invited us to an expat. party! Given the fact that we are both hard core party animals we of course said yes and got a taxi there (kept having reality checks of…. Oh my god we are going out two nights in a row…. We are more sprightly than we thought!) The music collection was varied to say the least, but our new friend Lawrence managed to dance to almost all of it- we were particularly impressed with his shaking to Shakira and his initiation of a conga line to Kyle’s Locomotion. We followed this up the next day with an all you can eat breakfast with Nicky at a very expensive hotel, it was hugely extravagant but totally worth it. Following this we went to a genocide memorial but we will be dedicating an entire blog to this as we feel it was too significant just to mention in passing.

After the weekend Jaz was quite ill and until today (Friday) has been unable to shift the bug which has left her at home, slightly stir crazy for most of the week:
In regards to the description of my illness let me brief but honest. Developing chronic diarrhoea over night in a house that’s entire water supply simultaneously runs out is an experience I would not wish upon even my most loathed of enemies. It is a memory and a smell that I fear will haunt me for some time…

Never underestimate the technology of the flush.
Never underestimate the significance of water.