Archive for February, 2010

By Mike Byrne

It’s not every January that you and a team of 3 friends/teammates hop on a plane in sunny, warm Phoenix, AZ, and touch down some 26 hours later in lush and balmy Kigali, Rwanda.  While you are more than happy to take part in the adventure, you cannot but help to have a hedonist smile hidden just below the surface of your lips.  While the grand majority of the Northern Hemisphere is trapped in the darkest and coldest hours of winter, you are traveling from a warm winter desert to the lush rolling hills of central Africa.

Along this journey, the team grabbed some chips at a pub in London Heathrow and scrambled through the metal detector at Nairobi International Airport, pushing our way past lavishly robed Sudanese, pudgy American missionaries, khakied British tourists, and a host of other characters whose very presence alongside one another smacked of contrast.  It’s not as if we were looking at one another with malice.  But there was simply a tacit recognition that most of us hadn’t the slightest idea what we might have in common with the person pushing their way in front of us through the metal detector.  Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the journey wasn’t that fact that Chadd decided to wake up in a moment of turbulence just fast enough to tip over a glass of wine onto Mike and then fall ever so effortlessly back to sleep, but that both the flight from Heathrow to Nairobi and Nairobi to Kigali were largely filled by Abazungu (white people).  All of us had waited for weeks, if not months, for the day we would finally touch down in Kigali and to be on a plane headed to East Africa filled largely with people who shared your genetic heritage delayed the sense of adventure and exoticism.

Upon arrival in Kigali, we were met by a host of young men who in one capacity or another knew Jules Munyampeta, our host and client.  With huge smiles and warm handshakes they greeted us inside the sixties-modern, concrete crownish building otherwise know as Kigali International Airport.  Our luggage was quickly loaded on board a burgundy, rightside drive mini van, and we took off down the right side of Kigali’s hilly and well maintained streets.  Some 20 minutes later the pavement dropped off and our van bounced its way onto a hard red clay path that led to the gated entrance of Jule’s house, our home for the coming 5 weeks.  A few bonjours and a quick toast-dominated breakfast later, we were resting in our new Rwandan rooms.