I went to Green Hills Academy today. It's part of the Cambridge University Group and is one of, if not the most prestigious school in Rwanda. President Kagame's kids go there. Inside the school is an independent language centre that runs language courses for adults and they've asked me to teach there. I went in today to talk about getting a visa and sort out all the paperwork then I'll start work on Monday. It's two hours a night, four nights a week, so it won't interfere with my schedule with ITeams. Now I don't want to go into details, but there were a few startling revelations and unwelcome hiccups that I just wasn't expecting. So please be praying in the visa/immigration genre.
When I had finished at Green Hills, I went looking for a bus stop so I could get home. I walked for half an hour before I found one. And the bus took me into town and not to Remera, which is where I would have got a connection to Kabeza. I wandered the back streets of Kigali for thirty minutes looking for a Kabeza bus, in which time my phone ran out of battery.
It's also worth mentioning that I had no food, water or Rwandese currency. I was feeling a tad pathetic and was seriously considering checking into a hotel for the night with my credit card and trying to find a bus again tomorrow. (At the hotel I would have borrowed someone’s laptop and facebooked Dora to let her know I was essentially alright, if not completely broken by the horrors of public transport. She worries about me, and I’m certain that she would have called a nation-wide search party by nine pm).
In my distress, I allowed a single tear to fall, then slapped myself across the face, reminding myself that I am in fact not a four year old girl, but an intrepid explorer and future presidential candidate.
After much debate in my head, I decided to get a bike up to Dora's office and wait for her to finish work so she could take me home. On the way up to the office, we drove past the bus I wanted and consequently found the bus stop I had been looking for. With this new hope, I went to the forex bureax and changed up a twenty I had in my purse. I used the money to buy essential supplies like water and chocolate, and then headed back down to the bus stop.
We waited half an hour for the bus to fill, then were on our way. Of course, on a day like this, that couldn't be the end of the story. There was this crazy old guy on the bus who did this call and response thing at the top of his lungs the entire duration of the journey. Kind of like Avril's 1 2 3 4 5 6 come on thing but in Kinyarwanda, for two and a half hours, with no means of escape, short of suicide, which for the first time in my Christian life I considered as a viable option. Furthermore, the conductor was determined that the bus be filled to capacity the whole way home, so every time someone got off, a new passenger had to get on. Joy to the world.
Long story short, I got home at 7pm, three and a half hours after leaving Green Hills. There must be a better way.
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