First Days

Muraho, friends and families! At the writing of the first blog post of our trip, we’ve been here for about three days, and we’ve all had a great time! We arrived in Rwanda around the early afternoon on the 27th after a very long trip that took us through Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After we arrived, we settled into our hotel rooms, took a quick tour of Kigali, and called an early night because of jet lag.

On our second day, we had our first introductory classes. Our first class was a businessman who came to talk to us about the development and future city-planning of Kigali. The second class was a teacher who came to teach us how to say basic phrases in Kinyarwanda, the official language of Rwanda. After the classes, a few of us took a walk around the neighborhood and put our new Kinyarwanda vocabulary to the test as we met many locals who were extremely friendly and seemed happy that we were here. Finally, we went to a really fancy restaurant called Khana Kazana where we ended the day with really tasty Indian food.

On our third day, we went on an exercise called “New Discovery” where we split up into groups of three, and each group hopped on a bus to different parts of the city and explored certain aspects of life in Kigali. The point of the exercise was for us to be comfortable with public transportation around the city and to come back to the classroom and explain what we saw on our little tour. A few of us went downtown, and others went to the marketplace. After we came back, we had our first lesson about the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and a brief introduction of what happened and how events leading up to it affected the conflict. At the end of the night, a few of us went to a watch party to watch the Europa League Final between football clubs Arsenal and Chelsea.

The picture I posted above is of our little hike through the neighborhood, and the pic below is of us in class. If the next two and a half weeks are anything like the first three days, then we will be having a great time. Keep up with our blog to be updated on our adventures in Rwanda!