A Day of Adventure

Kevin and I arrived safely in Kigali last night, to be very pleasantly greeted by Eric and Emmanuel. They will be the tour guides for the Regent class which will be arriving tomorrow. I'd read Eric's book - "My Father, Maker of the Trees" before I came so that I could start to get to know him. Both men were a delight and gave a wonderful first impression.

(As a side note, Eric's book is absolutely fantastic! He tells the story of how he, his brother, and his uncle survived the 1994 genocide. Eric hid in the branches of a cypress tree for 15 days. The second half of the book discusses why he can believe that there is a good God despite the evil he has seen.)

After finding our apartment, we settled in. Our apartment is big and has the most beautiful view of the city from the garden in the back. I'll post pics of the view tomorrow. We slept 11 hours last night, but I'm pretty sure we're over any jet lag we might have been experiencing. Rwanda is 6 hours ahead of Virginia, but we were so tired from the last month that it wasn't hard to sleep.

We decided to make today an adventure!!!

So we walked 8 miles. :-)

Uphill both ways. No really, it was uphill both ways.

Actually, we decided to walk into the center of town, which is roughly a 2-hour walk from our apartment. Along the way, we observed and became familiar with our new home. We ended up taking 6 hours more or less wandering the city (though Kevin knew where we were the whole time since he had the map on our iPod... isn't technology amazing!)

On our way, we found Kevin's office. The International Justice Mission building is only about a 10 minute walk from our apartment, and an easy one at that. We can actually see it from our apartment. This is a tremendous blessing since that means Kevin can walk to work each morning. It looks lovely, but we'll find out more tomorrow when he starts.

We did make our way into the center of town and everyone was so friendly. We changed some money into Rwandan Francs and got lunch at a little cafe that had soccer (I'm sorry, football) on television. It was some big game or something. Just kidding.... Kevin says I have to be a soccer fan now that we're living abroad for 3 months.

As we walked, we tried to compare what we were seeing to other places we'd been, but found that it was very very hard. There are aspects that remind us of Haiti, but the population seems much wealthier. So much is developing! The houses are lovely and the country is green. I tried to compare it to Colombia, since it looks like it from afar - all the houses on the sides of hills - but even in the city, the houses are made of stone and painted beautiful colors. We were amazed at how developed Rwanda already is, as well as the progress we could see was mid-way. Rwanda is certainly a unique country!

We're excited to learn more tomorrow!