Today
was an incredibly “Rwandan” day.
I left
the apartment for the walk to work and a beautiful blue sky (albeit quite
humid) was there to greet me. I got to work on time… so of course I was one of
the first people to arrive. When I sat down at my desk I immediately noticed a
problem – no power! This doesn’t happen often in Kigali, but it’s not a
terribly rare occurrence. But of course, no power means no internet is
available. No internet meant that I couldn’t really work on my project. The
power comes on at around 10:30am and I get to work. Then around noon comes the
rain. You’ve never seen it rain if you’ve never been outside the US. Next to
Hurricane Irene last fall and the tsunami like downpour that I had the pleasure
of assisting a dental operation through in Haiti, today was the hardest I’d
ever seen it rain.
With the
rain came another power outage. So there I was again, just sort of chilling out
in Rwanda. I wandered downstairs to see some of my colleagues only to be
informed that President Kagame had just announce a new public holiday… tomorrow!
Apparently it’s not unusual here for the workforce to be informed of national
days off less than 24 hours before.
So here,
I sit… the sun is all of a sudden bursting out from what 10 minutes ago was a
completely gray sky; it’s Tuesday afternoon; I’m almost done with work for the
week; and I can guarantee that dinner tonight will be at least a three hour
event.
Every
moment for the rest of this day that I manage to overcome my OCD, allergic to
“wasting time,” American attitude, will be spent pitying all of my friends back
in the States that are forced to work for law firms where they expect you to
“only” take an hour for your lunch break and in a country where the last
surprise holiday was… does anyone even remember one? :-)
- Kevin
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