August 8

WOOHOOOOOO! Impact assessment officially finished. Today I actually got dizzy from staring at Excel spreadsheets for too long. I had to go walk around because my eyes were starting to freak out. But it is done: report written, appendices compiled. We present the research to the CEO, CFO, COO etc. tomorrow, which should be fine. I basically know everything by heart at this point. It feels good to have actually finished something, statistically unreliable though it may be… Our data wasn’t really clean enough to do any regression analysis, so we put everything in charts and graphs and used summary stats, which is fine because the purpose of this assessment is mainly for publicity and grant application purposes. I will see if I can get permission to put some of the findings on here, so you can check it out. Plus, this means that I can be done with work on Friday, so I can leave this weekend to travel! Here’s what I will be doing:

At the beginning of next week I’m going to climb Mt. Karisimbi, a volcano in the north of Rwanda on the border with DRC, near where the gorillas are. The climb takes a couple days and you sleep in huts on the top. It should be pretty genius. I’m going with one of the girls from Quebec who will be here for two more weeks. After we climb the volcano, we’re going to Uganda. We will go to Kabale, a town near the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. We will penetrate the impenetrable forest. There’s also a lake there, Lake Bunyoni, that is supposed to be amazing. There are some traditional Batwa communities in that area, and if there’s a discreet way to see them I really want to. Sometimes I feel like things like that are a “people safari” and that it’s really insulting for all these white people to come and take photos, buy weird-looking masks, and then leave with really no understanding of the culture at all. It’s the worst part of globalization. But, at the same time, there are communities whose economies rely on selling things to tourists, and sometimes when I’ve taken pictures with the village women at community bank meetings, they really love it. So I don’t know, I guess I will have to feel it out. From Kabale I’ll go to Kampala and Entebbe, and then to the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria. If there’s time, I might go to Jinja and see the source of the Nile. It’s kind of far, though, and a major tourist destination (with good reason) but I’m kind of in the mood for more off-the-beaten-path type things. But, after Kabale I’ll be traveling on my own, so if off-the-beaten-path seems dangerous, then a lame tourist I will be. If anyone out there has been to Uganda, I would love some suggestions/input so I don’t rely solely on Lonely Planet.

I had kind of a cool experience after work, which I will attempt to relate, even though I feel like most of the stories like this that people try to tell never really hit on the main point. Anyway. Downtown (mu mugi) near my office, there are lots of mizungu offices. USAID, UN High Commission for Refugees, World Food Programme, Oxfam, HOPE International, and some embassies have their offices in the area where I work. And it’s in the financial district, so the government always has people cleaning things and it’s basically too beautiful and clean to be a third-world capital. So, sometimes, I feel like when I’m in town, I’m in pretend Africa or something, because it’s just weird. It does a nice job of exposing the paradoxes and ironies of Africa, though. Like the huge fountain in the roundabout that somehow always has water in it even though our running water at the house has worked a total of four days since I’ve been here. I see people with jerry cans going to get water from the fountain. And then the police chase them away. But they always come back, and the third or fourth time, the police are like, whatever, I’m not getting up again, just take the water, I don’t really care. It’s a great relationship.

That tangent was just to illustrate the fact that sometimes I feel like there is a whole city, an entire society, that lives right alongside the town that you see when you walk down the street. But you can’t find it if you don’t know where to look. I have had some glimpses of it, but it only ever appears when I’m with a Rwandese. Somehow, I can never manage to find it on my own. This mysterious city hides behind the visible shops and offices, and you have to access it through specific alley ways. But once you’re back there, it’s pretty amazing. I was first initiated when Marie, a lady from work, took me to her tailor to get a dress made. I would never be able to find the place on my own, even though it’s less than five minutes from my office. We took tons of turns down a really narrow alley/drainage ditch and arrived at a tailor, and it was like a whole other world. That’s really contrived, I know, but I’m not sure how else to describe it. Anyway, today I went hunting for a sweater after work because I need something really warm for the volcano. I went around to a few shops, but none of them had anything, and finally I found a guy who spoke French. I explained to him what I was looking for, and he took me out the back of his shop and around the block to another place. They didn’t have anything either, but one of the guys who worked there took me to another place he knew of, and so on a few more times. By the end we were so deep in the secret city that I had no idea which way was out. But I did eventually find a woman who sold sweaters, and I ended up with a cute green button-up wool sweater from… Old Navy. Where else? And either Old Navy is a luxury brand here, or they thought I was the biggest idiot ever, because they tried to make me pay 30 USD. But my bargaining skills are pretty awesome. I will be really mad at fixed prices when I get back to Montreal…

So I’m deep in the invisible city, and the guy who was helping me went back to his shop, so I had to find my way out. It was pretty awesome, and on the way I found a guy who prints things on t-shirts. Megan and I want to get t-shirts made that say (in Kinyarwanda) “If you can read this, say mizungu!” I eventually found my way out, and I was right by the bus stop place. What’s weird is that I don’t know how all those people and shops fit in between the street and normal shops. The laws of physics must be different here, which would explain why people are so good at carrying things on their heads.