Friday 5 mars – life in Kigali

I’m now starting to feel like this is home. I am settled in my house, am starting to actually know what I’m doing at work and know my way around Kigali pretty well by now. The routines are also starting to be established. I work-out a couple of times a week, study some French when I get the time and go to quiz night on Mondays. It’s not much different from my life in Sweden since I don’t have any money and it rains quite often. Well maybe a little different. I think to myself sometimes when I walk through the tall grass by the lake that if I get bitten by a snake I will probably not survive, even though there’s a hospital 300m away. If it’s a mamba or a cobra it doesn’t matter. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be a lot of snakes in Kigali and they mostly come out at night. And well I wouldn’t like to get sick in this country at all actually. Not sick enough that I have to go to the hospital anyway. I’ve heard some horror stories so I better stay healthy and not getter sicker than my little home pharmacy can handle. Apart from that I guess there’s also the water situation. Water can be quite scarce here in the dry season, that’s normal but we are having water problems now, during the wet season, as well. Some days the pressure is not high enough to take a shower and when that happens you can only hope that you’re not just back from a jogging tour.

Now that I’ve talked some about the negative things about living here I guess I should mention some of the positive ones. First of all there’s the wonderful weather which is not too warm and never cold. It rains a lot this time of year but that just cools the temperature a bit and that is a good thing. Then there’s the food. You can find an amazing supply of fruits and vegetables! There never seems to be the wrong season for anything and they can actually get three harvests a year here. If you by locally produced foods there’s not at all as much chemicals and preservatives in them as there is at home and they taste much better. It feels so much healthier than the food at home even though there’s more sugar and fat in it. You just don’t eat as much since you get everything you need through a smaller quantity. Another positive thing is the stunning beauty of this country. Calling it “the land of a thousand hills” is really not an over statement! There are terrace fields all along the slopes of the hills where they grow all kind of crops like coffee, tea, bananas, corn, potatoes and cassava. There are so many nice things about this country it would take forever to list them here. I think I'll stop here for now...