End of term Byumba

Well what an exciting day. In the morning we went to end of term ceremony at the nursery school where our niece used to be the principal. These two little boys were totally engrossed in playing with the drum rather than paying attention to what their teachers were doing until they got told off!

After this we went to Kigali. That was a real adventure. The "car" we'd hired was.....um.....a challenge! I volunteered to drive to Kigali. Basically the brakes were pretty shot, the steering a challenge, the clutch almost gpne and the gears....well it was a case of don't care any gear I can find! After a while I realised if I put my foot flat on the floor I could change gear without crashing them too much. Th road thru Byumba is pretty awful and takes a lot of swerving to miss potholes (more potholes than road) but once we got down the hill the road improved......most of the way. It takes about two and a half hours to get from Byumba to Kigali. On the way we had a couple of incidents. A very angry man threw a large stick at us, obviuosly didn't like "mzungus". Then then we realised at one point we had two extra passengers in the back of the pick up truck. They had obviously jumped in when we slowed down and they stayed in til we got to the outskirts of Kigali. The reason for going to Kigali was that Heather's brothers arrived the previous night but their luggage did not, so we had to go back to the airport to collect it. So we got off at the genocide museum whilst the boys went onto the airport.

The museum was very heart rendering. The families we are staying with all have suffered horrendous tragedies during the genocide and Manasseh the groom lost both his parents and some siblings. So going to the museum had special significance even though this memorial is just where those who were killed in Kigali are buried. Heather's younger brother then drove us back to Byumba. We went to Manasseh's for dinner and always seems to happen there were loads of people present and dinner took a long time to arrive but everything here is very social.

Next thing is the wedding (well dowry ceremony) where we think the whole town will be attending. So watch this space!
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