First of all, special shout-out to my son-in-law, Kolbe, on his feast day. May you, like your namesake, draw ever closer to Our Blessed Mother. May you also take good care of my daughter and that cute little Louie!
The title of this post is French for “I have arrived,” though there is supposed to be an accent on the e and despite some digging around and consulting Lord Google, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to type that e with an accent. If Madame Mills should ever read this, I apologize.
Lots to talk about today. First, my flight over. Everything travel-wise went rather smoothly. If you read my last post, you will know my travel plans changed rather last-minute. To avoid a storm and potential delays in Chicago, I was re-routed through Houston. Instead of Omaha to Chicago to Brussels (a rather direct route to Europe before heading south to Rwanda), I went Omaha to Houston to Newark to Brussels. That’s roughly 21.5 hours of flying time.
One intentional point of surrender for me is to not select my seat ahead of time. God took good care of me: I was on an aisle from Newark to Brussels, and then I had an aisle from Brussels to Kigali with no one in the seat next to me! That means I had both an aisle AND a window seat for the 8+ hour flight yesterday (only two seats on the outside section of the plane I was on). It was so nice to be able to stretch my legs across two seats.
Yesterday it finally dawned on me why air travel can throw a guy’s sleep schedule. I left Newark at 6:30 pm for a roughly 7 hour flight. My body thought I was landing at 1:30 am, but the sun was already up. I had slept for maybe two hours on the flight, partly because I can only get so comfortable on an airplane, and partly because I wasn’t really ready to sleep until 10 pm “my body time.”
I had a little more than two hours layover in Brussels. That gave me enough time to drink some coffee (Starbucks is international and overpriced in every country) and charge my phone. I slept for maybe another 2 hours on the flight from Brussels to Kigali.
I am grateful that I had recently been to Kigali this past January/February with Kathy Lesnar, who is a seasoned veteran of travel to Rwanda. I was well-prepared to show my passport and visa, and had ready the required contact information for where I will be staying. My entry went smoothly, and I was relieved to see my checked bag come down the conveyor belt.
The only minor hiccup was that I had the wrong phone number for the priest who was going to pick me up at the airport. I thought I was texting him my information; I was wrong. When I called last night upon arrival, I learned that he thought I was arriving today. So, I took a taxi to the “hotel” I am staying in. He is going to pick me up in about an hour, so I want to hurry and get this posted.
I should talk a bit about Kigali. Honestly, this place intimidates me. This is one of those things that you almost have to experience to believe, but I will do my best to describe it. First of all, one of the nicknames for Kigali is the land of a thousand hills. In fact, if you are familiar with the movie “Hotel Rwanda” (I recommend it), the name of the hotel is Milles Collines, which is French for “Thousand Hills.”
In case a math nerd reads this (one is writing it), Euclid based his geometry on a plane, or flat surface (think Lincoln, NE). On a flat surface, you can have a “line” continue on forever without any bends or turns. On a hilly surface, a “line” follows the contour of the hill and therefore necessarily bends and turns. With this in mind, you can imagine what the road system looks like. Sometimes I think I recognize where I am, but I easily get disoriented because there is no sense of “east-west” and “north-south” roads.
Adding to the tension is the traffic here. I had a favorite book when I was a child called “Hope for the Flowers”. It was a rather obscure book, though available in PDF format on the Internet Archive and is a quick, easy read. Assuming you haven’t read it, it is about a caterpillar who is seeking “more” and climbs onto a “caterpillar pillar” which is a pillar of caterpillars all trying to get to the top. Climbing up the pillar is classic dog eat dog where you step on other caterpillars and inch your way into any available opening to get to where you want to go.
In Kigali, there is this cacophony of cars, large trucks and motos that somehow moves together without serious accidents. There are lanes, but these are much more suggestions than absolutes. The motos often serve as taxis, and are treated more like bicycles than motorcycles. My taxi driver (my taxi was a mini-van) would simply tap his horn to let the moto driver know he was coming through, and it was up to the moto driver to get out of the way. The large trucks, slowly moving up the hills, simply provide a fun set of moving obstacles for the cars and motos that are moving through the streets. It seems a car only need be a few inches ahead of another car in order to be eligible to make a lane change. In America there would be much honking and one-finger salutes, but here it seems that cutting someone off is the norm. I would not want to drive in Kigali!
Kigali is the capital of Rwanda. It has a population of roughly 1.7 million, according to the internet. I am told that this total is misleading, as there are many people who live in the surrounding area and come into Kigali every day. It has been 15 years since I first came to Kigali, and while I cannot quantify it, it sure feels like there has been incredible growth. It is in many ways a typical city, but there is plenty of vegetation throughout and not much variety in the architecture and building materials.
I am staying at the St. Vincent Pallotti Center. They describe themselves as a 2-star hotel, but it feels more like a retreat center. There is a chapel in the basement as well as two separate chapels on the grounds. There is an interesting story about one of the chapels that is named after the Holy Family (pictured below). During the 1994 genocide (more about that in a later post), the chapel was burned to the ground. Allegedly, the only thing that survived the fire were the three words made from iron “Dieu est amor” (French for “God is love”) that you can see in the picture behind the altar. What a message!
As I type this, I am sitting on a balcony (had to check out of my room at 10 am local, so I have a few hours to type this while waiting for Fr. Jean Pierre to pick me up). There is the constant sound of traffic and construction you might expect in a big city, but somewhere nearby there is a group of people that occasionally break into joyful song. There is a building project going on literally right outside my room, so I woke up this morning to the sound of saws whirring, hammers hammering, workers shouting to each other, and trucks beeping to indicate that they are backing up. Sleeping in was not an option.
The network connection in my room last night was comically spotty. On the balcony here I have had great and constant internet, so I assume it had something to do with my room. When connected to the hotel’s wifi, I can send and receive texts and even phone calls through WhatsApp. When the wifi drops, however, I get notice that I should have received a text, but I cannot get the content. When I flew back to the US after my last trip, the texts finally started coming in (in no apparent order). Imagine six weeks of the Korta Family group chat pouring in with no rhyme or reason to it. That is what I have to look forward to on October 1st. If you have sent me a text and I haven’t responded, there is a good chance I won’t read it until October. On the other hand, if I happen to be on a network when it comes in, I might respond right away!
Finally, a few words about malaria. In each of the prior two trips to Rwanda, I was given anti-malaria meds with the recommendation to take the first pill one day prior to arrival and to daily take the medicine throughout my time here and 9-10 days after my return. Furthermore, I am supposed to take each pill at roughly the same time of day with food.
With my sudden departure and trying to accommodate time zone changes, I didn’t get my first dose in. When I went to bed last night, I figured I would take my first dose with breakfast this morning. Well, during the night I heard a few mosquitos buzzing around my ear which kind of freaked me out. Despite the availability of mosquito netting above my bed (seen in picture below looking like a huge chandelier above my bed), I had never used mosquito netting before and went to bed without pulling it down. Finally at about 2 am, I got up and dug through my luggage to take my first dose after killing a couple of skeeters in my room. The internet tells me that the medicine not only prevents malaria but also treats it; if one of those rascals happens to be carrying malaria and also happened to bite me, I assume the meds will keep me on the up and up. Stay tuned…
I will strive to keep posts shorter than this, but I felt like I had lots to share today. I hope you are all doing well back home. I am doing very well here and excited to enter this next six weeks in Rwanda! God bless.