We’ve just returned home from a lovely dinner out with the residents and local staff. It was great to get together as a group outside of the academic setting and learn more about everyone. Alfred, the chief resident, gave a lovely speech about the residents’ commitment to hard work and thanked Patty and I for our help over the past month. It was a little sad to say goodbye to the junior residents as they’re heading back to Butare and we won’t see them again before we leave.
Lake Kivu, our weekend destination, was beautiful. Patty calls it the Rwandan Riviera. I saw a real hot spring bubbling from the earth and cooked some potatoes for dinner. Then I poached a salmon. Patty and I got a key piece of beach real estate and watched the sunset over the mountains in the Congo while people swam and fished in the orange glow. I certainly will add this to my list of best ever sunsets. What I won’t add to my “best ever” list was the hotel without mosquito nets. I think I got around 350 bites and spent most of the night defending my eyelids from mosquito mouthparts. Now I’ve quintupled my malarone dose and gone psychotic.
Sunday’s return trip to Kigali was a success. Patty had been fretting about the trip all week in anticipation of the bus ride. We decided to take the public bus home from Gisenyi. We drew up a careful dehydration plan so neither of us would have an accident on the bus (the bus stops for NO reasons on the way home). We showed up extra early to get good seats but Patty ditched me shortly into the trip and I ended up sharing my space with half of Rwanda. I think 5 people sat in 3 seats. I even had a little boy on my lap. I tried to get him to teach me how to count in Kinyarwanda but he was too entranced by the bus TV which blared “BET” dance videos for the next 3 hours. It actually wasn’t that bad and since we drove at Mach 3 we made it back to Kigali in record time. Patty secretly loved the bus.
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