Arrived in Rwanda
First days of my Social Sabbatical
Today is my third day in Rwanda. I arrived here on Saturday evening. Already during the stop over in Brussels I met some of our group. It was great to see the colleagues, I will work with in the next weeks and I met virtually many times, in person for the first time. Unfortunately, our seats were distributed over the plane so that we hadn’t got the chance to talk. But since then we had enough opportunities to know each other a little bit better. On the airport we were picked up and taken to the hotel where we met the rest of the group who already arrived there on Friday night.
On Sunday, we had our first official meeting in the group with some ice breakers, introductions, and games like the architects-engineers game which teaches us how difficult it can be to communicate. In between we had lunch and did a tour through different parts of the city of Kigali. Kigali extends over several hills and has much green. We saw a quite diversity of roads from unpaved ones to really new perfectly paved ones. Even the houses have a big variety, from some shanty houses to huge western style houses.
We spent the evening having lunch in a probably typical Rwandian restaurant, where a lot of meat was served, literally hills of meat. For me as a vegetarian that was not what I preferred, but the others seemed to like it. But luckily there was also a vegetarian alternative which was not very Rwandian (Pasta), but nevertheless tasted good.
Yesterday the great moment came, when we finally met our host clients in person at the Genocide Memorial. But before that Marc, our local coordinator, have as a short through the memorial. It’s a nice place what makes a huge contrast to the reason of its existence. There are 250000 victims of the genocide against the Tutsis buried, so actually it’s a huge cemetery. This makes me feeling quite weird, in particular since we are going to work with our hosts there, because they don’t have an own office.
After the tour we meet the persons from the host clients and reach of the organizations introduced themselves. All were presented by young, strong women that were very impressing.
Then each subteam went with their hosts to their offices and started their work with them. My team (robin_meyerhoff, Liz, and me) stayed with Ariane and Alice from starlight at the memorial and started the conversation about their organization, their successes, and their vision.
