Groenteman (Vegetable seller)

Every Monday and Thursday we get vegetables delivered to the door.


Augustine is the boss, and he comes with one or two bearers with fruit and veg. I leave a shopping list and Clarisse gets it and haggles about quality and price, and if I'm home I go and take a look in case he has anything interesting like red peppers or rhubarb.



On Fridays, he comes with flowers, eggs and special orders from Thursday, and its also possible to put in an order for Mondays.

Clarisse then takes all the fresh produce in, and washes it with bicarbonate of soda to kill off any nasties, spins the lettuce etc, and all gets put in the fridge in tupperware containers ready to use.

The only downside is that the veg comes in family size quantities, which means we don't need to buy that much - or we go to the supermarket to buy 6 chillies instead of a kilo!

Thermal surfing

These are ALL eagles

What's in a name

A couple of years ago Rwanda decided to change the provinces, not to mad, because there were too many. At the same time they decided to change most of the place names; less smart. It is very hard to get a decent map of Rwanda, the best ones come from Europe. These maps are reasonable resent and some details are not 100% correct. So foreigners use the old names and so do most of the locals still. The newspapers etc. use both, sometimes in the same sentence. Luckily there are at least three names unchanged: Rwanda, Kigali and Gisenyi.

This all however is completely irrelevant as the signs on the road seldom mention the place names, they mention the name of the hill/neighbourhood. I don't think I've ever seen a sign "Kigali".

Greetings from Kiyovu.

Finally complete

YEAH !!! WE GOT THE CAR !!

After a few times 'next week' this week it became a few times 'tomorrow'. Yesterday it became today. Today it became 10.00 then it became 10.30, I will call you back in a moment, and again and again. Finally I called at 13.00 and they said, you can come now. The timing of my colleague was brilliant, as I walk out he said 'this has to be fixed today'. So after a 15 minutes delay I stopped a taxi, forget to negotiate the price upfront, so I got charged twice the price but couldn't be bothered to haggle. There it was, in it's natural environment: The street. To me it was a bright sight, but to others it was a very dusty one. So while one man was fixing the license plate, the man showed me the spare wheel, the key, the 1 paper that took weeks to create. So I happily paid the license plate man his fixing fee (even though we have a square plate on a rectangle spot). Stupid me told the man the car was dirty, so I had to take it to the car wash, even though our guard always cleans the car. So we went there I had a drink until the man was gone then told they washers that I had to go even though it wasn't finished paid the full price and drove of. FREEDOM. We went to Hazels favourite road and took it further than we have ever been, Hazels first drive since July. Only negative is that Hazel has to get up at the same time as me to drop me at the embassy. We will see how it works out, but I might be buying a small moped for commuting.

Exploring

Today we went to explore. I wanted to say the highest accessible hill close by. We found the hill, the road wasn't brilliant, but the experience was good. Unfortunately the road became smaller and smaller and we could see a river in the distance and no sign of any other road. So we turned and went past the same people who looked at us as funny as the first time we drove by. Back home we looked at Google earth and discovered we were heading in the direction of Burundi, so distances are not vast, we kind of knew that but not really realised.

A house is being built.

Hopefully we can explore in our own car soon. They lost our papers again! What are the chances petrol will not be available when we got our car?

Excitement

We get some excitement in our live, but not necessary the kind we hoped for. As you all know the Kenyans are not friendly to each other at the moment. This resulted in trucks not leaving from Mombasa harbour. All the petrol for Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi comes through Kenya. This already resulted in a fuel crisis in Uganda. In Rwanda, so far, there is still petrol, however petrol stations have been instructed not to give more than 10 litres for small cars and 20 for bigger cars and not to fill jerry cans. Thursday there were some queues due to people stockpiling, Friday there were only short queues. Colleagues had mixed experiences, some got 10.000 francs worth (15 litre) others got a full tank. We are a bit lucky in the sense that we get tax free coupons, and these are not dated, so even if there will be rations, we always get petrol, maybe we have to go to different petrol stations at the time. However, our coupons only work in Kigali. A colleague is going out of Kigali this weekend, I'm curious what her experiences are.

We don't know what the long term effect will/can be. Basic foods are grown locally, but often transported by truck. Water is local, so we're safe there. We haven't got a clue where the electricity comes from. We have 100 litre diesel for the generator. We didn't stock pile, but still have some food from The Netherlands. We hope this will blow over soon. There are negotiations going on to get supplies via Tanzania, but those roads are a bit worse, so it might take longer and cost more.

I will inform what the emergency procedures are at work, but we remain positive, so far, except for the petrol, we haven't noticed any change in people or supplies.

If you have doubts or just want to check, Skype, mail or our numbers are:
Lon +250 08642454
Hazel +250 03073024
DO dial the zero after 250.

No news is good news.

Useless fact

This could have been a traffic light



Some things I thought were obvious



We live at 1480 meters altitude, the top of our hill is around 1525 meters and the valley 1400. If you dig a hole through the earth, you'll end up in the middle of the pacific ocean 1000 km south of Hawai. There are four major cities/attractions all at different corners; north, east, south and west. The quickest route from and to any of these places is always via Kigali. The tops of the two nearby hills that are roughly 1800 meters high, can not be reached by car.

Timezones

First of all

HAPPY 2008 make something nice of it.

Kigali is more advanced then any other city I know.
We do not have daylight saving time (zomertijd), in stead we have a different time zone in our bedroom! One of the first days in our house the elctricity went out and the electric clocks were all 10 minutes slow. My conclusion was that the electricity was out for ten minutes. Could have known this was impossible as our guards are very quick with putting the generator on.

Anyway, recently we noticed our clocks were 15 minutes fast. So this was not posible just by a powercut. We changed them and a day later they were fast again. So now we have to check every day when we go to bed what the real time is and hope the alarm goes off roughly at the right time.

It is an exciting place!