Monday, May 18

Monday was back to work as usual, and even though we were still staying in Paradis (the actual name of our hotel) we were doing plenty of work again. We woke up early to start our two hour drive to the Gishwati forest, but it was definitely, definitely worth it. I think Dr. Keino might have said something like “Rwanda is really pretty” at one of our meetings during the semester, and I think it was the biggest understatement of my life. Rwanda is absolutely, hands-down, no question the most beautiful place I have ever even dreamed of seeing. I didn't come here expecting to be blown away by the natural geography, so that made it even better. I will never, ever be able to put the landscape into words, so instead I'll describe my reaction: many times I had goosebumps as I looked out over the thousand hills and fields and I was devastated when I would think that I only had such a short time to see it. I thought the Cinque Terre of Italy was gorgeous, but there is more beauty in 10 minutes of driving through Rwanda than in all of Europe.

We met the people of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa at their field station and set off hiking to the site of all the tree planting. The chimpanzees living in the Gishwati right now are doomed to extinction unless they can start breeding with the chimps in the much larger forest to the south, so a plan has been devised to connect the two places by creating a corridor of forest for the chimps to travel in.

After a solid hike we arrived at the planting site and were surprised to see that about 50 people were already working there. I think we were all under the impression that we would just be by ourselves doing some conservation work, but we were actually joining a large part of the local working force. The government of Rwanda has recognized the problem of depletion of Rwanda's forest and is funding the project to restore them. It's a pretty good deal, as it employs tons of the people living nearby in the process.

The only problem with this situation was that we were kind of trying to do these people's job when they were already much, much better at it than us and were obviously only slowed down by our presence. I decided I would do anything to keep myself from looking like some conceited America who comes in and tells people what to do, so I tried to help as much as I could while making a fool of myself in the process. It actually worked out well – even though I couldn't communicate with any of the people around, everyone understood the comedy of me trying to do their job.

So we planted a few trees, then eventually hiked our way back to our jeeps. Along the way kids from all the houses along the path would see me walk by and run to follow me. By the time I got close to the village there was probably 15 kids following me just to check me out - it looked like it came straight out of a UNICEF commercial. Everyone else was pretty exhausted and started the drive back to Paradis, but Lori (another student) and I stayed back with some people from the Great Ape Trust to work on our bean pole project. We spent a while talking to a local farmer and learning all about the process of growing beans in Rwanda. We got answers to a lot of questions that we would have otherwise been clueless about, but I'm not entirely sure that these are the answers we wanted.

We finally started our journey back home around 4 (views were still incredible even to my exhausted senses) and arrived just in time for some dinner. I had asked the girls from FAWE school what their favorite traditional Rwandan dish was – what they really wanted to eat whenever they went home with their families. They family meals usually consisted of beans, rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, matooke (pretty much a potato shaped like a banana), and a sauce. I don't think they're usually concerned with leaving on an empty stomach.

Anyway, I had noticed that our hotel had a dish called 'Plat Rwandais', which was pretty much exactly what the girls had described. I decided I needed to try it, and not surprisingly I was stuffed. It was actually a lot more flavorful than I expected... the beans were really good and Rwandan sweet potatoes are like American sweet potatoes on steroids.

So exhausted, sunburnt, and full to bursting I fell asleep without a problem.