Archive for the ‘African Great Lakes’ Category
Getting to ‘goodbye’
The most ubiquitous characters in my daily strolls in Kigali are the veritable army that sells airtime. They wander the streets in yellow vests, with a stack of yellow cards they try to pawn at every turn. When you need more money to use your phone—and in this country, where call rates are higher than [...]
Here’s how I guess this will work…
So, my friends, my intention was to begin my blog with a couple of posts a day about the Sierra Leone experience. Then, segue you nicely back into Central Africa. Here’s the problem: Stuff is still happening in Kigali. Actually–get this–stuff is still happening all over the world, even if I am not writing about [...]
Where have all the (cow)girls gone?
Okay, I don’t even like that song, so to all of you, and myself, I apologize. But yesterday it occurred to me, I’m surrounded by men. Occasionally I meet women in Rwanda; there are a few who work in the office our living room hosts by day, and they are amazing and wonderful. If I [...]
Is this what they mean by pidgen English?
I went with a roomie to Gisenyi today, just a quick day trip, mostly with just enough time to go down to the lake and back. We stopped at one place asking for directions, a hotel which has a separate building of apartments for rent. $200 a night—Kigali lux prices, in a place that’s barely [...]
Road rage, or, why not to live with a doctor
Two days ago, I wrote a post like this, but it was all wild and triumphant. It was a love note to motos, and a farewell to my old, cautious self who had refused to get on the back of them. The computer died, though, and I lost the post. Since then, I have again [...]
Language Lessons I
I have been taking Kinyarwanda lessons for almost three weeks now. Thank God I studied Swahili for a year; I can remember almost none of it, but all the hard work I invested in laying a neural network to make sense of noun classes and negatives is serving me well in Rwanda, where the language [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [