When in doubt, pitch it out!

2/21/09
So Diane came this morning and worked with Anita and I for about an hour and a half on Kinyarwanda. Her English pretty good so we got by and I think we’ll try to fit in a lesson with her once a week.
After she left we spent the day cleaning the house – this place has accumulated 4 years worth of people’s junk and we decided no one else was ever going to throw anything out so we made it our project for the day. There is something cathartic about throwing out other people’s junk – it also brought back surprisingly fond memories the days I used to clean out our house when I knew my father wouldn’t be home for a while. Four hours and three huge trash bags later, however, the nostalgia wore off and we left the rest for another day. Now comes the hard part – actually throwing this stuff out. Since I’ve been here I’ve noted that several items have somehow made their way back onto a shelf after being placed in the garbage so I think Josie, Seraphine and Joseph are reluctant to throw things out (understandably given the difficulty and expense of getting a lot of things in Rwanda). Considering that among the items we threw out were expired suppositories and empty ink cartridges for printers that no longer exist, hopefully we can manage to ensure they actually get thrown out. Now “thrown out” is a relative term here since there is no regular garbage collection and as far as I can tell most people just incinerate whatever garbage they create. So who knows what the ultimate fate of those suppositories will be – maybe they would have been better off gathering dust here for four more years! Anyway, we’ve decided to slowly divide the trash over the next few weeks and we’ll see what happens. One huge bonus of our mega cleanup though was the discovery of an electric-mosquito-killing-tennis-racquet-like contraption. We have a real fruit fly problem so I’ve been diligently zapping them which is disturbingly satisfying… I think of Eunice and feel guilty every time I zap something since I know she would have a conniption (she yelled at me every time I killed a mosquito even if it was about to bite me).
Anyway, after calling it quits on the clean up (all we have left is the bookshelf and two bedroom closets) I went for a run (which I’m now going to really try to incorporate into my daily routine) and then Anita and I joined Katie for dinner at Sun & Moon – a new pizza shop in Centre Ville. It still hasn’t ceased to amaze me how dead Kigali is at night and a Saturday night at that! I mean there certainly are hot spots and popular bars/clubs but overwhelmingly this city is NOT nocturnal – quite a switch from NY.

2/22/09
Well today has been my laziest day in Kigali thus far. I went for another run this morning and spent the rest of the day leisurely reading and doing a whole lotta nothin! Anita and I are planning several weekend trips to occupy ourselves and explore as much of Rwanda as possible so I don’t think I’ll have too many more quiet weekends in Kigali… probably a good thing since a little bit of boredom has started to set in this evening.