I am writing this post, the first on this blog, from the airplane over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I am about halfway through the first leg of my journey out: the flight left at 6:00 p.m., and now it is about 9:15 p.m. (Eastern Time). I had been hoping to sleep for the whole flight, but I woke up after about three hours later and I feel pretty awake.
This trip will contain several firsts for me: I have never flown on an airplane alone before. I have never been out of the United States for more than two weeks. I have never really been to a developing country (unless you count South Africa), and I have never been anywhere near the equator (except on the way to South Africa).
Rwanda will be the smallest and most densely populated country I have ever visited. It will also be the one with the lowest human development index, the least-developed tourism infrastructure and the longest presidential terms. On the other hand, it will be the fastest-growing economy and it will have the highest proportion of women in its parliament.
It’s kind of interesting what distinctive things about this trip are not firsts: it is not my first time in a malarial zone or a non-O.E.C.D. country (both South Africa). I have been to places with higher unemployment, more political corruption, higher crime rates and more income inequality (again, South Africa on all of these). It is not the first landlocked country I am visiting (that was the Czech Republic), nor will it be the one with the highest summer temperatures (which, honestly, is probably the United States). It is not the first with French as an official language (I’ve been to France and Monaco), nor the first with a majority Bantu-speaking population (there’s South Africa again).
Maybe I’m having too much fun with that. I do have one interesting story to share so far. At the airport, after going through security, I first went on a fairly long search for food; it ended happily (Shake Shack!), and I then came back and sat down at the gate a few minutes before boarding started. There was a crowd of young people nearby, looking about college-age. One of them noticed the flag sticking out of my bag and asked—in African-accented, but native, English—what country’s flag it was. We had the following exchange:
Student: “What country’s flag is that?”
Me: “Rwanda.”
Student: “Oh, do you live there? Are you from Rwanda?”
Me: “No, but I’m going there.”
Student: “Really? Are you going to be safe there?”
Me: “Oh, yeah, it’s fine.”
Student (skeptical): “Wow. So, are you in the army, or are you with a mission?”
Encouraging, right? For all I knew, he was going there too!
As it turned out, he was with a group of students from Durban University of Technology in Durban, South Africa. A few more of them came over, and we had a pretty interesting conversation. They had been in the U.S. for a conference on housing at the University of Pittsburgh. I was happy to hear that they had enjoyed their time here; they said that everyone they had met was really nice and the hospitality was great. That is the impression I usually hear from Americans going abroad, and it is kind of nice to know that the reverse can be true too. We also talked about life as a student here and in South Africa, the research I was doing, and other things too; they were a good group of people.
They had a long trip ahead of them: they must have already flown (or perhaps bussed) in from Pennsylvania, and from Amsterdam they would take transfer flights first to Johannesburg (in itself much longer than mine to Kigali), and then from there to Durban.
So there’s only so much I can blog about before arriving at my destination. I’ll post when I have access to the Internet, hopefully in Amsterdam. We are projected to arrive about 45 minutes early; in the meantime, I am going to try to read, or maybe sleep some more.
Update: I am at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol now, but the Wi-Fi is kind of slow so the Blogger page won’t load. Maybe I will try again after I get some food.
Update: Yeah, Internet is tough. I am posting this at the first opportunity, probably from an Internet café in Kigali.
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