Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week were not uneventful, but they were eventful in ways that are not easy to blog about: I went about business, talked with friends and family and caught up on writing about a busy weekend. Some very general things below:
- The guy who sold me my SIM card has been calling me. I talked to him once and have ignored him since; I do not really feel a need to be his friend. This is confusing because someone called me from a different number and introduced himself with the same name; I have since been ignoring both numbers’ calls. The problem is that I think one of them might be a person with that name who I met at church and would not mind talking to, but I do not know which one that is because I gave them the same name in my address book.
- I finally submitted my research permit application at the Ministry of Education on Tuesday, after securing my letter of affiliation from the Rwandan Academy of Language and Culture. That should take about a week to approve, and then I can finally start doing my work.
- One of the things I had to submit with the permit application was a pair of passport-sized photos. I did not have those, I realized, at the time that I handed in most of the application. I was a bit peeved to hear that they would not even look at my application until I had given the photos in (really?). Much more interesting, though, was the process of getting the photos printed. I went to a papeterie in town that offered printing services; it turned out that this just meant they had some printers and some paper, and no photo paper. They also did not really know what to do with the material they had, hindered by inability to speak English. So I ended up using their computer to paste my photograph into Microsoft Word, and then after printing it I cut them out myself with the pair of scissors they gave me. I only paid 300 Francs (45 cents), so I do not feel so bad, but I might have liked to not do all that myself.
- Meeting with a guy from my affiliating organization gave me the chance to look around the Kigali Institute of Education, in Kimironko, for a little bit. That is a very nice campus, which was comforting to see: I spent some time looking around the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology awhile ago, and much of that school looked overgrown and decrepit.
- The amount of candy I have been consuming here is probably kind of frightening—I will find out just how frightening when I look through all of my receipts back in New York. Every couple of days, when I go into town, I make what has become a very familiar circuit: to Bourbon Coffee, where I buy a scoop of ice-cream and do Internet things on my iPad with their Wi-Fi, then to Simba Supermarket, where I buy snacks. I select my foods based primarily on price—I buy at least three items each time and have yet to pay more than 2,000 francs ($3.00) in one visit. These are three fairly large items, too: the prices are quite amazing. This is not because my hosts are not feeding me well, by the way, but because I am American and I need sugar!
- Monday, 1 July, was Independence Day; businesses were closed. It is kind of interesting that independence is still celebrated here, given the circumstances under which Rwanda became a republic. 1959 through 1962 saw the dissolution of the old monarchy via ethnic revolution, and the rise of a government of the majority under the auspices of colonists who largely turned a blind eye to massacres of Tutsis that foreshadowed worse events to come. I guess, for a young state like Rwanda, it is nice to have another public holiday—and, in any case, others are commemorated more.
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