another day

After three weeks here, the days - sights, people, life, work - feel pretty normal so I guess that means I'm settling in. The great part about the newness wearing thin is that you actually get to see things closer to what they are and it gives me more space to breathe it in. Even though I'm working, it still feels a little like vacation and I'm trying to maintain a sense of just being/abiding and letting the experience do the work. In a lot of ways, it has been restorative for me to be away from my normal life and to visit a slice of the global development world. It is also a great challenge, as it forces me to confront a prevailing reality that has, does and will continue to pull me out of an otherwise comfortable hibernation. I am, however, cheating the game a little by being here for a few months - long enough to feel present but short enough to avoid some of the more difficult issues and transitions.

During some more of my recent field excursions, I was able to get a little deeper into the rural parts of Rwanda, near the Congolese border. We paid a visit to one of Opportunity's poster-child clients, who started with just enough of a loan to buy a single bag of sorghum and is now running a full harvesting and processing operation that employs twenty some-odd people. The picture above is the walk between the stream where the Sorghum is washed/soaked and the area where it is dried. You can see a few boys carrying the large bags of sorghum on their head. The picture below shows a few of the women washing and soaking the sorghum in the stream. The entourage of children is a typical escort for "mizungus" (kinyarwanda for white, aka rich people).

This next shot is out the back window of our land rover as we left one of the villages - you can see how the kids like to chase the car and a few of them even hung on to the spare tire as we made our way back to the main road.




And finally, a roadside stand where we stopped to buy some bananas and pineapples on the way back into Kigali. Kind of reminds me of buying fruit or vegetables on the side of the highway in Arkansas...except not.