September 23, 2014 (Part 2), Lake Muhaze, Rwanda

Kids standing alone in a field...a common site.

A typical home along our route to the refugee camp.

A busy market.

Lake Muhaze - The view from our motel.

Kids playing alongside the road.

After we finished training the security forces, we boarded a small bus and left Kigali en route to a refugee camp. We traveled east through Kabuga and Ntunga, through green rolling hills to a small motel on Lake Muhaze. As we traveled east, we traveled back through time.

Our only experience had been in more affluent neighborhoods in Kigali, one of the largest cities in Rwanda. As we left the center of Kigali, we traveled through various villages on the city outskirts, and city transitioned to town, and town to farmland.

Pleasant earthy smells filled the bus with cooler evening mountain air. We saw field after field of people tending banana trees and other crops. Now and then we would see a field with dozens of people working together to prepare the field for planting. Otherwise, people were scattered across the farmland, hacking and picking and digging. The road carried a constant stream of people walking or riding bicycles. Farm equipment consisted of simple hand tools, and no more.

Even in the countryside, we rarely traveled more than a few miles without seeing someone walking. Many of the walkers and riders carried 5-gallon water containers. There seemed no stretch of road that wasn’t going up or down. People bent at the waist with head hanging low and muscled bicycles strapped with a hundred pounds of water up the hills. Men and women carried strikingly heavy loads perfectly balanced on their heads. Children not of working age played in dirt wearing well-worn clothes. Not one looked sad. Not one cried. Children playing in dirt…nothing more simple and perfect than that.

Houses were not houses as Americans think of houses. They were modest structures made of mud or clay, not big enough for anything other than a bed or two and a stove. Utilitarian. These people use their homes to sleep, perhaps to eat, or to escape the weather. Otherwise, they are outside. Some structures were no more than sticks strung together in a web pattern with mud and hay shoved and stacked into the space between the sticks. The addresses were spray-painted in black on walls facing the road.

Now and then we would pass small villages with active commerce. One such village had what an American would judge as a pretty large flea market. As in the cities, people communed, held hands, laughed and chatted. Adults stared with passive interest at our bus as we passed. Kids waved excitedly.

We arrived to our motel after the sun had set. It was in a beautiful location on the lake. The staff showed us to our simple rooms. A bed and a bathroom. No hot water, no tables or chairs.

The hours spent traveling back through time, east through Rwanda, the Land of a Thousand Hills, held the most pleasant moments of the journey for me thus far.