So...

Last week was so so. I spent some time cleaning up the studio and editing some music, it was an average week.

I did have a meeting this last week with my MCC (sending organization) boss and my WOI (partner organization) boss. It was a mid year see how things are going kind of a meeting. There was also some talk about how to keep me more busy and how to best utilize my talents.

I am kind of in a strange position in this organization, I am a worker at the station, but I am also coming from the outside. I have lots of ideas of how to improve things, but no authority to make the changes. I have been frustrated because I don't understand the chain of command and much of that misunderstanding is caused by the cultural differences. What I really need is to be told what to do, I am happy to do whatever they would like, but I have been given no direction.
The conclusion of the meeting was for us (studio workers) to have weekly meetings where I can share my ideas, we can discuss what is important, then they will tell me what they want me to work on for the following week.

We had a meeting on Friday and I believe it went well. The plan is to make a commercial for our recording studio which will then be played on the radio station. The commercial will be basically telling people to come record their songs at our studio. So, hopefully people will come, I will be more busy, and the studio will start generating income. Everybody wins.

absent

Dear faithful readers,

I apologize for my sudden lack of blog posts.
Honestly, I haven’t had any motivation to write a blog post. Things have been very slow at work, and life is not that exciting.

The excitement and newness of everything has worn off. I guess that is life.

Also, I have been making a lot of excuses such as: I’ll do it later… Well, I guess that is really the only excuse that I have come up with.

Today I took the day off work, partially because I really needed to do laundry, and partially because there was nothing going on.
Right now I’m at the café that I go to often, called cappuccino, and I’m stuck here for a bit until it stops raining.
As I sit here typing I realize, as I often do, that my typing skills are progressively getting worse. I type daily, but there is one problem, at work I use a French keyboard. It was difficult at first but then I got used to it. Now I stumble around trying to type on my laptop. Here are some of the differences:

Q and A have switched positions as well as W and Z. M has moved up next to L and I have to Shift-period to get a period. Those are the most annoying changes. The less annoying (but still annoying) changes involve ‘ @ () and “. I know their general areas by now, but I have to stop and look at the keyboard when I need to use them.

It really isn’t that big of a deal, my fingers are just really confused, and I end up using the backspace key every other word.

A small cockroach was just crawling on my leg, no big deal, its worse when I find them on my bed. I have actually become friends with the ones that live in my closet, but we have an agreement: if I see them I’m allowed to squash them. They are just tiny ones, and it is a lot of effort to chase them down.

Yes, slightly random, but a blog post none the less.

I hope you are all having a good week.

Kigoma vacation

I just got back form an amazing vacation to Tanzania! We left Christmas Eve and returned on the 2^nd.

We went to a little town called Kigoma that is just south of the Burundian border. It took us all day on a mini bus to reach Kigoma because the roads aren’t fantastic and we had to spend some time at the border crossings, but it was definitely worth the trip.

This is the beach where we spent Christmas day, and many other days, just relaxing.

Some other views from the beach

One day of our trip we went to Gombe national park to see chimpanzees. We had to take a 2 1/2hr boat ride from kigoma to the park. The water taxi was a little crowded and the sun was beating down on us, but it was scenic.

This is like the boat that we took, cargo in the middle and people piled on top and along the edges.

Sunset at Gombe

We arrived at the park in the late afternoon and we had a picnic diner on the beach.

The next morning we headed out chimp tracking, and it was amazing! There were times when the chips would come down from the trees and pass right by us on the trail. So cool!

There are some chips here resting on the trail.

Seeing the chimps was my favorite part of the vacation, but I also enjoyed exploring kigoma and relaxing on the beach. This was a great vacation and an excellent way to spend the holidays.

slow week

I’ll have to say that this last week was a little slow. It may have been slow because I was thinking about our weekend trip to Rwanda the week before and looking forward to our trip to Tanzania. This week we are heading just south of the Burundian border to a town called Kigoma, and nearby there is a park where we can hopefully see chimpanzees.


This is our papaya tree. Sadly there is only one little papaya growing on it.

I was hanging up my laundry this week and I noticed that our spiky plant along the wall was beginning to flower. Upon further investigation I discovered that it is actually a pineapple growing in the center! Our cook looked at me like I was crazy for taking pictures of the plants in the backyard, but I think it is exciting.


A number of other plants have surfaced recently in previously bare areas of the yard. There are beans, corn, tomatoes, and a few other things that I can’t identify. Something I really enjoy about Bujumbura is the use of space. In random little corners of neighborhoods, and even just on the side of the street, people have little plots of land where they are growing their crops.



At work not much has been happening. We finished a project for a choir, but other than that not a lot to do. It’s a little discouraging sometimes because I want to be accomplishing something, or progressing toward a goal. I know there is a lot that our little studio can accomplish, but it’s just not happening. I’m hoping that this upcoming vacation will be refreshing and that when I come back I will have new motivation and some creative ideas.

Kigali trip

From Thursday to Sunday we were in Kigali, Rwanda.

The border crossing of Rwanda and Burundi

I didn’t take any pictures of the downtown portion of Kigali because the whole time I was thinking, “Wow, this place is really developed.”

You can’t tell from my photos but Kigali is pushing to become a major city. There are nice roads and sidewalks, stoplights and streetlights, and they are in the process of building two additional sky scrapers (all of these are in sharp contrast to Bujumbura).

It is also a very clean city. Plastic bags, like grocery bags, are outlawed and they even check for them at the border crossing, but I happened to smuggled two in.

This is the hotel Milles Collines, the hotel that the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on.

Once we got a little outside the main downtown area things changed a little.

One of the things we did while in town was visit a coffee shop called Bourbon, but I would have sworn we were in Starbucks. It was a very surreal feeling especially because it was decorated for the Christmas holiday. It hasn’t really felt like Christmas yet, probably because there are not a lot of decorations around town (bjumbura) and commercialism hasn’t infused itself into the holiday yet. Also, it’s hot!

On our way back to Bujumbura we stopped at a genocide memorial. The memorial is located in a church, which has remained relatively untouched, where one of the massacres happened.

When you walk into the church you see piles and piles of clothes on benches and on the floor, holes from grenade blasts, and a blood stained alter. Our tour guide told us the horrific story of what happened. In summery, people fled to the church to seek refuge, the church property was surrounded by solders, the solders then proceeded to killed people in every way imaginable, and unimaginable, and over two days thousands of people lost their lives.

this photo is from bbc, but similar to what was at the memorial
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8412014.stm

check out the story

Shockingly, our guide was one of the 10 survivors of this massacre, so this gave so much more weight to his words when he described the killings because he saw them with his own eyes.

Out back there was a crypt that we walked down into. Inside there are some coffins but there are mostly just bones on shelves. The skulls are in neat rows and other bones just in piles.

The whole time we were on the tour all I could think was: I can’t believe this happened…how could this happen…how could people do this?

It was kind of a depressing way to leave Rewanda but it was good that we saw the memorial and heard this man's story.