The Weekend

I had a great great weekend, and it all pretty much started on Friday afternoon, when I decided to stick around the hospital in the afternoon, because some of my favourite interns were working, and I can provide them with comic amusement and the occasional tidbit of relevant medical information. Sometime mid-afternoon when it was a bit slow I ended up chatting with a fifth year medical student I hadn't met before. When he asked me what my plans for the night were, well I didn't really have any - so I got invited out to some party he was planning on going to! Random but that's the way things seem to work for me here. Then (very fortunately) I found out from the interns that on the last Saturday of every month ALL businesses in Rwanda close down for the morning. So the banking I had been planning on doing the following morning, I now had 45 min to do. I literally ran out of the hospital to my room and then 'downtown' to get to the bank before it closed. Because I was in such a hurry, I didn't count how many Rwandan francs I had left - which becomes important later in my story.

So I met up with Jeado, this 5th yr med student and we had an awesome cheap dinner of carbs and Fanta. Then we met up with some of his other friends and walked about 35 minutes into a part of the city I had never been to before. There we found the house of these two Danish girls who were hosting the party. It was great! We danced, drank Primus and ate birthday cakes (it was no one's birthday - but who cared!) We decided to bring the party to the dance club around 1 am and it was only then that it dawned on me - there's only one rule at the place I'm living in and it's this: doors close at midnight. And they don't open again until 7 am. Crap! I had completely forgotten. So I ended up having to rent out a room that night in a small local hotel. This is where the money side of things starts to kick in - I had enough to pay for the room but it would leave me with very little to get me through the rest of the weekend!

The next morning, as the city lay silent until noon, I wrote postcards and tallied that I had just about 3000 Rwandan francs for food for the next 48 hours. That is just under 6 US dollars. Not too too bad. In the early afternoon I met up with one of the interns and he and I hopped into a matatu and made our way to Gikongoro, a city about 35 min from Butare. There we decided to hop on the back of two bicycles to make the 2 km trip down to Murambi. What a ride! The scenery was absolutely spectacular and I decided to focus my attention on that, because we were riding fast and I've seen some of the injuries that result from bicycle crashes in this country! When we got off, my friend David even commented on how fast we had been riding! woot!

So I wanted to visit Murambi because it was supposed to have quite a striking Genocide Memorial. David was incredibly kind to have volunteered to come with me, especially once I realized what we had gotten ourselves into. (to be continued...)