17/05 - 02/06

Jeez so we've gone past the four month mark now! How scary!

So after the family left, and a few lonely days at the guesthouse on my own with Yohan the missionary and Heather the 38 year old teenager (she was actually amazing though!), THE ETHIOPIA LOT RETURNED HOME! They had some amazing stories and awesome photos, it was great to catch up. The only problem was when I jump hugged Tom when he walked in the door and he said "I've got to go to Kampala, I forgot mine and Soph's passports and credit cards on the bus." Luckily they did get everything back...

We had a mental trip to Rwanda planned with Joe, Dom, Tom, Marianne, Soph and I from the Friday for a few days, but then Sophie's parents heard about a few bombs here and there in Kigali so it ended up being just Joe, Dom, Marianne and I...wimps.

So at midnight Friday night, we embarked on our 13 hour bus journey to Kigali! Needless to say we had no sleep due to VERY potholey roads, so it was probably a very bad idea to do the Genocide Museum first thing after lunch on the Saturday. We got there all excited that we were in Rwanda we swiftly became very ashamed of being white and human when seeing the museum...I'd go as far as saying that it was actually on a par with the holocaust that's how bad it was, mainly because the holocaust was psycho Hitler controlling a nation, where as this was a whole population who just turned on their friends and neighbours with machetes and no one tried to stop it. There were rooms full of skulls, full of dug up clothes, full of the killing instruments... There was also a room which was lined with hundreds of photos of victims and messages, and a video was playing in the background of stories of survivors who'd lost their families. A Rwandan woman was watching the video with us, and she told us that the person on the video was her cousin...2 minutes later she'd thrown herself on the floor and was sobbing her heart out yelling about her family who'd died...it was one of the most heartbreaking things I'd ever seen.

Despite our stomachs were in turmoil after that, we hadn't eaten for a good 20 hours so we went to the main shopping centre in Kigali which was like walking into a mini Mall at Cribbs!! It was very surreal considering I've been shopping at markets and wooden shacks for the last four months. Being an old French colony, we managed to find a boulangerie selling fresh bread and croissants...I COULDN'T HAVE GOT MORE EXCITED - first fresh bread since January!

Down the road was THE Hotel des Milles Collines from Hotel Rwanda so we went and had a drink there which was pretty cool.

So after a very intense day and a half in Kigali, we got a bus up to Gisenyi by Lake Kivu. We hadn't really done much research about it but it was the easiest place to get to by the lake. It turns out Lake Kivu is the first lake in the world exploiting methane for energy which means if something goes wrong the whole lake could have blown up, and when you're swimming you have to watch out for bubbles of methane as they can give you serious burns, and we were 1 km away from Congo and we could hear explosions and see smoke rising from burning buildings and could see a constant trail of UN planes flying in and out, and the HUGE inactive volcano was definately glowing red at night... So really I'm quite surprised we left alive!!

Marianne and I were having a whale of a time busting out our French and showing up the boys :) we found a 'Maison du Lait' (House of milk) and Joe's been missing fresh milk terribly so we went in. Turned out the milk was like sour yoghurt and was more like Fromage Blanc we find in France...Joe couldn't have been more disappointed!

We mainly spent our time chilling out by the lake but they way people stared was UNREAL. I thought Uganda was bad! We were just reading our books, Mazza and I were covering our legs and shoulders and everything, and there were at least ten people, grown men and women (kids always stare so they don't count) just looking at us and staring...for no reason! When we were waiting for the bus back to Kigali we were playing cards on the pavement, other Rwandans were playing their own games too, but there was at least 30 people watching us play pairs - policemen, shop keepers, motorbike drivers - just watching a very uninteresting game! It was WEEEIRD.

So then the Tuesday night we got a 20 hour bus back to Jinja (it had a lot more stops and detours) and Jinja couldn't have felt more like home :)

Since then, it's just been trying to get back into our routines. Last weekend was the last weekend with all of us in Jinja as Joe, Dom and Ollie left for South Africa yesterday. On the Friday we met the new set of AVs who had just arrived in Jinja, most of them are very nice but 3/4 of the boys were just posh idiots, but the girls were cool. The Saturday was our big Busogee night - we had a five course meal of our favourite foods: Tomato brushetta and mini homemade rolexes to start, homemade burgers as our main, nutella banana and chapati for dessert, then to finish we had Joe's famously disgusting 'At Ease' which no one ate but is a classic. Ollie and Miles, while they were travelling in East Africa, wrote a Busogee song with a verse about the worst bits of each of us and the chorus was about how we all like to snuggle a lot:

The snuggle's on on the Busogee sofa where the
sofas are soft and the snuggles are long,
Tonight's the night so lets take this opportunity
to keep on singing our Busogee soooooong.

It's the honestly the cheesiest and best song I've ever heard.

So now the Busogees are slowly starting to disband, the Hampton boys have now gone, Miles is leaving in two weeks, then Sophie two weeks later, then everyone else apart from Connor and I two weeks after that! Luckily we've got friends floating in and out so it'll be good :)

Love and that! x