This week was full of knitting machine workshops, a change of scenery for trainings, rekindled friendships, and lots of new foods. Can’t complain. We’re using such rich experiences to mask our impending breakdowns about leaving.
On Monday we had our first training at the new location in Cyaruzinge, as decided by the new cooperative President and community leaders in an effort to reduce conflict and centralize meetings. The new location is an old cow storage shed that’s open-air and is now full of dirt-swept stalls. The women congregate in the largest open space, spread out their woven mats, and spend the morning hours knitting and weaving baskets together.
It’s an open environment that seems more calm and lighthearted than the previous space. It’s encouraging to know that the women have a common space where they can hold trainings and meetings at most any time. In fact, we had our largest turnout EVER on this day, a group of 26 people! Where did all of these new women come from??
About four or five women refuse to come to these new trainings and instead spend their time at Providence’s house knitting (assumedly) with her. This doesn’t quite echo Claude’s promise that “The cooperative is one again,” but it implies an issue of shamefulness and awkward reconciliation rather than continued conflict and division. Claude spent a large part of training speaking with these women, reporting that they felt reluctant to rejoin the group. We hoped this would change in the days to come.
Connor was sick that day, but luckily most of the energy was channeled toward our first day of knitting machine training!
At the beginning of the training, the cooperative members decided (on a nomination-consensus model) to elect the four “Knitting Captains” who would be responsible for learning how to use the knitting machine and relaying that information to the rest of the cooperative. We were impressed with their choices, as they picked women who exhibit visible leadership traits and always seem happy to help other members learn new skills. Thus, Monika, Janeta, Janet, and Leotine sat down with Sarah in anticipation of the weird, heavy, mysterious machine on the table in front of them.
The knitting machine is a complicated, fragile, frustrating, and fascinating feat of engineering. It sort of looks like it has antennae. To someone who has never used one before, it involves a lot of clicking and whirring and tons and tons of tiny hooks and latches. The women were intrigued by this, paid close attention to Sarah’s instructions, and learned the basics quickly.
Rachel helped teach the newcomers the basics of knitting, which felt a little like starting from the very beginning again. They picked up the skills very quickly though! Also, Claudine left partway through training to attend a cooperative training in town with Providence. Not sure how many trainings KCC holds, but we can only be thankful for the amount of information they’re being given!
After a successful training, we headed into Town with our coworker Nadeg and ate lunch at a place called Simba. I don’t know if we’ve spoken about Nadeg before, but she’s doing her undergrad at Michigan State and is originally from Rwanda. She’s our main translator in the field (#WhereIsClaude) and she does a spectacular job. Nadeg is bae. We had the chance to talk with her over lunch about her impressions of the US vs our impressions of Rwanda, laughing about the American affinity for cheese and holiday consumerism.
After Simba, we headed further into town to the fabric market. As we were walking down the street on the way to the market, a rogue white girl tackled Rachel from behind in a giant hug. Rachel was startled but soon squealed in greeting her friend Abbie, who is a member of the study abroad group (18 students) doing a Burch Research Seminar on international law and criminal courts systems in Kigali.
The group is staying in Kigali for five weeks and had just arrived from the Netherlands the day before. We were swarmed with about eight umuzungus huddled on the side of the street; we put on quite a spectacle for the surrounding crowds. Somehow we serendipitously ran into a few of them in the middle of Town???
After sufficiently overwhelming Nadeg with our enthusiastic umuzungu friends, we all walked together to the fabric market and showed the Burch kids around the stalls. The fabric market is holistically overwhelming. There is just so. Much. Fabric. After stressing ourselves out, we said goodbye to Nadeg and the Burch kids and headed to meet Connor at Bourbon to work.
Connor, as mentioned above, was sick, but he was also in a huge bind because his passport recently got water damage. This is unfortunate on many levels, as Connor is leaving for Jordan after Rwanda and then heading to India for six weeks shortly after that. And then going to Hong Kong for a semester. Passport is critical. He spent the afternoon at the office of the Canadian High Commission (I’m being told this is like an embassy, but like, less) feverishly working out details to get a new passport.
After we met up with Connor and debriefed the day, we spent time working on evaluations and blogs and watched some people film a Bourbon TV advertisement. Sarah, Hannah, and Rachel then left for SoleLuna trivia, where we pressured people into joining our team and managed to make quite a few new friends who are in Kigali for various internships and jobs. One woman (who we later found out knew my housemate? Kigali is so small) was forced out of Burundi in April with the ascension of political instability and is staying here until her NGO reopens in September. Also we didn’t lose trivia this time!!!
We then stopped by Sawa Citi, which is a sort of small supermarket that has a lot of imported foods. We brought chocolate to sick Connor and reveled at the sheer volume of Americanized/European foods. Sarah, resident cheese connoisseur, finally assuaged her hunger for cheese that is not laced with the potent and unavoidable flavor of strange Rwandan Gouda. Overall it was a big food day.
Tuesday morning, as seems to be routine, we met up at ABC bagel for breakfast to write blog posts and eat yummy bagels. Connor was #stressed about his passport/visa situation. Ahhhh. The ladies headed to the office, while Connor made his way, once again, to the Canadian High Commission office for the entire day to get some more advice.
We didn’t stay at the office long, since we headed over to the nearby Ministry of Health to go pay back Muad for the infamous Akagera trip. He gave us a tour of the place, which was pretty……..officey? (complete with rolling chairs, whiteboards, and reliable wifi). He came over to HDI for a tour of our place, which in comparison was really crowded and chaotic (and dark). Tbh we were surprised he still wanted to be our friend after the 16+ hours stuck in a Rav 4 together.
Note: We later found out that the office was so crowded because there was a huge meeting of Burundian refugees within the LGBTQ community who were convening to discuss their situation and the ways in which HDI could provide them with support.
Claude invited us to go with him to give clothes to children from Cyaruzinge, which inevitably (dreadably) required transport to the market near Cyaruzinge. So we caught a dilapidated bus, that was (at best) hesistantly approved by Claude with a shrug. Throughout this bus ride the utter incompetence of this bus was hard to miss; pretty sure that cracked windshields and a rusted metal interior were trendy when this particular bus was designed. Let it be known that Rachel couldn’t even put her feet down because the metal of the bus floor was scorching her through her shoes. A rigorous clicking that no bus should ever make also contributed to the ambience. alkdjsflakdjsfklajdsklfa.
We got pretty far in this butthole of a bus, until two police officers flagged the driver down. The driver handed them various paperwork, which was met with grimaces. Naturally, the bus driver got arrested.
Here’s a synopsis of everyone’s reactions: Sarah, who sat in the front near the cracked windshield, “wanted to jump out of the bus” (-Claude); Rachel was suppressing giggles as Claude whispered comments like, “I think Adam and Eve knew this bus”; Hannah remained oblivious, enjoying the beautiful views (……… okay Hannah); and Claude disapprovingly, yet concisely, summed up the journey by shrugging and offering, “Yes, I agree with this arrest”.
The police officers apologized and told us we would have to walk to our destination. We headed down the street, laughing about the experience and how dangerous and crappy the bus had been. Then, #thebus drove by. This time, however, both policemen where riding in the front seat.
Wait. What? This seemed just a liiiitttle counterintuitive, yet for some reason we got back in the bus. It was hard to contain our incredulous giggles.
We made it safely to the market. There, we met up with Jean Pierre, the Cyaruzinge cell leader and another man (name unknown) with his two kids who were 2 and 3 years old. Their nicknames were something along the lines of “Dan” and “Denny”. Claude told us that the children suffer from Kwashiorkor, a severe malnutrition caused by protein deficiencies.
Claude found a stand at the market with children’s clothes a lot of which, judging from the abundance of Mickey Mouse and basketball, probably originated in America. He asked for our help in choosing clothes, so we dug through and found about 5 outfits per child, which Claude bought and gifted to the kids. We had the kids try on shoes and, after not being able to find a price he liked, Claude settled on inexpensive sandals that squeak. With every step. They were really really cute, but probably got annoying fast for the parents. That concludes our market experience.
We actually had a really successful and quick bus ride back to the office, whoa. We then met up with Connor at Shokola, a cafe/restuarant on top of the Kigali library that has a wooded atmosphere that Sarah wants her future house to be like, complete with an awesome view of the city. Connor remained frustrated with his passport situation as the day ended.
Wednesday started with a training, which again took place in the new training spot. When we got there, the women were making baskets that had been ordered the previous week, and Nadeg requested that they switch to knitting. Rachel continued the knitting machine training with the four knitting captains. They quickly picked up color changing and binding off, which was really exciting because once knitting machines are figured out THEY ARE SO COOL. On the mat, there was a new woman present who was knitting a sweater, which we hadn’t ever taught. She told Nadeg that she had learned this skill in school, since schools used to teach girls a home-ec-ish class; we also saw her teaching sweater-making to those around her: yay!
At the end of training, Claude was missing (this is pretty typical for Claude). So, after waiting a while (in the beating sun and overheating truck) at the cell office, we left Claude at Cyaruzinge. Sorry Claude. Then, we went back to Sarah and Rachel’s house for lunch and much needed showers. We chilled at the office for a while and soon headed to Lalibela, an Ethiopian restaurant, for ladies nights, which entails a cheaper buffet and free soda (sorry Connor). There, we obviously discussed the ethics of having a gender specific night and stuffed ourselves with the buffet. We then headed over to Hannah and Connors to watch TV with Yannick: Tyrant, True Detective, and So You Think You Can Dance. Lolz.
On Thursday, we hung out in the office for most of the day writing blogs and a COPHAD newsletter (props to Hannah for doing amazing job with the formatting!). We had wanted to talk to Claude about the women’s understanding of their new positions, but he never showed. We ate lunch at the 24-hour Apple place down the road where Rachel and Sarah ordered mushroom soup that was pretty much just a bowl of hot cream. Luckily, they realized something was off when neither bowl was touched more than once, and they quickly took it back and brought a more typical soup out for no charge. Our best guess is that they simply forgot the mushrooms for the first go round.
After work, we went to Kimironko market with Toussaint to get clothes made by his friend Josie. After about an hour of taking our measurements and furiously scratching down notes on each piece’s fabric and shape, Josie announced to our amazement that all twenty or so garments would be finished by the coming Wednesday, leaving plenty of time to spare before our staggered departures that weekend.
We four departed the market for a resto-bar called Car Wash. Yes, they have an actual car wash as well. Definitely an interesting environment. We had been told that there was karaoke every Thursday, but found instead, with mixed emotions, that it was throwback Thursday with DJ Ryan instead. An eclectic mix of 90’s rap videos played on a projector screen at the front of the room as we ate our meal. Afterwards, we parted ways and headed home for the night.
On Friday, we had training bright and early like usual. The knitting machine continues to be exciting, but it definitely is a source of frustration as well. One tiny mistake usually forces the users to start over, but at least the knitting captains have become really great at getting a project started!
Recap from Monday: the group of cooperative members who had been on Team Providence stopped coming to trainings after the election because they were embarrassed about the whole situation and felt pretty uncomfortable. Claude spoke to them on Friday, and (flash forward whoa) some of them came back on Monday! We are hopeful that this will continue and that eventually Providence, who we have not seen since the elections, will return soon as well.
At the end of training, Connor and Sarah were approached by a man babbling excitedly in Kinyarwanda and gesturing like he was brushing his teeth. He ran away, leaving Sarah and Connor rather confused. Her returned a few moments later with—not a toothbrush, but a goat. It turns out he wanted us to buy the goat. He was even willing to slit its throat and make brochettes with it, hence the teeth brushing-type gestures. With the help of Nadeg, we gracefully declined, stifling giggles.
We found out on our way home from training that HDI would be moving offices that day and over the weekend. It had been mentioned as a possibility to us in the first week, prior to Connor’s arrival, but had not been mentioned since so it was news to us.
We went to a restaurant called Masters for lunch, craving a touch of home in the form of pancakes and ‘marple’ syrup. It was awesome.
After lunch, Rachel and Connor travelled to Nyamirambo with Claude to learn knitting machine techniques from the woman who had shown us how to fix the broken latch. They figured out how to make ribbing for cuffs of sleeves and learned to use the pattern cards that allow the user to create a wide variety of repeating multi-colored designs with very little effort.
Sarah and Hannah headed to The Rwanda Development Board building to find more information about Nyungwe, the rainforest national park that was to be the destination of our final weekend trip. We wanted to hike and camp in the park one day/night and spend the other day in Butare, the old capital. Needless to say, the logistics were a bit tricky. After a ton of phone calls and a small amount of progress made, Hannah headed to town to meet up with some UNC Burch scholars on the study abroad trip for her friend’s surprise birthday celebration. Sarah met up with a fellow HDI intern named Maddie at RZ Manna for jelly donuts.
The team reunited at Khana Kazana later that evening for Indian food. After dinner, Rach and Hannah went to meet the taxi driver for the weekend to show him where he would be picking us up in a mere six hours, and Connor and Sarah went to Nakumat to gather supplies for the trip. Up until this point, we were planning/hoping to camp but had been unable to track down a tent. Keep in mind that this is at about ten thirty on a Friday night when our taxi was planning to pick us up at four the next morning. Yeah. We could have planned better.
Anyways, we lucked out at Nakumat! They had tents! And they were cheap! We bought the tent, pasta things for dinner, s’mores supplies (that’s right, you can find marshmallows in Rwanda. This place is awesome!), and sandwich/snack supplies for lunch on the trail. Word of advice, if you ever have to choose between Nutella and a spread called ChocoNut, go with the Nutella. It’s worth the extra thousand francs. We promise.
After our successful shopping trip, we headed to our respective homes to pack, make sandwiches, and catch a couple hours sleep before our early departure.
Peace,
Connorachannsarah