It’s been a long time since our last blog post back in February 2011. Two years have passed since...a lot has happened in the interim, and much has stayed the same.
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| Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania |
One of the highlights of the past 24 months has been traveling within East Africa and beyond. We took trips to Zanzibar, Tanzania (Serengeti N.P. and Ngorongoro crater), Uganda (Lake Bunyoni and Queen Elizabeth N.P.), Kenya (Mombasa), Italy (Rome and the Amalfi Coast) and the US. We did some fantastic trips with family and friends - with my parents (to Tanzania), Gopal and Veena (to Zanzibar), Esha, Ketan and Nihal (to the Amalfi Coast); and some trips on our own. Work took me to Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Bujumbura, and took Shilesh to Nairobi and Bujumbura. Over the past two years we've been fortunate to have both sets of parents visit Rwanda multiple times, and we've managed to participate in some memorable family events - from the 100th birthday of Shilesh's grandmother in Kerala to the first birthday of my adorable niece Radha in Mumbai!! Shilesh and I have both run out of passport pages, and Azad has only two left!
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| On the (very bumpy) road to Serengeti N.P., Tanzania |
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| A lioness on the hunt -- Serengeti N.P, Tanzania |
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| Enjoying our morning coffee at Lake Bunyoni, Uganda |
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| At Virunga Lodge in Volcanoes N.P., Rwanda |
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| With Shilesh's parents at Lake Kivu, western Rwanda |
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| A trip to Lake Kivu -- western Rwanda |
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| At Nyungwe Forest on the south-west edge of Rwanda |
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| With my parents, on our way to track the mountain gorillas in the Virunga volcanoes, Rwanda |
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| With Gopal, Veena, Adam and Sara on our way back from Zanzibar |
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| With Nihal, Esha and Ketan -- Positano, Italy |
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| The view from our villa -- Positano, Italy |
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| The perfect sand bar at Funzi Key -- Mombasa, Kenya |
Of all our trips, our second trip to Uganda in 2012 was particularly eventful. Queen Elizabeth National Park is about a seven hour drive from Kigali, and were looking forward to a nice long weekend at a beautiful eco-lodge on the edge of the park (http://www.volcanoessafaris.com/safari-lodges/kyambura-gorge-lodge/).
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| At the Rwanda-Uganda border |
When we reached the first town in Uganda after crossing the border (Kabale town), we turned left and drove for 2.5 hours until we first reached a refugee camp, and then a sign for the Congo border. It turns out we had driven 200 kilometers west instead of east! We finally asked a policeman for directions and he said to us: “you are totally lost my friends…you have wasted so much petrol” (time is barely ever equated to money here…). He then told us we would be more likely to find our way if we gave a ride to his colleague. It turns out his colleague was a soldier on his way home on leave for two weeks, carrying a giant sack of Irish potatoes as a gift for his wife. We sat with a total stranger dressed in full military fatigues for the next 5 hours. When we stopped for a late lunch of beans, sweet potatoes, plantains and cassava, he ate with us, and when the bill arrived he simply said “Thank you so much.” Luckily our very tasty lunch cost less than a dollar a head. We drove for another two hours through dusty roads and road construction (funded by the EU), until we finally reached our destination – tired, grumpy and with a serious headache. Azad was the most well behaved and cheerful one on the trip.
Azad is four and a half now, and has spend over half his life here in Rwanda. This is very much home to him, and he’s old enough now to have memories from our time here. I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same place – never changing cities, homes or schools – and Azad has already had so much variety already…. He is in a Montessori pre-school now, where he’s learning about mammals, volcanoes, frogs, and subtraction (among other things!). He is obsessed with superheroes, loves doing puzzles, coloring, and reading stories together. He has an incredible long term memory – we were reading a story about a train engine this morning, and he remembered that his friend Theo in Boston had the same engine toy…I was totally blown away (can’t say the same about his short term memory!).
Work is going well for both of us. In September 2011 I changed roles from monitoring and evaluation manager to Rwanda program manager for TechnoServe's Coffee Initiative. The past 18 months have been an incredible learning experience for me – learning how to manage a team of 30-50 people, a budget, program implementation and stakeholder relationships – and one that I was very fortunate to land.
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| A farmer right after delivering his coffee to the station |
Here are some stats to give you a sense of what the project I manage (TechnoServe’s East Africa Coffee Initiative) has achieve in Rwanda – in 2011 our project provided technical and strategic support to 46 coffee washing stations (centralized coffee processing factories that convert coffee cherries to coffee parchment) – 35 of which were set up from scratch by TechnoServe in 2010 and before. These farmer owned businesses exported coffee to high end roasters all over the world, earning ~US$5.7 million in revenues. US$3.5 million went directly to farmers as farm gate incomes. We have supported these farmer owned businesses by linking them to working capital financing and specialty coffee buyers, building their capacity to manage a business, providing technical advise and support on specialty coffee processing, etc. Many of these businesses have "graduated" from our program and continue to operate and grow.
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| This is how your coffee is pulped... |
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| ...and dried |
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| Workers at a coffee washing station, western Rwanda |
Shilesh is enjoying work tremendously. Back in 2010 when he was hired into the Strategic Investments Unit within the Rwandan government – the unit consisted of one employee (i.e., Shilesh). He was frustrated at first by the pace and process – at his previous job at Goodwin Procter he was used to closing a deal every six weeks, and when he hadn't closed a single deal within his first six months in Rwanda he was frustrated to say the least. Since then he has managed to streamline the investment process, grow the unit to a team of seven local and international experts (mostly lawyers and bankers), and move a number of large deals forward.
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| My dad and Azad at Plantation Lodge in Karatu, Tanzania |
Life here continues to be relaxing (sometimes boring, necessitating frequent short trips within Rwanda and to neighboring countries). We spend a lot of time together as a family, spend a lot of time with a few close friends, and travel from time to time. Shilesh's office is less than a five minute drive away from mine, so we often meet for lunch during the week. We have the same wonderful housekeeper (Grace) who can now cook really well, particularly Indian food, our same trusty guard who ironed our clothes using Windex when we first moved here (reference to first blog post), and the same old Toyota RAV4 which is now 17 years old and had to have its clutch replaced last week. We are in the same house, but did finally invest in a new couch (read first blog entry).
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| Reya, Lyla & Azad |
2013 has brought some exciting new developments. In the first week of January, Shilesh’s sister – Shubha – along with her husband, Chuck, and their two daughters arrived in Rwanda to spend three months with us! We are spending lots of good family time together, with Azad tremendously enjoying his time with his cousins. If you asked me six months ago what I miss most in Rwanda, I would have said its having family around…and we seem to have found our (temporary) fix!
In other exciting news – we are expecting a baby boy this summer! We are all very excited (and perhaps a bit nervous…it will be 5 years since we had Azad and I’m not sure we fully remember the sleeplessness and work a new baby brings!). Will keep you all posted....
To close, here are some interesting things you may not know about Rwanda:
- · It turns out that if your car breaks down in the street, the police check your gas tank. If your gas level is low they give you a ticket. My question is if you don’t have enough money to buy gas, how are you going to pay the fine?
- · While corruption is very hard to spot here, Shilesh was once asked by a cop to buy him a Fanta…while he was just using a euphemism for a bribe, Shilesh was really confused and asked him, “where am I supposed to buy you a Fanta from?” and managed to get away.
- · Over 90 percent of the clothes people wear here are second hand...apparently there is a thriving global second hand clothing industry, and many of the clothes donated in the west end up making their way to the developing world. Some countries (India for example) ban imports of second hand clothes to protect domestic manufacturing, but here that's all you can buy really. As a result you can spot some very interesting t-shirts here (once our housekeeper wore a hot pink t-shirt that had a not so pleasant 5-letter word written across the front in big black letters. I told her that it was not a good t-shirt, and she hasn't worn it since).
- · Every last Saturday of the month is Umuganda – community work day – where everything is closed and everyone is required to participate in four hours of community work (e.g., road building, cleaning, constructing houses, etc.) organized at the "village" level. This is a pretty incredible concept, and it actually seems to work in practice.
- · It is totally socially unacceptable to eat in public…can’t figure out why, but its just not done. As a result, there is absolutely no culture of street food in Rwanda.
