There's Mud Everywhere!! GAHH!

Well folks, it’s been a long, hard couple of days. We’ve been out in a village in the district of Kayonza in the Eastern Provence for the last 4 days building a mud brick house for an 80-ish year old widow who lived in a hut made of banana leaves. In 4 days we’ve managed to build, or I should probably say assist locals to build, almost all of a house out of mud bricks. We’ve still got the roof and then floors to finish. Also on Monday when we go back for the day we will be covering all of the walls with mud to protect them and then cover them all with concrete. There will be a few last things that the local builders will be doing through out the week while we’re doing other things and then on Friday we will go back to check out the final product.

There’s really not a whole lot to say about what we’ve been up to... we were basically slinging mud and carrying 30 pound mud bricks for 4 days straight, although it is worth mentioning the crazy amounts of work that the locals did. We had a few problems finding enough bricks and water to complete the project, so that meant that there was a lot of work to go through out the village and bring back the materials needed. Our second day on site the place that we were getting our blocks from just down the road decided that we weren’t paying them enough, so they jacked the prices up by double. (This usually happens in Rwanda then people see that mzungus, or white people, are involved.) We decided to get our bricks from someone else who was willing to trade his bricks for ours, which were just being made, so they could not be used for at least 3 days until they dried. The problem with this was that it was about a kilometre long walk away from the house. We tried to hire a truck to help us get them there, but again, they doubled the price when they found mzungus there. So, we ended up hiring some local people who were just finishing another job just down the road. They were paid 100 Rwandan Francs per 3 blocks that they carried. That works out to be about 20 cents per every 90 pounds carried 1km... it sounds like nothing, but most people out in the village consider 100 RWF to be a good days wage, and they can feed their family on that... so really, some of them made almost a month’s wage in 2 days. The craziest part about this was that there were a couple of guys who would put 3 blocks (90Lbs) on there HEAD, JOG the whole way there and back and do it all over again... for over 4 hours without a break, for 2 days in a row. I had to carry 2 20L jerry cans full over water over a kilometre and could barely handle that... these guys put all of us to shame. Too bad the one that worked the most also tried to break in to our van as the group of them was getting paid. Luckily my custody eyes can’t be easily turned off and I noticed him very sneakily checking to see if the doors were locked and caught him sliding one of the windows open half an inch at a time over 10 minutes. Bah, a well... you can’t really blame them, they live in such poverty and there in front of all of them were all our back packs full of things they could never even imagine owning.

Tonight after getting back to Kigali we all got cleaned up (which was nice, considering we’ve been playing in the mud for 4 days straight) and went out for Indian food at an amazing restaurant. (Thanks for the tip Laura!!) The food was awesome and it was great to just relax and hang out with everyone again, knowing that we weren’t getting up early again in the morning to physical, muddy labour.

So... like usual, I’m still waiting for a decent connection to post pictures. The one I have here is sketchy, at best. Tomorrow we will be relaxing, sleeping in and doing some shopping and exploring of downtown. We have been here for a week now, and I’m the only one who has been downtown so far and that’s because I left the team... that’s not very usual. Most of the time the teams would be very familiar with downtown by now. After the shopping and time to explore we have been invited to a wedding tomorrow afternoon. It should be a lot of fun and we will get to experience all of the culture of a Rwandan wedding... which is a lot of fun! I went to one in Gisenyi last time I was here.

Well, it’s 12:30am here now... I’m not so much on my normal schedule where this would be early still for me, so I’m off to bed! Looking forward to a nice relaxing, fun day tomorrow in town and at the wedding... should be good times!

Hope you all are doing well!!