to church at Momma's orphanage

April 19th

As I’m getting up I notice its grey outside. I need to nip across to the baker’s and get fresh bread, so have a quick shower and dress. By the time I’m dressed you can see cloud coming up the valley opposite, and it’s so thick that it’s just like a curtain being drawn across the far side of the main road. Immediately the cloud reaches us its starts raining heavily. We wait nearly an hour until the main downpour eases, and then I run across the road to get bread

By now it’s time to leave for church. We’re going to have to miss breakfast. We get motos to Tom’s office because it’s still drizzling at Gahogo, but by the time we reach his office, a hundred or so feet lower in altitude, it’s not raining. At the office we get one of the FHI pickup trucks, and pick up Nathan (Tom’s new FHI intern), and then go to the “Hotel Spendide” to pick up two more young Americans who are on a very short, fortnight, placement with FHIU in Gitarama. So we descend on the “church of Momma” at her house as five muzungus. We are something of a distraction to her orphans!

The service is lovely. Just one hour long, informal, with the main bits being translated between English and Kinyarwanda.

After church Tom has to go to Kigali to sort out problems and attend a volunteer’s leaving party, so I go back to the flat and cook up a big dinner. In the afternoon I finish writing my Uganda blogs ready to post, and catch up on some emails I need to send to people.

At the muzungu meal in the evening we have some of the new FHI people, plus Ulrika’s successor. Ulrika finishes her tour of duty and leaves for Germany in a fortnight or so. Her successor is Andre, who is fluent in English and French as well as German. She has her Senegalese partner with her, and her 18 month old son who is a real cutie. So we have twelve eating which is one of the largest for some time (and that’s excluding Soraya, Hayley and Charlotte who are away at the moment).

It’s been a quiet weekend and I’m more than ready to start some proper work tomorrow!