Just arrived in Kigali!

Welcome to my blog! This is where I will be posting all of my stories for the next 3 months. I had intended to do my first post before leaving Vancouver but things got hectic so here I am writing at the airport in Amsterdam! We had a 6 hour lay-over here and I had thought that we would just spend it in the airport, but we didn’t! We took the train into downtown Amsterdam and walked around for 2 hours before heading back here. It was very lovely and unexpected! There was a vending machine that sold maps but it was empty so we just ventured out on our own. Lots of windy cobblestone street and tonnes of bikes! We decided to follow a lovely little lane that had plants all along the walls of the buildings and we ended up in the red light district! We had no idea until we saw a scantily clad woman beckoning 2 men into her house.  I then noticed the red lights above the windows before looking around and seeing lots of women sitting on window seats looking out into the street. That might sound of sketchy but it really wasn’t. This was at 4pm and there were tonnes of tourists around.  That was my brief Amsterdam experience!

Before leaving I wanted to give a bit of background to the project so you can have a better idea of why I’m going to Rwanda. I first heard about this project in January while taking a course at UBC called World Problems with Nutrition. The professor of the course told the class of her involvement with the project in Rwanda which aims to alleviate poverty by increasing food security in the Ngoma District (the Rwandan district with the worst child mortality rate in the country—for children under 5 the mortality rate is just under 1 in 5). The first group from UBC left for Rwanda in May and stayed for 6 weeks. I received an email while I was in Ottawa this summer saying that they were accepting applications for another group to go in September and now here we are! The project is a partnership between UBC and the Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Education of Kibungo  (INATEK). We will be working with students and faculty from INATEK as well as with contacts from the government and some NGOs to identify the causes of malnutrition in the area and to come up with solutions to improve the issues surrounding food insecurity.

I will be boarding for our flight to Nairobi soon. It will be another long one...8 hours I think. I’m going to try to sleep for most of it. We have another 6 hour lay-over before a short flight to Kigali. A UBC master’s student, Sung Kyu, who has been working on the project in Rwanda since May will be meeting us at the airport. We will then spend the weekend in Kigali for our in-country orientation before heading to our home for the next 3 months, Kibungo.

Several hours later....

We made it to Kigali! We just at our hotel to relax for a bit before going out for dinner. Three students from INATEK came with Sung Kyu to meet us at the airport and it was a short drive to our hotel. So I haven’t seen much of Kigali yet but I’m excited to go out later!

Kathy, Gurjeet and I in Amsterdam!