spamtastic/phishulous!

i think that spammer/phisher (what's the difference?) might have been responding directly to content from my last post. wow, technology! here's what would have made me click on that link - if the first part of the spammer's message had said 'sorry about your lost camera.'

so many posts...

so little time to read! hope this is enough to get y'all through the weekend. these last three posts were written between 1 and 5 am last night. i was lying there coughing, unable to sleep, and thought, 'this is the perfect time to blog!'.

enjoy.

pulling a madonna

i’m getting a little sick of the catching up, so i’m going to give into my penchant for whining for just a bit.

i’ve had a crappy few days. i’ve been counting down the days to morocco for a while, but the last few days have really put a damper on things. on sunday, i lost my camera. the details don’t matter – i was a dumbass. i had it in my hand, in a taxi, and when i got out, i didn’t. now, I have no camera for morocco. contemplating buying another one in london is painful – my bank account is already empty and my parents have been ridiculously generous by helping to finance most of my travels this summer. add at least another $100 to whatever i'll spend on a camera in the uk in getting to the city from the airport and back – man. suckage. major suckage. and for the last two days i’ve had ‘the flu’. it’s not really the flu, because i’m not completely out of action, but i spent two days in bed, and lost almost 5 pounds. I haven’t had a good run in a week, and I feel like a lot of things are out of my control.

on the other hand, i don’t think i’ve expressed my thoughts on my time in rwanda; they’re overwhelmingly positive. i’m surprised by how easy it was to adjust to my environment (no, i don’t consider my bouts with stomach bugs and other illnesses as signs of non-adjustment). there are pinapples galore (at least for the past month), passionfruit, avocados, and loads of baguettes and other yummy breads. every woman i’ve encountered is born able to strap one baby to their back, hold another by their hand and balance something on their heads. people are friendly, if close-mouthed about most everything. kigali is clean (as i’ve said before), and the poverty that dhs numbers trumpet is seen by mzungus like me only on rare occasions (like when the street kids in butare beg for anything you give them). i think my comfort here has a lot to do with the accommodations, but also because i've felt as if i was in india – except with you know, african people. in fact, i think the poverty is even more apparent in india, due to the outward signs – begging, hungry children and women, slums, and the marked contrast between the have’s and have-not’s apparent in every part of any major city. in kigali, the gap isn’t as glaringly wide. this is not to say it does not exist. something like 50% of children are malnourished, 80% of the population lives on less than 2 usd a day. there are few resources for women here – no ngo’s which serve abused women and none (to my knowledge) which train women as vocational workers or artisans (rwandan basketweaving is apparently not as high quality as it once was, but then, nobody is holding classes on it). women are left to do much of the work of sustaining a household, because very few men actually do much to help make ends meet (that’s from a rwandan woman’s mouth, not mine!), though they are good at heading to the bars at 6 pm, sharp, and peopling the streets at night.

all this ‘putting your best face forward’ business doesn’t do much to deter me from randomly pulling a madonna, and absconding to the us (or maybe the uk, i do love those british accents) with a rwandan baby (who are the cutest babies i have ever seen).

the poor man's elephant

about a month ago, we headed out to akagera national park, in the northeast corner of the country. on the way there, we passed the newest outpost of partners in health - in the wilds of rwanda!

i don't think that i've ever had as calamitous a weekend as this one, with the craziness taking on the forms of people, cars, *and* animals.

taylor, ajanta, erica, brandon, and i decided to go on a budget safari while emily was off exploring all of kenya. we borrowed april's car (a jeep cherokee), and set off on saturday morning, with 100 usd worth of gas in our car. we found out at the gas station that the fuel tank had a hole in it. so, 10 minutes into our trip, while were still in kigali, we had to haul back to a kobil station with a service center to fix our leaky fuel tank. that was two hours worth of fun. but it was all good, because i ate a couple cadbury dairy milk bars (oh, cadbury, how i will miss you in the states!) and drank a passionfruit fanta (i am now trying to wean myself off of all flavors of fanta, as this spells dietary catastrophe, otherwise).

our first encounter with crazy occurred that very evening: jody (don't call her 'judy'), the woman from northern ireland (or so she claimed). her red hair and fair coloring would lead me to believe that she hailed from somewhere in the emerald isle, but she was very distinct about being northern irish. for my inquisitive readers (who can load a google search page in microseconds): quick, do the northern irish have *american* accents? because jody's american accent suggested she was just a crazy american. the evening started out with her tour of the diocese of gahini, where we stayed at the episcopal church's guesthouse. jody's kinyarwanda phrases were duly trotted out to impress us (at that point, we had all been there for about 6 weeks, and were pretty good at buying veggies from the veggie lady) but she started acting childish when she realized that yes, carrots in kinyarwanda are 'caroti' and we were right about it, because we had been in rwanda about 6 weeks longer than she had. things went downhill from there. suffice to say that jody left us sitting at the dinner table after she got into an argument with taylor about how research dollars should be spent and the profusion of grant monies that were available to ensure that every person was served even in a research project. we heard a curse and 'dumb americans' muttered as she stomped out of the guesthouse canteen.

cue the next morning: we got to akagera game park nice and early (7 am!) to start our game drive. we saw giraffes (one female who appeared arthritic and a family with a baby!), zebras (they have *huge* butts), cape buffalo (ugly and static), topi, a bunch of monkeys, and some well-fed cows (their horns are amazingly straight - i've seen these cows all over rwanda and uganda, now). we didn’t see any elephants, but then, i wasn’t expecting any – the guidebook was quite frank about the scarcity of animals. birds, on the other hand, were all over the place, but i care even less for birds than i care for animals.

our guide, denise, was having a good time tracking the animals (with the assistance of her radio) until she realized our vehicle was doomed. it abruptly stopped right after we saw the cows (and passed over a bump). we tried to troubleshoot, but didn't figure out anything until taylor started to inspect the fuses. one of the fuses had blown (i still have no idea which one). taylor replaced it with a less necessary one (rear headlamp warmers?) and we kept going (bad decision #1). we stalled out twice more. before we stalled out for the second time, a crazy baboon (whose leathery yet wooden-looking butt i'd been admiring - get your mind out of the gutter, i do not have a thing for animal butts) stole all of our food from the trunk of the jeep, the door to which had been left open for less than a minute. the third time we stalled out, it was next to lake mwazi.

so, about 4 hours into our budget safari, we were stranded next to a lake full of hippos. every guidebook tells you that it is not the lion or the elephant that is the most dangerous animal - it is the hippo. you are never supposed to get between a hippo and what it wants. in this case, we were between the hippos and their sleeping grounds, beneath the trees about 10 meters from our car. as the afternoon went on, and our options for getting the car up and running dwindled (our radiator was leaking, all our backup fuses had been used up, and the rangers took 6 hours to get us oil, which didn't do a damn thing), the hippos started coming to the surface and grunting more often. by 5 pm, they were coming up every 10 minutes for air; by 7 pm they were just hovering there, with their ears and snouts showing, watching the stupid humans who were in their way. around 2 pm, denise had sworn up and down that the hippos waited til dark to head to the trees. darkness had fallen, and a mist had crept in by 7:30; we were slathering on 99% deet and getting ready to hunker down in the jeep by the time a tow-truck showed up at 7:45. then, i got my first experience riding on the floor of a gutted toyota minibus (those things are tougher than hummers - geh folks out there - if you can clean up the emissions and package it attractively, i think there's a market in this for public transport in atlanta).

i just glanced over the last four paragraphs - my use of parentheticals is out of control. so, i'll end it here. but here's something to think about - i've been stranded two times in as many summers due to car troubles. anyone want to guess whether this will be a mainstay in my future travels?

this is your life

on saturday, my life flashed before my eyes. but before that, i experienced a first: laying out by the pool in a bikini top. yes! i know that since everyone admires my physical prowess and classic physique, it will come as a surprise that i have been quite hesitant about letting the world admire my indian belly. but, after nearly a month of almost regular running, i deemed the world ready. the response was most definitely underwhelming. the sun that beat down on us as we ran in the late morning had disappeared by 1 pm, and there was a posh wedding photo session taking place at the serena hotel. so, of course, as soon as i took my shirt off and lay down, i notice (nearly simultaneously) the first thunderstom-y clouds of the ‘dry’ season approaching and the dirty looks the wedding party was directing our way. i couldn’t do anything about the former, but to the old man robbing the cradle and the wedding guests, i say: don’t think your glares had anything to do with my covering up! you’re taking pictures at a western-style hotel! i will be back this weekend (if the weather holds).

so, emily, erica, mona, and i started back down the road to our house. we’re not even halfway there when the thunder and lightning cat-and-mouse game begins. the time between the claps of thunder and bolts of lightning are down to 3 seconds – we’re in front of the coke kiosk – and bam, i see lightning strike 20 feet to my left, and the simultaneous crack of thunder. i felt it in my bones. i thought i had been struck, seriously. but, apparently, feeling it in your bones isn’t quite the feeling you get when struck by lightning. another sign that you aren’t fried: seeing and hearing the thunder at the same time. thank god.

on sunday, we ended up heading back to murambi (this time, successfully seeing the memorial, which was gruesome). on the bus ride back, we went through another thunderstorm. the rwandans riding along with us were more preoccupied with gawking at the other, bad, drivers on the road (there was a collective rise-and-peer maneuver that was repeated over and over as we passed numerous cars weaving down the rainy roads). but, i was happy to be safely insulated in a bus, with my headphones on, and listening to ‘champagne supernova’, ‘ordinary world’, and ‘africa’ accompany the surreal sound and light show that illuminated the countryside.