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L-R: Cathryn, me and Anja at Jovial's house last June.
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It's been an awesome first week back.
Beginning of the week was quite lazy and I worked from home, catching up on sleep from the journey and a few hundred work-related e-mails.
Caught up with Cathryn and Sarah at High Noon on Wednesday. I went to Sarah's beforehand to cuddle the cats. Had a massive Sula hug but Shue was out somewhere so I didn't see him. Total role-reversal since they moved there. Before, it was always Sula who was out strutting her stuff and Shue who was the soppy home-bunny, but now it's completely the opposite way round. Perhaps he's having issues with so many women in the house? I'll find him and cuddle him soon though.
Dropped off a ton of nice UK cat treats and headed for the bar. Cathryn joined us later and I may have been slightly the worse for wear the next day.
Thursday afternoon we had a very important meeting at the Deaf Association. The head of all VSO and the head of VSO East Africa are both in country doing a tour of duty and they wanted to pop in and meet us. Mike, the Country Director, and Amanda, my Programme Manager, were also there. Our Chair is currently in Holland with the leading academic on disability, attending an international Deaf conference so Gerard, the Vice-Chair, stepped in and most of the Committee and main volunteers came, including Leon, who was Programme Co-ordinator when I joined and is now a fully-fledged lawyer at the Ministry of Justice. To celebrate, he's taking us all out for chicken next weekend, a special treat - nom nom nom.
Continuing the high-profile theme, both the visiting heads came to the Disability Working Group on Friday. Sadly, our guest speaker was a no-show, he forgot which day it was, but the meeting itself was up-beat and productive.
Friday night the fun began. There's a wee group of us: Giudi, Maxime, Anja, Coco, Cathryn, J and myself who have taken to hanging out together. The picture up top is from J's house-warming last June where he and Cathryn cooked for us all. This Friday it was Giudi and Maxime's turn, also a house-warming, and Maxime cooked the most outstanding spread: potato & beef salad, spicy beans and rice. It was delicious and we ate, drank copious quantities of wine, and sat up chatting about everything and anything until the wee hours.
Wet season's definitely easing in and it rained the whole way home. Always pleasant on the back of a moto (err, not) but fine when you can just roll in, throw off your clothes and flop into bed all snug and warm. Water from the sky doesn't equate to water from the taps - naturally - and the water situation in my house is still dire.
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Jo & Pierre's house, pizza party last May:
L-R: Me, Giudi, Maxime, Pierre, Jo and Anja. |
Saturday morning I just lounged about and watched movies: Bedtime Stories, which was quite entertaining and involved a CGI guineapig called Bugsy, which is always good for a laugh. It also included Russell Brand who, I have to say, as fine a comedian as he is, is quite a terrible actor even in a comic role :o/
The second film I will discuss once and once only, I was that disgusted by it. Following on from the theme of horror movies: Mirrors. It was like the spawn of 1408 mating with The Brøken, but with none of the imagination.
Although The Brøken's release date was three months after Mirrors, I can't help thinking that someone probably read the script for the first and though 'nice concept, let's knock out our own version as fast as we can.' There's more than a hint of conceptual plagiarism going on there. By far The Brøken holds it for psychological suspense, plot, special effects and acting ability. In addition, the Mayflower Department Store which features in Mirrors must be a property location somewhere between House on Haunted Hill and Silent Hill, there was more than a whiff of both about it. A scrambled egg re-hash of a number of award-winning earlier concepts. So, yes, I was faintly bored and not at all impressed by it. It was certainly a shoddy down-size from Kiefer Southerland's Flatliners days.
Aaaanyway.
Last night was an absolutely brilliant one.
First of all, it was Ruairí's 50th birthday and he chose to have it at Handee, the new Indian restaurant. I really wanted to check it out but could never think of an excuse. This was the perfect one. Started around seven and everyone was there, from our Country Director, the British Council and the Deputy Ambassador, through to Ruairí's mum, Paula, Martine, Els and pretty much the entire VSO Rwanda corps.
The food was absolutely outstanding. Four types of curry in giant vats with naan bread and rice, self-service so you could stuff yourself silly (and we did) and ice-cream for desert. Totally fabulous. Highly recommended venue for parties and general indulgence.
Cathryn and I didn't actually make it as far as the ice-cream. We ate, drank, and made an early exit to Amahoro Stadium. It's the 50th anniversary of Primus beer in Rwanda, the first factory to reopen after '94 with a long-standing tradition of brewing in Rwanda, originally using gas from Lake Kivu to bottle it :)
In celebration they held a massive concert at the stadium including Rafiki, Kitoko, P-Square and Cécile Kayirebwa. I'm a complete fan of the latter and it turns out she's J's aunt! :op
[NB 2013: It turned out J told a lot of porkies. that was probably one of them.]
Unfortunately, we missed all the headlining acts because we arrived so late, but on the up-side we bumped into the guys: Simon, Aaron and Shakur, who upgraded us from VIP to VVIP and amazingly Giudi, Maxime, Anja & Coco had also slipped through earlier so we had a wonderful time guma guma (shake shake)-ing away to some fine Congolese beats with free beer and fireworks. Was most excellent indeed.
I think Amahoro's getting better at parties with practice. This was certainly better organised than the Shaggy concert and I didn't see any overt police violence, though the security people were miserable as sin and extremely unhelpful, directing people the wrong way into the stadium and then telling them to go back (lack of communication and planning), and preventing people from leaving to go to the toilet when they'd locked all the toilets inside the stadium, resulting in men peeing up against toilet doors! I have to say, for a major event venue the toilets are definitely something Amahoro need to work on. Small women's toilets with only two cubicles when you have thousands of people inside, really doesn't work. No apparent disabled toilets even though the National Paralympic Committee have their offices there. No mirror in the ladies, no toilet paper, locking toilets so that people can't use them - bit of a shambles.
The Primus guys were great though (well, I would say that, I'm biased) and the event itself was a brilliant line-up of acts. So many people having a wonderful time. Very well done. Rwanda needs more of these events - promote general happiness and good vibes :)
We rounded the night off at Stella and I finally fell into bed around 3:30 after a pain-in-the-arse ride home with a moto who ran out of petrol halfway down Rwandex road. Absolutely no one about except a group of drunk lads who tried to intervene (oh joy). I mean, really, when your sole job is to get people from A to B, you'd think you'd be capable of doing the one thing you need to do to make that job happen: fill up your vehicle.
Cathryn's moto did the same on the way to Amahoro *sigh* Eventually he managed to coax it back up the road to a petrol station and we were fine, but he kept stroking my leg on the way, driving at a snail's pace and chatting non-stop when all I wanted to do was get home. When we finally did get there he took about ten minutes to find change. Then my guard asked me to make him something to eat. At three-thirty in the morning. Do I look like your wife? I gave him some bread and went to sleep. Blah.
But minor trifles. It's been an excellent week and today is another lazy day of lounging in bed, eating a form of pot noodle, which I found in Ndoli's, and watching the last episodes of Dexter, season one. I am absolutely addicted to this. I first saw a couple of episodes from Season Two in Sierra Leone and wanted to watch it properly ever since. Dad sent me back with the first series and it's delicious. Absolutely loving it. Had to stop myself watching it all in one go so that today, Sunday, would be a treat. Apparently it's based on a book: Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay - this is now on my Christmas list people :)
So, off to make more coffee and watch the penultimate episode.
Huzah.
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