"I want to visualize it"

This is a request I got in an email recently and I thought it would make for a good blog post, so here's my best attempt! See the last post for more pictures.

The Centre de Jeunes is a big place. We are on the edge of Gatenga, which is the name for the part of Kigali in which we live (actually we are on the border of Gatenga and Kickucuro, but call it Gatenga). We have 27 acres of land, shared between the school, playground, farm and living quarters for priests, students and volunteers.

To get to the center from the eenter of the city is about a ten minute drive down a good, paved road. As you reach Rwandex, one of Rwanda’s biggest industrial areas in Kigali, you turn down a red dirt road towards our center. Immediately things change from the paved-road industrial world, to that of developing Africa. A large machine/mechanic operation is right outside our walls and often time we must navigate parked semis to get to our front gate.

(You can actually see the center on Google Maps. Search Kigali and when you get to the page it is clear where the city center is. Follow the road Boulevard de l’OUA southeast out of the city center. Zoom in and you will be able to see Rwandex labeled on the map. To the Southeast of Rwandex is a large Green space. That is where I am! Another post might try to explain this is detail more later)

As you walk in the front gate, you walk into a red dirt-road circle driveway with a statue of Don Bosco and the building where the Salesians live directly in behind Donny B. Here live two priests, Fr. Frans, the director, and semi-retired Jean Paul from Canada, more on them later. This is also where I eat most of the time, so I spend a lot of time in this building.

Taking a road to the right leads you past one of the professional school buildings on your right, where students study building (carpentry, bricklaying, electicity, etc) and secretarial skills. On the left is the small church, with outside seating because it is always full on Sunday mornings, and a small computer lab where Chris spends most of his time in the school year.

Continuing down the road you approach the farm and playground. I haven’t measured, but I think we have almost as much playground space as farmland. The “micro-garden” consists of maybe a one-acre plot where we have a vegetable garden, green house, seed bed, offices and a small area dedicated to teaching seminars to locals about how to maintain their own kitchen gardens. Continuing down the hill (literally sloping down) is the main field where we currently grow corn, and the marsh. The marsh probably takes up at least one qarter to one third of our total land, and it is a constant battle with water on the farm. In the dry season we struggle to water our plants and in the wet season can’t get the water out of the corn.

The back side of the center consists of the Foyer, where about 125 students live during the academic year. This large building is next to the “other side” of the school, which consists of agricultural studies and metal-working. Past the Foyer is the small center within our center where the pre-novitates live, work, study and pray. There are 11 pre-novitates from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in the very preliminary stages of studying to become religious. They are young guys who are passionate about many of the same things I am, and some even speak English, so they are great to hang around with.

And behind the pre-noviates, past the bananna trees and about a 10 minute walk from the front gate is my home on the very back side of the center. It is an old house for nuns, and could be described better as a dormotory than a house, with each having an individual room down a long corridor. I have a concrete floor, a bed, a desk and a cusioned chair that I stole from our “living room.”

The entire center is surrounded by an eight foot high brick wall topped with barbed wire and throrny vines. We do have a back gate, thankfully, and just down the road is “Agents Bar” where I can occasionally be found on a Friday night eating Brouchette (goat meat on a kaboob stick) and grilled plaintains with a 73 cl Primus beer.

This is a panorama from the watertower behind my house. The metal roof on the bottom is my house and this is a shot looking over the banannas and marsh.

more pictures

The boys working in one of the many bananna crops.


The playground. We have three basketball courts, three volleyball courts (two concrete, one grass), two small soccer pitches and one full size soccer pitch.

An aerial view of the center from the water tower behind the community. Out of the picture on the left is the foyer. The buildings you can see on the left are some class rooms and the metal shop. The building below is one of the places we keep the pigs and the ponds are for raising fish. You can also see one of our small vegetable garden below and some bananna trees on top of the photo. The large green area is non-aereable land and out of the picture top left is my house!

This is the path I walk to and from work and meals every day. Not a bad commute!


We have a "back door" gate that allows us to leave the center by our house. This is the road right outside our back door.

My Address

A couple people have asked for my address, so here it is:

Mitchell Lincoln
Centre de Jeune - Gatenga
B.P. 468
Kigali - Rwanda

Chris received a package from his mother yesterday and it took exactly one month to arrive. My dad sent something about three weeks ago and I haven't received it yet, so take this how you will! I think mail works, its just painfully slow!

I'm headed back to the lake this weekend (with our contract guarenteeing the price we demanded), so I'm excited to go see the waterfall. And Mom, I promise not to go to the DRC this time.

Mitchell and Hannah's adventure weekend

Last week, myself and four of my friends wanted to get out of Kigali for the weekend. We heard that a Nyngue National Park was pretty cool and made plans to go. However, after lodging, transportation and general interest fell through, all that remained was my friend Hannah and I and no destination. While I wanted to go to town and get on the first bus we saw, regardless of destination, Hannah was a bit more sensible and picked a destination: Ruhengeri, in the Northwest of Rwanda.

With backpacks and travel guides ready, we departed Saturday morning. It immediately started raining and with Hannah forgetting her rain jacket, it seemed maybe the travel gods were plotting against us. However, after we got to the city center and were soaking wet sitting on a bus bound for Ruhengeri, we got a break and sat next to a student who we knew in Kigali who lived at the Imbabazi Orphanage and was going home and invited us to join him. The Imbabazi Orphanage has a cool backstory, and is detailed in the book Land of A Thousand Hills by an American, Rosemond Carr, who moved to Rwanda and spent her whole life here. Coincidently, I was just finishing the book and was excited to see the place I had been reading about. When we reached Ruhengeri, in true adventure fashion, looked around and decided we would not stay there and changed buses with our friend.

We got on a bus heading for Gisenyi and halfway there stopped in the middle of the road to leave the bus for the much more exciting motorcycle ride down a terrible dirt road, but ascending and desending the hills and looking out over the Rwandan landscape in the shadow of the giant volcanoes that are the Northwest boundary of Rwanda. While it was cool to see the orphanage and meet the very friendly Americans who worked there (Mrs. Carr died a couple years ago), the most impressive part of this was simply its location and great views of the country side.
Before dark we jumped back on a moto and by a stroke of good fortune were able to flag down one of the last busses headed West towards Ginsenyi, where we found cheap lodging and a place to eat on the beach of Lake Kivu.

Sunday consisted of relaxing on the beach all morning, which was amazing. It was a little too cool to swim, which I was actually happy about the relief from the heat, and I spent the morning laying in the shade watching the waves come on shore. While this was great, I can only sit still for a little bit, and the close proximity of Goma was calling to me.

Goma is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was the place where thousands of refugees fled during the Rwandan genocide. As a long result of this, it has continued to be a place of conflict both within the DRC and with its Rwandan neighbor. The history is long and complicated, but quite fascinating to learn about if you are interested. There is also the most active volcano in Africa on the outskirts of town which erupted in 2002, taking out half the town. Today it still smokes all day and glows at night.


Because of the secuirty issues, we were told by a couple people not to go to Goma. I think these warnings just made it more appealing, so we decided to go. After waiting in line for one hour, bribing two Congolese officials and paying $40 a piece, we got into Goma... and were kind of disappointed. It was cool to walk on the lava rock from the eruption and see the reconstruction and the smoking volcano, but other than that Goma wasn't much more than a gray, drury town with too many United Nations trucks driving around. We were there two hours and crossed back and found a bus back to Ruhengeri.

The next morning we headed north from Ruhengeri to visit Lake Burera, and the accompanying Rusumo Falls. After another bus ride followed by moto, we arrived at a small house with a boat on the water and told the drivers to stop and let us off. It was a boat tour operation, and the manager seemed very happy to see us, it was out of the way and I don't think they get much business. After arguing over a price for one hour, it began to rain so both sides gave up and we sat inside and drank tea, looking out over the lake, whose banks are formed by an impressive collection of hills, giving it a unique, jagged appearance.

After the rain we decided to walk back to the main road to catch a bus back to Kigali. To do this we walked through some very rural areas and with the lake on our left and volcanoes on our right, my visions of amazing African landscapes were fulfilled.

Monday night we arrived back in Kigali, mentally rested and physically exhausted. On Tuesday I was back to work, clearing brush with a Machette in the morning and playing rugby with the Rwanda National Team in the afternoon. Yes, Africa is good this week.



This is Hannah walkin with our escorts back from the lake. In the rural areas "Muzungos" are fairly rare and they love to walk with you, touch, stare and say "good morning" regardless of the time of day,
This is me negotiating prices with the boat operators. We were drawing in the sand and doing math arguing about what a fair price is. Because i have been here for a two months, I have a pretty good idea what fair prices are, and what a decent wage is. When people try to rip me off because I am white I get a little irritated and while in reality we are often bartering over small sums of money (in this case a difference of about $12) I think my stubbornness plays a bigger role than my wallet.
Smoking Mount Nyiragongo, the most active volcano in Africa (in Goma).
A view of Lake Kivu and some of the hills of Rwanda.
Hannah, Gaudi and myself at the orphanage with the beautiful gardens maintained there.

Finals Week!

Sorry for the delay in posting. We had a slight problem with our electricity recently which killed our wireless modem. Fortunately for me, nothing of mine was damaged, but my friends in the office next door were not so fortunate.

Anyway, right now we are in “exams” period for the students. It reminds me of finals week in college, where everything stops, except testing. I remember during my last finals week sitting in Gage Union watching a man wash windows. I thought to myself, wow, I’m done studying and ready to just work. Well, here I am, with everyone else studying I am the one happily working away.

The big news for the past couple weeks was a trip to Gitarama, the second largest city in Rwanda (even though I didn’t even know it until after I left). Later that week was the first plowing of our corn field and apparently being from Iowa qualifies me as the expert in plowing and all tractor operations, so I happily plowed along, getting a sense of satisfaction from my work. My dad reminded me that I do indeed come from a long line of farmers and this is to be expected. Last week we actually got out of the center a little bit and went to the 2^nd annual Mutzig Beer Fest, which was a nice change of pace from our full, busy days at the center.

We’ve been to the Embassy two times now to watch football and its glorious. We hang out with about 5 or 6 other American guys and watch football. It’s a simple pleasure, but I do love it. Last weekend we even bought some ground beef and made hambergers!

I have posted some pictures below. I have many more, and hope to take many more, but until I get more reliable internet I won’t be able to get them online.

Also, if anyone knows how to get episodes of The Office from a non-US IP address I would be eternally grateful!

GO HAWKS!

Some Pictures

This is Chris, Pascal and I with a bunch of random Rwandan kids in front of some rural landscape. We visited Gitarama and stopped to take some photos and the kids (who live outside the city and aren't used to "muzungos" came running)
Every Saturday morning the kids who live in the center come to work on the farm for a couple hours. It is my job to assign tasks and supervise so last week I took 40 students and cleaned a drainage canal - I almost called Mike Rove of "Dirty Jobs."
A seed bed in our "micro=garden"
Our center is reknowned across the city for its acrobats and other performers. Here is one practicing.
Ah yes, me and one of my tractors, plowing along. This one has a cab with a radio that get "Voice of America" so I was plowing and rocking out!

p.s. if you are reading this on facebook you might not see the pictures. visit: www.wanderingkohawk.blogspot.com

My illegal border crossing and the United States Marines

While it makes for a good title, these two instances were not related, but both decent stories.
The first is a funny one. The volunteer who worked on the farm before I arrived returned to Kigali last week after traveling East Africa. Its a long story about running out of money and getting back to Rwanda, but he owed a man money at the Tanzanian border, so I agreed to take the bus with him to keep him company. When we arrived after our four-hour "bus" ride (more of a large van) we could not find the man, and decided that he was probably across the border. We went to the offical on the Rwandan side of the bridge, smiled big, played dumb and asked if we could see the waterfall from the bridge (I didn't even have my passport). He obliged, we walked across the bridge and just kep going, only to discover that our man was in fact on the Rwandan side of the border. As soon as we discovered this, the offical came charging across the bridge and up the hill to inform us that we did not have permission to be in Tanzania and we needed to return immediately. We smiled big, played dumb and came back, with him telling us facts about the waterfall and the border. Not that great of a story, but I thought it was kind of fun.

Wednesday night we went to the US embassy because we heard the Marines had parties there every Wednesday. We arrived, and after going though security, still a little skeptical, showed up and sure enough, there was a party! It was held in the Marines' house and while there weren't as many Americans there as we hoped for, the Marines were pretty cool guys and I think Sunday Chris and I are going to visit again to watch some football. Yes I'm still loving Rwanda, but very excited to have some American friends and American Football (tired of international football - soccer).

I'm also writing this as I know all my friends and family are tailgating in Iowa City, and of course because I'm in Rwanda the Hawkeyes are going to be good this year. Alas, I'm following as closely as I can and will have to put all my sports efforts into coaching my basketball team which might actually get started this week.