National Service Day

We had arranged to spend Saturday with Kate and Heather. Kate is from Massachusetts and I met her last summer at the Belfer Conference in Washington, and Heather is from Calgary. They are both teachers. They are the people who brought us the two gorilla walking sticks when they came back from their gorilla trek. Darla also participated in that trek and she, too, was part of the gorilla stick gifts. Heather had had a rough go of it on the gorilla trek. Her feet were very badly blistered and she was hobbling around a bit. We invited her to come over and have a shower and soak her feet in clean surroundings and she took us up on it.

Kate and Heather said that they would be at our room at 8:30 a.m. They showed up at the stroke of 8:30, laughing and having a great time. It seems that they took motorcycle taxis to get to the hotel from the St. Paul because there were no taxis to be had. It was National Service Day. On the last Saturday of each month, all the shops and businesses are closed, and everyone performs some sort of service to their country, usually cleaning up, but there are other things that people can do, too.

We noticed that there was no traffic at all around the building. Heather had her shower, and she was just in heaven that it was so clean. After her skin was dry we dressed up her blisters with polysporin and proper band-aids and went upstairs for brekkie. What can you say about breakfast at the Milles Collines after you have had breakfast at the St. Paul? What can you say about a shower at the Milles Collines after you have had a shower at the St Paul, for that matter. It is like comparing apples and streetcars.

We had to wait until 1:00 pm to go out because all of the shops were closed. We stayed in the hotel and just chatted. It was a nice relaxing antidote to the busy-ness we had had since the moment we arrived at Pearson airport to leave for Rwanda on July 18th. We decided that we wanted to go and look for textiles, and we knew where the fabric district was so at 1:00 p.m. we set out. It was pretty hot out. At any rate after a few false starts at shops down alleyways etc. we finally found a place that had some nice material. We bought a few pieces (we all did) and then we found an even better place across the street. I bought 6 kangas. What I really wanted were kikoys, which are from Kenya, but I didn’t see any. Linda tells me now that she saw some at the airport in Nairobi but didn’t mention it to me until we got home.

We exhausted ourselves shopping. We also stopped by a sporting goods shop and purchased a few Rwanda soccer shirts as souvenirs. Then we went to the craft market across from the Nakumat and picked up a few things. By then I was shopped out.

We went back to the Milles Collines with Kate and Heather and we had dinner, which was really nice, but kind of expensive. I noticed that there was a cat roaming the grounds of the hotel at night. I mentioned it to the waiter but he didn’t seem to care about the cat at all. I resolved to find some cat food and feed it.

Kate and Heather went back to the St. Paul at about nine o’clock. Heather said her blisters were feeling a lot better for the clean water and good band-aids. We had a great, if exhausting, day.

We bumped into Rich at lunch at the Bourbon Café. He asked if we had had a power failure at the Milles Collines. We did in the morning, but it only lasted about 2 minutes until the hotel’s generator kicked in. The power was out at the St. Paul all day.