As hard as it was to top that last day, the next was right up there though it started off funny. First, a little background. Liz and been trying to communicate with a coffee co-op named COOPAC for several weeks before the trip. The charity/foundation arm of Women For Wealth was interested in making micro-loans through COOPAC and Liz wanted to organize a trip to come out and see their operations near Lake Kivu.
Since we had been in Rwanda, Joseph, who is the head marketing guy at COOPAC, had been trying to find out from Liz just how many people to expect on the visit. Liz's arms were somewhat tied because every time she tried to get up in front of our group to see who wanted to join us the group coordinators would tell her to wait until tomorrow so that there would be other things to choose from.
So the day before we are suppose to go to Gisenyi, we have the total number, but the problem is that we are suppose to be there at 10:00am. Not a problem, right? Except that it's 3 1/2 hours away. Solution? Helicopter of course! If we ride Airwolf we can still leave at 9:00 and make it in plenty of time. The only caveat is the weather. If it's raining or the clouds are too low, the bird can't fly. So it's a bit of a gamble. Liz wakes up the day were supposed to leave at about 5:30am and calls Forrest to see if the weather is going to be OK. "not sure" he replies. So we decide to go on the assumption that the weather will be fine and sleep in.
We got to the Serena at about 7:30 and eat breakfast. Forrest (or maybe Eric) had arranged for 2 SUV's with drivers to take us to Gisenyi. D'oh! We're going to be so late. Not to worry. The helicopter can fly, but just not yet. We will drive to Ruhengeri (about half way), and the helicopter will come meet us there at the airport with the rest of our group. We will all go visit a school and then they will give us a ride in the helicopter to Gisenyi. We should be there by 11:00. Not bad!
We packed into our rides.
and away we went. It was pretty uneventful, except that my cell phone had run out of minutes. I needed to find a Terracom store so that I could recharge some minutes. The problem was the fact that it was still before 8:00am and everything was closed. Oh well, we do have 2 other people in the car that have local phones so we should be ok. So we start heading out of Kigali. Oops, one more problem. One of the car is almost empty so we need to find some diesel fuel. No problem right? Wrong. We probably go to 10 different gas stations in Kigali and they are all out of diesel! Evidently this happens periodically and they are still trying to figure out some supply issues. (I think the hold up might actually be in Uganda.) The solution? Drive to the next town about 40km away and hope that they have gas at their one station. You have to realize that the entire country is build on these beautiful, but very large, hills. You are always either going up or going down. There is no level. I'm thinking that we are definitely going to be walking up some of them when we run out of fuel.
Alas, I was wrong. The one station in the next town did have diesel and we were back on the road.
Nothing eventful except that Juli almost got crushed in a stampede of people at the one gas station. She thought it would be a good idea to take her backpack full of toys out into the street and give some of them away to the kids. Total pandemonium broke loose. I have the whole thing on video which I will post another day. I did, however, take this photo once we were back on the road:
We got to Ruhengeri. Found the airport. Here's a picture of the terminal:
The helicopter arrived right on time with the rest of our crew and we all zoomed off to see a local school. It was called the Sunshine School I believe. There seemed to be a couple hundred kids boarding there and it is considered to be a tremendous success. Here are some shots from the school:
Then we hurried back to the airport to get on the helicopter which was way cool. We told our drivers to meet us at the airfield in Ginsenyi and drive fast! Oh, and did I mention that the entire back end of the helicopter was wide open?
The best part is we landed safely in Ginsenyi. You'll see why that's the best part in the next post.
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