Just in case you forgot you live in Burundi...

Here are a few things that wouldn’t happen in too many other countries:      

• It takes 4 weeks longer than expected to get your car back from the garage because the only reputable garage in town has no electricity and doesn’t want to waste diesel to turn on generator for your piddlely, dinged-up door that doesn’t close.
• There’s an attack on a bar 5 kms outside the capital (yep, that would be Bujumbura) that is known to have many patrons from the ruling political party, and 36 persons are killed by unidentified assailants (Google: Gatumba Massacre).   However, because the ruling party doesn’t want to admit that there is an armed rebel movement developing in the countryside, the President makes it illegal to discuss the attack in any type of public forum for one month.  No radio coverage, no TV coverage, no news at all until the official report of the massacre comes out.  It made international press at the end of September 2011, and we don’t hear a peep about it anymore.
• The best place to buy strawberries in the capital is from a barefooted fruit vendor who walks between the cars coming to pick up children at the Belgian school.  Put in an order the day before to be guaranteed good Goma cheese (cheesemakers in the city of Goma in Eastern Congo are known as the best – it’s similar to Gouda, sorta) and fresh, large-ish sized strawberries.
• When you go for a pregnancy appointment with a “Belgian-trained” gynecologist (the term all expats yearn to hear around here) at the “best” hospital in town (supposedly Hopital Bumeric), you have to ask to if he would please check your blood pressure.  Not once has he measured my belly, asked me to step on a scale, told me what blood work I need to be done, na-da.  Every time, though, he does look for my “file” (i.e. a pink piece of paper in a binder with handwritten notes on it), and I explain that they never made one for me.  Every time he can’t find it.
• By mid-September every year, you’ve met more new people than you met in six months living in a non-expat environment.  Most people working as expats move during the summer, which means lots of goodbyes each June (yuck) and many hellos each August (fun).  This round has been especially fruitful for us as several English-speaking and Dutch-speaking families arrived with kids the same age as ours – hurrah!
•  It’s OK to do your 28-week glucose screening test with 2 Fantas and a pain au chocolat rather than the standard, doctor-issued glucose solution, which isn’t available.  Of course, don’t expect any accurate interpretation of results…

31 weeks pregnant in Burundi

Jan took this picture today and clearly we're well on our way!  The boys understand what's going on (there's a baby in Mommy's tummy), they know I'll leave for the USA first and that they'll come a few weeks later with Papa and that we'll all have Christmas together in WI.  Hurrah - great timing, don't you think?! (Although, landing in WI nine months pregnant with my favorite Indian buffet, Papa Johns and Prego spaghetti sauce available anytime, not to mention Thanksgiving AND Christmas, does sound a bit dangerous...)

Most Burundians who see me, those I know as well as strangers, are seriously impressed with my stomach, and often comment on it to Roger, our driver.  Or ask me when I'm due and then act shocked that I still have 2 months to go.  (Half the baby's genes are Dutch and they're the tallest people in the world - what's a mom to do?)

My theory is that all the attention is largely fashion-related.  Burundian pregnancy clothes tend to be similar to a large colorful sheet that just makes you look fat (I'm sure there are way more pregnant women than I actually notice), whereas ours are specifically designed to make you look pregnant and not fat.  Or at least that's the hope...  In Western pregnancy clothes, I look visibly (sometimes shockingly) pregnant and apparently that's hard not to notice!

Let's Talk About Food: Israel!

Ok, so maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I LOVE TO EAT.  I’m not a foodie – I don’t believe in all that super-fancy, shooshy food and expensive ingredients because it feels exclusive and I don’t like that.  I do like eating foods that are in season and haven’t traveled a million miles to reach me.  But that doesn’t mean that I won’t buy Vietnamese fish sauce in NYC’s Chinatown and carry it in a suitcase to Burundi.  

I like to cook, and I read cookbooks to relax.  Although, as my husband recently pointed out after going through the margin notes in most of our cookbooks, I seem to be allergic to following a recipe exactly.  I mean, they’re really just recommendations, right? 

In brief my brain is very tuned into food pretty much all the time and especially whenever I travel.  I’ll try my best to limit my food ramblings to 1 – 2 entries per country.  For now.

So…let’s talk about food in Israel!

I thought Americans pretty much had the corner market on breakfast in a restaurant.  Uh, NO.  We have the Hungry Man Breakfast (basically 2 of everything on the menu), eggs about 1,700 different ways, and no qualms about eating potatoes under or next to everything, but you sure can’t get feta cheese marinated in pesto with fresh rolls before noon in America. 

Besides the fact that I was eating by myself and literally chugging my breakfast because a cab was coming to take me to Ramallah, here’s a photo of what may be my favorite restaurant breakfast every, eaten at the London restaurant, 111 Herbert Samuel Avenue, Tel Aviv (it barely all fits on the table - yeah, baby!):

• Yogurt with maple syrup, toasted oatmeal, grapes, apple, pear and some other exotic fruit I didn’t recognize;
•  4 warm, sesame seed-covered rolls;
•  A selection of spreads and finger foods: tuna salad, olives, feta marinated in pesto, fromage blanc mixed with olives, and roasted red pepper;
• Balkan Eggs Benedict: 3 slices of toast covered with roasted eggplant, 2 poached eggs, and shredded feta cheese with a side of fried potatoes;
•  A generous bowl of chopped cucumber, tomato and red onion in a lemon and olive oil dressing (known as “Israeli salad” in Israel);
•  Lemonade
•  Cappuccino

A little advice for anyone traveling with a friend – split the darn breakfast and then order an ice cream sundae at 10 am, like the smarties at the table next to me! 

Food shopping in Israel must be a learned art because I would have bought everything I came across, except that I was carrying a large camera bag and about 20 lbs of baby weight, which meant I wasn’t about to buy anything.  But had I wanted to, here’s a small selection of things on my shortlist from the Mehane Yehuda market in Jerusalem:

Gobs of dried fruits 

Hummus - as far as the eye can see

Baklava & cookies

Spices - can you smell them?

Halva

Chips - in Hebrew!

Big Belly, Will Travel - to Israel and Palestine!

Live from Ramallah:  So I've actually left my two darling boys and their father in Burundi for 2.5 weeks so I can travel to Israel and Palestine to collect more stories for One Globe Kids.  I knew it would be tough being gone for so long, but it really wasn't until now that I understand how hard it is for my sister and parents to Skype with the boys and not be able to actually kiss them through the computer screen.  Plus, I'm around all these darling children and their siblings for work, making it that much harder!  

I arrived in Tel Aviv after an overnight trip from Bujumbura with stops in Nairobi and Addis and am very pleased to report that it IS possible to eat Ethiopian tibs and injera at the airport in Addis Abbebe.  (My baby needs meat, don't you know?)  I picked up a free Time Out Israel at the airport, bringing back memories of my own Time Out New York subscription of a year ago, and rolled my bags through customs without stopping, looking like the tired, pregnant lady that I am. 

A mere 5 hours after laying down, I reluctantly pulled myself out of bed the first morning to go out in search of a SIM card so I can make local calls using my own cellphone.  (Gotta love that SIM system – my phone can call Zambia, Rwanda, the Netherlands and now Israel depending on what card I put in.  Only bummer?  It won’t work in Wisconsin.  Sheesh.)

And wow, Tel Aviv is great!  The weather feels truly Mediterranean, sunny and dry, the streets busy, filled with bikers, buses, cars, walkers, and tons of people pushing strollers and playing with kids.  It feels remarkably like lower Manhattan but with less humidity, shorter buildings and fewer people in suits.  Oh, and a lot more hummus, believe it or not!  I found the card, called my friend Kari in Ramallah to tell her I’d arrived, and reconfirmed my appointment with the first family and child that I’m photographing – a funny, sweet 5-year old boy named Asher.

Here I am, heading out to meet Asher:

Traveling and working internationally while pregnant is actually way better than you’d expect – that big ball is the biggest door opener ever.  It seems that besides the 15 – 22 year-old age group, everyone wants to talk about kids.  Little girls on the street point, smile and giggle, old women and men tell you about their grandchildren, and parents are more than happy to talk about their own munchkins.  Last night, Munir, the 33-yr old Palestinian taxi driver who brought me from Jerusalem to Ramallah (via the famed Qalandia checkpoint) told me all about how long he and his wife waited before having kids, what he hopes they’ll study, how their behavior changes over time.  A potentially, slightly intimidating car ride from Israel into the West Bank was made quite entertaining and insightful due to my growing belly - it may be one of the greatest travel assets I’ve ever had.  

Tourist in Rwanda - during Genocide Memorial (Journal: April 2011)

Excerpt from my April 11, 2011 journal:

In about an hour Jonathan and I will be back on the road headed toward Bujumbura.  What a Rwanda tour this has been!  We’ve hiked through tea fields (who knew those bushes can grow up to chest height?!), seen a group of Colobus monkeys in the wild, including the cutest baby Colobus, all covered in white hair, eaten and shopped our way through Kigali and are now enjoying a lake/marshaland in south-easter Rwanda.  As I type, Jonathan is using binoculars to check out some big (3 feet tall) stork/pelican walking along the shore.  From a distance they seem majestic and graceful, and I suppose they are, but as soon as you get a closer view, they seem to have flown out a bad horror movie – their face is covered in warts and red blotches and their waddles (which are gigantic) are covered in short, coarse hair.  To cool off they stand still and spread their wings, about 5 feet across.

We’ve been in Rwanda for 5 days now, and all 5 have been official genocide memorial days.  I hadn’t planned to visit then, but neither had I actually looked to be sure when it was so we wouldn’t interrupt.  The airplane carrying the Preisdent of Rwanda and the President of Burundi was shot down around 8:30pm on April 6 and their 7-day memorial period starts April 7.  (Burundians memorialize the genocide on April 6 – not sure why there are different dates.)  During the whole week, everything is open in the morning but closed in the afternoon.  It seems like a very smart way to memorialize something of this magnitude – 1 day would never be enough, yet 7 days is significant.  But life can’t shut down – people still need to earn a living, buy food, work, so the lively mornings shows living resilience in contrast to all the death that occurred. 

Every where we’ve gone, from the Nyuwenge Forest to this remote lake, people where purple shirts, purple ribbons and hang purple banners to remember what happened – how 800,000 people were killed in 2 months.  Memorial sites dot the landscape. 

We visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali on Saturday, and I’m not sure what to write.  It’s like visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washignton, DC, where everyone is quiet and doesn’t know how to react appropriately because it’s all so horrific.  The Rwandan genocide occurred 18 years ago, so if you were 10 when it happened (definitely old enough to remember it all), you’d be 28 years old now.  The museum had video interviews with survivors and you realize that there are thousands of people who lost as much as those we heard.  A woman told how her parents were taken away, and she saw and heard her three sisters be thrown into a latrine, followed by large rocks until their screams were silent.   I wonder how many people we passed on the street, or spoke to in a gas station or a shop or a hotel, experienced something similar.  Thousands.  I won’t write more, because: 1) it’s so mind-blowing to be chased down by your neighbors, have so many people killed, and still the international community didn’t intervene; and 2) Rwanda is trying really hard to be more than the genocide and they are.

Last January I in Rwanda I met a couple from NYC who had flown in to go on a 12-day Rwanda tour.  It’s definitely on the radar and has amazing nature and culture to offer.  Our second day we had lunch and lounged at the Nyuwenge Forest Lodge, a private hotel with its own helipad and infinity pool over-looking the oldest prehistoric forest in the world.  It never completely froze over during the last ice age so there are many plants/animals that could have been here for literally millions of years.  The Igishigishigi plant is literally thought to have been food for dinosaurs!  The lodge is the kind of place that Brangelina would stay should they ever visit Rwanda – the location and decoration is absolutely stunning.  We saw a chandelier made of tea strainers since it’s located on a tea plantation next to the forest.

Rwanda is using tourism, for a large part, to dig it’s way out of poverty, and the government has a highly-centralized office of parks and recreation.  Their capacity to communicate what you can do and for how much money is not up to snuff, however.  Each “activity” is billed separately and costs a pretty penny.  For example, a hike to see the Colobus, Chimpanzees or “Primates” are all paid separately.  A plain “hike” is also paid separately from that.  We paid $70 (for Jonathan) / $50 (for me as an East African Community resident) to go on a hike to see the Colobus monkeys, which we saw largely in part to the tracking team that stays on the ground to direct visitors.  However, we were told we could see them near the guest house where we stayed and then also hike to find them from the other tourism office.  The neglected to tell us that if the monkeys moved too far away and wouldn’t be able to reach them and hike back before dark, that they wouldn’t even let us try and find them.  The guide (one of 7 guides sitting at the park reception park doing nothing) refused to let us enter the park since they had moved 2.5 hours away by 1pm.  Essentially we had hiked through the tea fields to find the smaller colony (a 2 hour trip) and were not allowed to enter the real forest to hike or try and find the monkeys again.  They explained that it is because we would have been “hiking,” instead of tracking Colobus, and that’s a different activity and would cost another $40 – 50.  They’re extremely proud of the 6,000 people who visited the park in 2010 and couldn’t have cared less that a new pricing system may give them more clients.  But oh, well!  We did see Colobus during our hike, Mountain monkeys (cute black monkeys with really puffy, white lamb chops on the side and bottom of their face) along the road, and Vervet monkeys on the guesthouse grounds.  Now I’ll now how to do it next time – pay for a 1-2 day hiking pass and get into the forest.  If you really want to see monkeys, pay for that separately. 

In Kigali, we ate at Mama Africa a large, open-air terraced restaurant with thatched roof, followed by drinks at Republika Café – how I would LOVE to decorate a place like that.  All bright African patterns and old wooden chairs and fixtures.  So cool.  We had coffee at La Galette, where I’ll definitely be bringing the boys for croissants and limitless rocking on the big rocking horses for children.  Lunch was, of course, at Khana Khazana, the Indian restaurant that used to have a sister restaurant in Burundi.  (Indian food in Africa is somehow some of the best in the world!). 

In a few minutes we’ll head back to the main road, giving the hotel manager a ride to a funeral before driving back to Bujumbura.  It’s 18 years after the genocide and bodies are still being found and services held.

Hunger on the Street (Journal: January 2011)

This is an excerpt from my January 2011 journal:

Lest my emails make it sound like Burundi is only fun and games (and good food and beaches) tonight’s email will bring us all back down to earth.  When I write about life here, I do not intentionally sugarcoat, just as I do not intentionally point out the hard, scary, bad things.  I figure that every place has things that make us nervous, bad situations, people who must make difficult choices, poverty.  Never once did it occur to me to tell people about the woman who lived (lives?) in the City Hall subway stop when they asked what it was like to live in NYC.  But a woman lived in the subway, near Pace University, and she slept on a cardboard box and did her business in a McDonald’s cup and I walked by her every time I went uptown on the 4/5/6. 

This afternoon my Dutch neighbor, Frederieke, and I went for a walk.  We’ve both been trying to exercise more and this is the third weekend that we got out for our power walk.  We only slightly modified our route today, heading down the mountain from the exclusive expat neighborhood of Kiriri into the equally exclusive next door neighborhood of Ruhero 1 for a lap at the public garden. 

Burundian’s are unique with their love of exercise, going to such extremes that each day of the week one of the government ministries (ministry of interior, health, security, finance, etc.) closes at 3pm so the employees can go exercise.  As of 3pm everyday, people are jogging, walking, doing calisthenics on the street.   Lots of people.  For a few hours at a time, exercise works like a great equalizer.  Young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, expat, Burundian – everyone is working out.  A smile, a thumbs up, and we’re all in it together.

I really like my walks with Frederieke.  Sometimes we talk about fluffy stuff like the various merits of Edward and Jake from the Twilight series and sometimes we talk about serious stuff, like what more can be done to stop the ongoing rape of Burundian and Congolese women in the countryside.  Today our walk took us to the public garden for the first time.

The jardin publique is just that.  A public garden, cut from the same concept as Central Park, but much, much, much smaller.  There’s a small playground, basketball courts, fields for Frisbee football, a pavilion where I’m hoping to go for step aerobics, and a track that runs around the outer edge.  Today there was a private wedding, attended by a government minister, and therefore many extra armed police standing around the perimeter. 

We finished our lap, enjoying the normalcy of walking in a city park, and had just headed back out to the street when she fell.  Eva? Francoise?  Euginie?  I don’t know her name but I saw her collapse on the street about 100 yards from where we walked.  My first reaction was puzzlement.  Did that woman really just fall down?  Why did she fall in the middle of the street?  Why is the security agent across the street from her not doing anything?  Frederieke and I hurried toward her, looking around to see who else had seen what had happened.  When I saw the little foot hanging from the side of her body, I broke into a run. 

A woman carrying a baby on her back had collapsed in the middle of the road about 200 yards from the entrance to the public garden.  She fell on her back, pinning the baby to the pavement.  When we reached her, I thought she was dead.  Her eyes and her mouth were wide open, unmoving, and she didn’t respond when we grabbed her arms and pulled her upright.  The baby was moving but did not make a sound.  We screamed for help as one passerby helped us pull her off the road.  Not knowing what to do in case of an emergency in Burundi, Frederieke stayed with her while I ran to find the police.

I stopped 2 passersby on the road, Burundians who had also come to exercise, explaining as quickly as I could what had happened and asking what we should do.  At one point I remember saying, “I’m a foreigner here.  What should we do in this type of situation?  Where do we get help?”  No one had a response.  The police wouldn’t leave their “posts,” where they hung out in a circle chatting.  By the time I got back to the woman, Frederieke had the baby in her arms and the woman was propped up by a tree, alive.  A group of onlookers had gathered, a gawker’s traffic jam as it may be called at home. 

I don’t know what we would have done if my friend Jasmin hadn’t pulled up in her car shortly thereafter.  Jasmin is Belgian and married to Boscoe, a Burundian.  They have two daughters the same ages as our boys and just moved to Burundi from Belgian so he could invest in his country.  The crowd that had gathered told us that the woman was hungry and Jasmin had several muffins in a box, which we fed her.  For the first time, I saw her child move to take the muffin away from his mother to feed himself. 

Collapsing from hunger is perhaps not as uncommon as we’d expect in the world.  What is shocking is to see it happen in front of you and to realize that NO ONE knows what should be done to help.  Until Boscoe arrived, no Burundian had made even any indication that he/she would take responsibility to find help.  There is absolutely no safety net at all in Burundi.  No 911 to call.  There are hospitals, but no ambulances and no treatment without money.  There’s no social security, no homeless shelters, no safe houses for women and children.  Even if the police would have reacted, they don’t have a protocol to follow, don’t know any first aid.  Besides driving her to a hospital, where she would be refused without payment, there isn’t anything they would or could have done.  Burundi has roads and restaurants and shops and people who exercise, but when a vulnerable woman collapses with her child due to hunger, there’s no net to catch her. 

Eventually she told us (in Kirundi) where she lives and Boscoe said he would give her a ride home and money for groceries.  Frederieke and I walked home, half stunned and half mad at it all.  How could this happen?  Why is it like this?  When will it change?  What will happen to that little boy?  Later I heard that she had fallen over again in the car so they took her to the hospital anyway.  The doctor said she had collapsed from hunger, not having eaten for over a day and with too much physical exertion.  While at the hospital, a nurse told Boscoe that it’s not a good idea for him to drive her home.  The neighborhood is too rough to take a car after dark and he could expect problems from her family and neighbors, who may accuse him of having harmed her.  Not wanting to get dragged into a situation he didn’t understand, he brought her to the bus stop, made sure she knew where she was headed and gave her money. 

And I sat on my couch and wrote about it on my MacBook Pro.  What chance does she, does her child have for a healthy life?  Could it have been an act?  A desperate step taken when she saw two white Mzungus walking toward her?  What could possibly be worse than intentionally falling to the ground, on top of your child, with the hopes that two strangers would be wiling to help?  No one with other options would do that.  No matter how I examine it, I am unsatisfied.  How quaint.  I’m unsatisfied and there’s a starving mother in Kanyosha trying to feed herself and her baby.

Pregnant in Burundi

Fast-forward from April, I am now 3.5 months pregnant (15.5 weeks to be exact!!!) and went today for my first blood work.  Clinique "La Misericorde" (personally, I can't come up with a way to pronounce it that doesn't sound miserable) is near the public garden in Bujumbura and has the reputation of having the best lab in the city.  Many expats get their bloodwork done there, pick up the results and take them to a doctor for analysis.  When we took Wim for blood work about a month ago a cat walked in while he had the needle in his arm (a decent distraction), but otherwise it seems nicer than other places.

While waiting at the reception to pay (one always pays first and then takes the receipt to the lab for the blood draw), the husband of a VERY pregnant woman cut in front of me, which I found fine considering her size.  She looked at least 40 years old and quite tired, while her husband looked not a day over 30 years and very spry.  They did not interact until he started digging in his pants for the payment.  Even though he had an honest-to-goodness man purse around his neck (necklace-style), he went down so deep I think he must have had a pocket on the inside of his underwear.  No wonder the Burundian Franc bills mostly look/feel dirty and/or wet.

I picked up the results at 5pm tonight and will take them to the doctor in the morning, assuming I get in to see her.  Given the number of pregnant expats in Buj, there's really only one doctor people trust and you don't make appointments to see her.  As at all doctor's offices, you get there early and wait - hopefully they come to work!

But all in all, being pregnant in Burundi is pretty great.  The food is really healthy and fresh, the weather is great, swimming is always possible, there are tons of young families, an ultrasound costs $12, and it's both fun and economical to have clothes made to fit, which I've been doing a lot of lately (right now they're pregnancy clothes but just imagine - in 2012 I'll have nursing clothes made-to-fit!).

Of course, I do need to qualify the above statement as coming from a seriously privileged expat point-of-view.  I can't confirm that the woman in front of me in line this morning felt the same.  Burundian women have an average of 6.2 children and the majority are not born in a hospital.  I see pregnant women walking down our hill with a basket of avocados on their head, a baby on their back, and a child by their side heading for the market.  How does one survive morning sickness like that?!  At least I get to throw-up into a normal toilet that flushes away the yuck.

The national monument at the end of our street is situated in a large park, which is maintained by a group of women, primarily widows, from the neighboring hills.  I'd estimate that it's roughly the size of 2 football fields and these women groom it with nothing more than hoes and their hands, most often with babies tied to their backs.  Their slightly older children (1 - 2 years) sit in the shade nearby.  The weeds are pulled by hand, the rocks lining each pathway are straightened by hand, hoes are used to keep the gravel orderly.  Maintaining this park requires a lot of bending over and knowing how hard it is to simply put on shoes when I'm really pregnant, I am seriously impressed.  For most Burundian women, being pregnant doesn't mean a break from the ordinary.  They keep cultivating their fields so their other children can eat, hauling water, cooking over charcoal, washing by hand, and then breast-feeding in the shade.  Whew.

I am seriously lucky.  And I need to remember that the next time I'm desperately craving box macaroni and cheese with crunched up Cheez-Its on top.  (If you haven't tried it, I HIGHLY recommend...)

Guests are Great - especially in Burundi

My brother, Jonathan, arrived in Burundi at the beginning of April.  So far we have:

• Seen 3 hippos swimming in Lake Tanganika about 2 meters from the shore (note: no more swimming in the lake for us!)
• Gone to the Bujumbura Central Market twice (we're both market people - we saw avocados as big as my 2-yr old's head)
• Bought African cloth (including real Wax Hollandais) and ordered clothes at a local tailor (shorts for Jonathan to take home, matching safari pants and hats for my boys)
• Purchased a trunkful of vegetables from the side of the road for approximately $14 (5 heads of cauliflower, 4 cabbages, 4 lbs zucchini, 4 lbs spinach, 4 lbs carrots, and 1 lb leeks)
• Gone swimming with the boys everyday (sometimes more than once)
• Had movie night on the big screen (I still laugh out loud through most of Date Night with Tina Fey and Steve Carell)
• Grilled poolside with friends (including real potato french fries made in my husband's serious Dutch deep fryer - I must say, fried fries do beat oven fries.  sorry, olive oil fans.)
• Taken the boys to Ice World (uh, I guess it's becoming a regular thing...lookout DQ...)
• Played Cranium with my 5-yr old (he did correctly spell m-u-d but c-a-r-d was just too hard - it should be c-r-d, don't cha know?)
• Accomplished much train-track building and reading (fun for adults and kids alike);
• Gone on a 5-day road trip to Rwanda (siblings only), which completely deserves it's own blog entry (Colobus monkeys in the wild, euchre lakeside with the craziest storks ever, eating/shopping our way through Kigali, aka bliss with only a few totally crappy roads)

In a nutshell, having a guest is totally great.  And it's only going to get better when my sister and her husband arrive this weekend.  Next up: an Easter road trip to the Serengeti... with kids!

Fitting in all the fun has meant finding time for work is tight, but luckily he has a job that he can work on from here so we're getting at least 3 - 5 hours in per day.  But not in Rwanda - that was pure fun.

As a small preview, here's us hiking through tea fields with "Mama Colobus," the monkey tracker in search of Colobus monkeys in Rwanda's Nyungwe Forest:

LIVE: From Bujumbura, Burundi!

Hello out there!

This is my first blog EVER and it's coming out of a rainy Sunday afternoon in Bujumbura, Burundi.  My husband, Jan, is playing with our kids (sounds like some version of horsey/lion pride, if I had to bet) while I'm in my home office working/hiding/writing.  Instead of sending out emails over life and times here, I'm switching to a blog format with the hope that I'll write more regularly and be able to share photos with friends, family, and anyone else considering a move to Burundi (I know you're out there - we were in that situation a mere 7 months ago...).

If it weren't raining, the view from our kitchen porch would be this: down the mountain into central Bujumbura, with Lake Tanganika and the mountains of DR Congo in the distance.  Not a day goes by that I'm not thankful for this landscape.

It's the rainy season now, which sometimes means crazy loud thunderstorms, but today means one of those damp fall-like days where it's just gray and rainy.  No better way to interject a bit a life into such a blah afternoon than a quick trip to Ice World, the latest edition to Bujumbura's kid-friendly scene: a soft-serve ice cream joint!  Here I come, boys!