June 22

We spent two nights in Kibuye this weekend and explored a little bit of Lake Kivu.  The lake is beautiful and it was a very relaxing weekend for the most part.  The hotel wasn’t nearly as nice as the guesthouse in Kigali and I was very excited to return to Bethany this morning.

We got to Kibuye Thursday afternoon and Friday morning we took boats to Amahoro Island and spent a couple of hours relaxing by the water.  It was such a beautiful island and I felt like we were in the Caribbean.  The lake is so big and is surrounded by hills (as is the rest of Rwanda) and the views were amazing.  So naturally my camera battery died right when we landed on the island.

During our time here I’ve experienced a fair amount of alienation, especially as you get to the more rural areas of Rwanda.  On our way back from Kibuye, we made a bathroom stop in a very rural region with a lot of people, and I think this experience takes the cake for the most alienated I’ve felt in Rwanda.

As the bus pulled over a group gathered around to see what the white people were doing stopping in their town.  We were definitely a spectacle and around 100, if not more, people began to stare inside our bus.  It literally felt like we were animals in a zoo.  Elizabeth and I had our window open and an older man tried to open it from the outside. 

After students got off the bus to go to the bathroom, the bus door stayed open and women and children stood outside looking at us and talking about us to each other.  Some asked for money and others laughed when one of us tried to say “good morning” to “hello” in Kinyarwanda. 

This is probably the most uncomfortable I’ve felt throughout the entire trip because there were so many people just peering through the windows looking at us.  In most other places we’ve been, people would look at us while they walked by the bus but a congregation of people isn’t that common.