Rwandan roadtrip

Rwanda is called the country of a thousand hills ("les milles collins") and the description is spot on. I drove across about half the length of the country yesterday from Kigali to Kibuye never once touching a straight stretch of road longer than 20 meters, just endless broad meanders around the hills. The countryside is very green, fertile and every square inch is cultivated - it has to be to feed 6 million people crammed into an area about the size of Wales. I love contours, and so the landscape is right up my street. The views can be spectacular as you crest one of the larger hills and gaze out over the endless fractal progression; this time of the year is quite hazy, so the more distant hilltops are blurred by vapour, giving the scene a kind of dreamlike quality.

Driving in Rwanda seems to involve jamming the wheel hard to the right around one bend, hard to the left around the next, and so on until you reach your destination, all the while tooting the horn to warn the hordes of pedestrians, cyclists, cows and goats about your approach. The density of population is obvious from the dozens of people who lined almost every stretch of the two and a half hour journey.

Lake Kivu is, to look at, a paradise location with crystal clean water surrounded by those milles collins. It's a perilous place, however, as it contains pockets of methane gas which periodically bubble up and can suffocate anyone swimming or fishing in the vicinity. Three years ago (to cap Africa's bloodiest civil war) the Volcano overlooking Goma on the Congo side of lake Kivu erupted and cut a lava path through the city centre. Apparently the lava solidified about 70m into lake Kivu, however if it had penetrated another 100m it would have ignited the methane, leading to an unimaginably vast explosion. That is one horror at least that the long suffering people around Lake Kivu have been been spared.

Here's a random observation: I've been known to start my sentences with an conteplative hum "Mmmm" but Rwandans seem to take this to extreme, beginning every word with the letter M. Okay, so this isn't strictly true, but certainly the four survival words of Kinyarwanda I've learnt so far all fit the pattern:

murakoze = thank you
mwaramutse = good morning
mwirwe = good afternoon/evening
murarakye = good night

Weddings and loose ends

I'm writing this from Kigali, Rwanda, where I've just arrived to assess HIV/AIDS projects for my charity NPC. I'm here until Saturday then driving down to Burundi (avoiding interahamwe and other rebels on route) for another six days research. This trip is hectically sandwiched between two weddings in England. I arrive back in London at 6am on the 24th and head straight to the wedding of my oldest friends Anne Westmacott, and the evening before I flew out here was the wedding of an Iraqi friend Hussein.

Hussein and Ghida's wedding reception was the most oppulant I've ever attended, or am likely to attend! It was in the Royal Counts of Justice in London, in a giant hall seating at least 500 people. All the great and the good of anglo-iraqi society were there, and at one point I even found myself bopping on the dance floor to an Amr Diab song alongside the lawyer who is organisings Saddam's criminal tribunal. It was wonderful meeting Hussein's friends from school and university, as I've only seen a small section of his life in the year we've known each other. One of them commented, and this is spot on, that H manages to make everyone in the room feel special, and that was demonstrated as he floated around arm in arm with Ghida greeting everyone. Brides are traditionally radiant, but Ghida really took it to a new level - the photos I have of them dancing together look like the must be scenes from a Hollywood film. I also had the surprise of bumping into another Iraqi friend who, unbeknown to me, had also got married that same day.

I'll post of some more in a few days about my impressions of Burundi and Rwanda. Before I sign off I better tie up a few loose ends, having not posted for quite a while. I mentioned, regarding my trip to the Congo a couple of months ago, that I'd been asked to carry over a "package" from the Ambassador in Britain the Foreign Minister. Various concerned friends had emailed to ask about my smuggling activities, and I have to admit that the package turned out to be a perfectly boring (but very heavy!) box of A3 paper and envelopes - clearly in short supply over in Kinshasa. So I'm not on the run from Interpol... yet. I should have really posted more about Kinshasa, but it took time to digest and I was really busy in May and June (excuses excuses). But grab me sometime and I'd be delighted to chat with you about the disco dancing funeral processions, the brightly coloured shops with names like "The Love and Blessing of God Grocery", canoing on the mightly Congo river, the sharp division of society into two rival groups - those who drink Skol and those who drink Primus beer - and many other things.

The other bit of news from the last month is that Jubilee Iraq has recived a grant from George Soros' Open Society Insitute, which will enable us to hire an Iraqi out in Baghdad to take the campaign forward there over the next few critical months. I'd hoped to go out there in June to recruit someone, but planning for this Africa trip meant I wasn't able to take of any holiday time from my day job, but I'm hoping to get over in August. It's been far too long, almost a year, since i was last out there and my heart strings get jerked with the news each day. Inshallah (providing NPC can get funding for this) I'll be over there for an extended period towards the end of this year, begining of next, catalysing support and funding for Iraqi civil society.