Today we said good bye to the students and staff at St. Johnson's. We've chosen to sponsor a few of the students' school fees in the upcoming year, so they were quite pleased with that news. Yesterday, we took two students for pizza and an afternoon at DiDi's World, an amusement park in a 3rd world country (comparable to a county fair in the U.S.). The rides weren't much to write home about for me, but the kids had a ball. They LOVED the bumper cars and probably...

Lance and I stopped at Hotel des Mille Collines, made famous as the building in which more than a thousand people took refuge during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The story of the hotel and its manager at that time, Paul Rusesabagina, was used as the basis of the film Hotel Rwanda. With the help of his wife, Rusesabagina bribed the Hutu militia with money and alcohol to keep them from killing the refugees in the hotel. He also managed to provide the refugees with foo...

Our main interest in visiting Rwanda's capital city was to take in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center. In April 2004, on the 10th Anniversary of the genocide that split Rwanda apart, the Kigali Memorial Center was inaugurated. We had heard incredible things about the memorial, and we were not disappointed. The primary purpose for the memorial is education - for younger Rwandan generations who may not remember the genocide but whose lives were profoundly affecte...

Our bus ride to Rwanda was….interesting. I nearly had it out with some guy and Lance's foot was puked on. The day continued down this path of interestingness when we tried to get money. Finding ATM's had been no problem in Uganda, even in the small villages, so surely this won't be a problem in Rwanda's capital city. Wrong! To make matters worse, they don't exchange money either. After pounding the pavement for a few hours trying to get money, we finally found ...

I went gorilla tracking today! Lance and I purchased permits ($500 each) to see the silverback mountain gorillas. We spent about 3 hours trying to find them, an hour observing them in their natural habitat, followed by 1.75 walk back. The silverbacks are only found in Rwanda, Uganda and D.R. Congo, and they are highly endangered. We trekked through very thick vegetation (sometimes crawling, often using machetes to cut through the jungle) to find them. It was a...