A lot has happened in the last month or more, what with the traveling, testing and visitors. So here is the run down.

Ali and I set off on a holiday for two weeks the same day as the opening ceremony which set an unfortunate precedent for watching the Olympics but the alternative was just as good. We made our way to Uganda via Nairobi and spent a week there. Our first stop at Jinja on the Nile and lake Victoria was definitely a highlight due to a days whitewater rafting. We went over six level five rapids and flipped on half of them and at the end of the day stayed at a great campsite which looked straight down the Nile. We spent a night in Kampala and then traveled down to the Ssese Island on Lake Victoria. We set a new personal record en-route with the amount of people in a vehicle with us. On the way there we had 26 people, 5 babies, a chicken and ample luggage in a mini-van. On the way out they added another person, a chicken and a goose. It was great to see Lake Victoria from a quiet fishing village. An unexpected little Moroccan Restaurant run by a crazy but friendly Moroccan expat served some of the best fish I have ever tasted. Next stop was Kabale and more specifically Lake Bunyoni. Apart from being beautiful the local markets were unlike others we had seen. All of the mama’s brought their produce up the lake on canoes. So for most of the morning canoes were coming up and down the lake with produce or buyers coming up the lake to the markets which set up on the shore. We then made our way down to Rwanda which was a beautiful drive as we started to get into the hilly country which typifies Rwanda.

After the dirt track which Uganda provides to the boarder the first glimpse of Rwanda is the beautiful autobahn esk roads which continue throughout the country. We made our way to Ruhengeri, our staging point for our Gorilla trek. We were very lucky to find permits for the gorillas with about a month before we left, most sell out at least three months ahead. We started from the National Park Office where they place you into groups of eight for each of the groups of gorillas. We were allocated the ‘Hirwa’ group and were shown photos of all twelve gorillas in the group. It took over four hours to trek up to where the trackers had found the group which, longer than usual. Some in our group were getting angry at the length, difficulty and at times safety of the walk but from our point of view we were just getting value for money. We found the group at the bottom of a gully with the two hundred kilo silverback reclining in a ditch sunning himself. We could only see him and a couple of mamas at first but gradually they all came out of the wood work. The kids were all playing around the mamas while they were grooming the silverback. You are only allowed to spend one hour with them and it felt like ten minutes. At one stage a tracker was clearing some branches away just a meter or so from me so we could see some of the mamas a little easier when the silverback jumped out of his slumber rushed the tracker and stood over him. It all happened extremely quickly and at the time looked like he actually struck the tracker, but we assured he just stood over him and that it almost never happens. In the end it is hard to explain how good it was but it was well and truly worth it.

After Ruhengeri we headed down to Batare via Kigali. Rwanda is so small and the infrastructure so good that it takes no time at all to get anywhere. We visited the national museum at Butare and the first of many Genocide Memorials at Gikongoro. We spent our last three nights in Kigali and on the way back up we passed the Tour de Rawanda which we first saw near Ruhengeri. From Kigali we did a day trip south to Ntarama and Nyamata to visit two memorials and visited the National memorial and a few other sites within Kigali. The national memorial was a really interesting site with a lot of information to take in. The other memorials we visited outside of Kigali were a really visual reminder and almost giving a visual reality to the different statistics that you so often read. It was impossible to really understand what went on or to be able to relate to the feeling for any Rwandan but it was great to walk away with far more knowledge of the events over a long, long time, not just the early nineties.

We got back to school on a Friday morning and walked straight into the second week of testing. Testing is on every Friday from the end of August through until sometimes December or when they find the amount of kids for next years enrolment that fit the academic and socio-economic criteria. It starts with a reading test then a written test, documents check, a home visit, a two week probation period, another home visit and a parent committee check. We are involved in the Friday testing and home checks. The first Friday we got back we processed around three thousand kids of who almost all had family out the front of the school. If a student is successful in their reading test they move to the written and if successful are asked to come back on Saturday for the document check and so on. On this Friday out of three thousand kids only maybe one hundred and fifty were asked back on Saturday and then forty passed the document check and then maybe twenty five passed house checks. It is all very interesting to be involved in and can sometime be sad when you have to say no to a kid who is just above the cut off but you just have to be confident that the places will all be filled by kids who are worse off.

For the past couple of weeks we have had our own little tour group staying at the school. Nicole arrived with Alice Cohen two weeks ago and the Lize who Ali went to school and then uni with arrived the next day. Then on the Sunday Elkie, Ali’s almost Neighbor from Garah and her boyfriend Fraze arrived. They all did safari’s the first week but on either side we showed them around as much as we could. Was actually a good excuse to finally get out to the Food Water Shelter program to have a look at there eco-friendly, self sustaining, community friendly model for living in Africa as well as visiting some places again.

Today the oldest kids in standard seven, the final year of primary school are do the first of two days of final exams, if they do well enough they will qualify to move on to secondary school. A lot of pressure for a year in which children are ideally twelve years of age. In any case they should all get through, with flying colors most of them. Understandably independent invigilators are brought in to all schools however strangely all schools have to be closed for the day, I guess as a further strategy against teachers cheating. In any case I finally got the chance to write this. Strangely only three months to go, hopefully it won’t go too quickly.