Blessed are the flexible for they shall not be snapped!

Muraho! That is Kinyarwandan for Hello! It is fantastic to have finally arrived…and we are already being made to feel so welcome here. I cannot open my eyes wide enough to take everything in! Yesterday we arrived at lunchtime and until this morning everything was so surreal. It is so difficult to describe, but anyone who has travelled for even a couple of hours knows that feeling of your body having arrived…and some part of your brain still being in the place you left. Having travelled so many miles and taken two days to do it, I wasn't entirely sure that any part of my brain was still in my head! We drove from Kigali (the capital) to Ruhengeri where we are living - it takes about an hour and a half to drive - and the scenery is incredible (though I'm planning on going to look at it again WITH my brain intact!) Rwanda is called the country of a 1000 hills…and I think that is an understatement. We are staying with Sue, a friend of Pam's (the lady setting up the Tubakunde project), and from her house we can see six volcanoes!! In the evening we went up to the Tubakunde house, stepped over the asbestos sections of roof (which are waiting to be removed from the premises…) and looked around the house…to begin with in the pitch black because the electricity had gone off, and then with the lights when it came back on! Apparently it only tends to go off for 15mins at a time, which is better than the hours we were predicting! Then we drove up to Sonrise school where Tracy will be working and saw a bit of the grounds…before the headteacher decided that he didn't want us traipsing about because we hadn't given him prior warning of our coming. In fact Pam hadn't expected him to be there at all, but because school started today there were lots of preparations going on. Still, I think we got away with it! Our bodies were so confused about what time of day it was, that by the time we got home we were so shattered we went to bed. It was 8pm Rwanda time…6pm England time!!