It's About Time

I know, I know, I'm very late. On the bright side, prepare for blogging madness! I'm finally starting to get a sense of my schedule, now that orientation week has finished and we're settling into a routine. I don't usually have a lot of free time, so my goal is to do regular, short posts, since I'd rather not spend huge chunks of time writing long ones. So, since I already have very much to say, I'm going to just post something short every day for the next few days until I get caught up.

And so, back to the beginning..

I didn't get to Rwanda until 3am Tuesday. I left Atlanta at 5:30am Sunday morning, and was supposed to land in Kigali Monday afternoon, but my flight from D.C. to Ethiopia was delayed, so I missed my connection to Kigali and had to get on a later flight out of Addis Ababa. What made this all especially miserable was that, since I had to leave my house at 3:30 am Sunday, I decided to just take a short nap on Saturday and then sleep on the plane. That was a very bad decision; the stresses of travel are amplified enormously by lack of sleep. Lesson learned.

The thing that struck me first about Rwanda was how dark it was. As my flight began to descend towards the Kigali airport, I looked out the window and all was dark. I looked out towards the horizon and could hardly tell where the earth ended and the night sky began. The scene seemed so peaceful and natural compared to the constant, buzzing glow of Atlanta.

Beautiful though my first impression was, my first day was miserable. It was almost 4am by the time I got to the hotel where we would spend our first days, and we had to get up at 7:30 for class. Everyone in my group was so kind; they remembered that Monday had been my birthday and sang happy birthday to me at breakfast before I'd even learned everybody's names, but still there was a voice in my head all day wondering what the hell I was doing there, saying I hate it here and I want to go home where I can sleep. That was a long day, but a good night's sleep made Tuesday much better.

Speaking of a good night's sleep, it's time for me to get one. More on orientation week tomorrow!