The Gift of the Beautiful Game

Saturday, December 21, 2019
Kigali, Kigali City, Rwanda
A casual day today… breakfast and coffee (and more coffee and more coffee), then boarded the minivan.  I brought some deflated soccer balls with me and told Phenie I wanted to give them to a school or kids playing along the road.  While I pumped them up, Phenie took me to an orphanage just outside the park and introduced me to Happy, the main administrator (yep, that’s her real name!).  I handed two balls to a couple kids out front and was met with two big smiles.  She showed me around and introduced me to the children.  Wow, tough living conditions!  I saw the boys bunk house and when I asked is it full, she said yes, three to a bed!  They cook over a wood fire, bring water up in large plastic containers and learn in tiny, dark classrooms.  Yet, the kids seem happy and sang several songs for me complete with dancing and a drum accompaniment.  On the drive to Rwanda, we stopped at a random soccer pitch along the road where a couple dozen kids were playing with an old beat up ball.  The driver called the coaches over and we gave them a freshly inflated new one.  They said thanks and told me they’ve been playing with that ball for four years.  
          We drove through the verdant valley filled with farms growing tea, sorghum, bananas, pineapple, and corn.  Back through the tedious border crossing with checks and paper work on both sides – plus an Ebola screening checkpoint – fun!  Before the border, we stopped at Kabale for a car wash (Phenie doesn’t like driving a dirty car in the city).   Seems hard to hand wash a car in a mud puddle filled dirt lot but it came out looking pretty good!   We ate lunch in a second floor café overlooking the main road through town.  So interesting watching the people and traffic go by - women carrying everything you can think of on their heads, bikes and motorcycles with two, three sometimes four passengers.  We were across the street from a Singer sewing machine shop.  Mainly, they sold table top, foot powered models.  I guess due to the lack of reliable electricity, it’s the preferred machine.  I saw two separate customers lash these big table units on the back of their motorbikes, carry the actual sewing machine between their legs with the wife riding side saddle in between the driver and table.  So fun to watch their ingenuity. 
          We drove quickly through the last two hours of Rwanda and into Kigali where I said goodbye to Phenie and gave him the last soccer ball for his two sons.  I also left him the pump and asked him to check in with Happy at the orphanage once in a while to fill up their balls when needed.  He is back off to Uganda to get together with his father, ten brothers and sisters and all the children and grandchildren for the holidays – over fifty in his extended family! 
          I checked into the Hotel des Milles Collines, formerly the Hotel Rwanda.  Surreal being in the place where the hotel manager sheltered hundreds of Tutsis saving them from the genocide in 1994.  Today, as then I guess, it looks like your typical high-end hotel with a pool and a nice restaurant overlooking the city below.  I had dinner and a couple beers down by the pool then headed to bed.
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