Paula in Rwanda

Sunday, 18.08.2019

My journey starts at the airport in Hamburg on the 18th of August. I flew four hours to istanbul, where I met three other volunteers of my organisation, Florian, Lilly and Alina, who would also stay in Rwanda for a year. Together we flew to Kigali, where we would arrive at 00:05 at night.

Upon stepping out of the aeroplane, we were very excited – and nervous. Getting our one moth holiday visa was – at least for me – fairly easy. Alina and Florian struggled a bit, but that was because they didn’t have their adress at hand and after some minutes of panic it all worked out.

Each of us was supposed to be picked up by one of our mentors of the organisations, to be taken to our new homes, but stepping out of the airport we were only greeted by a german volunteer, Leander, who was working with Alinas Organization in Kigali, and wanted to greet her together with the – absent – mentor.

Lilly, Florian and me apperantly had to wait a bit longer, which, as Leander told us, is quite common in Rwanda. So we settled down and waited…and waited some more… until it was almost 2am and we decided to look up the telephone numbers of our mentors, because we got the feeling that nobody was going to come to pick us up. 

We were very thankful then, that Leander and Alina decided to wait with us, because none of us others had a working rwandan Sim-card yet, so Leander let us use his phone. After some confusing phonecalls during which it was established there was some miscommunication due to which all of our mentors were sleeping soundly in bed because they expected us to arrive at midday (12pm) and not midnight (12am), we finally found a solution.

Because we three all had to go to Nyanza, 3 hours away from Kigali, it was nonsense to wait for someone to come pick us up, so we took a taxi to take us to our mentors. The taxi drive to Nyanza was a whole adventure in itself but that will be another blogpost. Important is: We finally arrived in Nyanza at 6am on the 19th of August.