Diary from the field

April 10 – Today we traveled through Kirundo Province. Burundi is seriously beautiful. I often wonder if people who live in these rural areas, most of whom will not have opportunities to see different places, think they live in a beautiful place. To which one might ask me if people who live in secure counries, who do not know what it’s like to have a civil war tear apart your life, think about how they live in a peaceful place. After a working in two different “collines” (this is an administrative demarcation, French for “hills,” that encompasses around 1,000 households), we spent the night in a medium-sized town.

April 11 – This morning I resisted the urge to snooze my cellphone’s alarm. The main roads are lovely pavement, but trekking on the side roads is the usual bouncy ride that I got used to while living in Congo. Our Landcruiser did its best impression of a mechanical bull. Still, even these roads were a piece of cake in comparison to the winding trails and sketchy bridges in Katanga Province (Congo). After conducting interviews in a colline near the Rwandan border, we stopped at an NGO’s office who works in the area. This happens to be the NGO I worked with in Congo and Niger, so it felt very familiar. Turns out one of the employees in that office, though she’s on vacation, is also an acquaintance from grad school. Small, small world. We eventually found a decent hotel, and by decent we mean minimum standards of clean rooms and sheets. I lucked out that the running water was working and took a shower. The shock the cold water caused me to gasp. Never been a big fan of cold showers. The water stopped running halfway through, and I dragged the bucket of water from the corner to finish the shower the old-fashioned way. My colleagues in the meantime had located a restaurant where we could eat and work. They had already placed the order for our meal. Our hotel said the electricity was only intermittent, so they had sought out a place with a generator. When we got there it was past six in the evening, and the light was quickly fading. We asked them to start the generator to plug in or laptops. My colleague, speaking in Kirundi, is obviously not happy with the response. I see two men slink towards the gate and leave. Turns out they left to get fuel for the generator. Yes, this was the first of many bad signs. The second was that the generator turned out to be broken. The third was when the cook showed up at 8pm to start cooking our meal. Having used flashlights and our laptop batteries until this point (which were now out of juice), I had the driver drop me off at the hotel. The rest of the team stuck it out for the food, which came at 10pm. I ate a Go Lean crunch bar that I had brought from the states and collapsed into bed. My phone rang a half-hour later. My mom and I had a broken conversation distorted by the bad reception, bad phone card, or a little of both.

April 12 – More field travel and interviews. I listen to my ipod as my colleagues have animated discussions in Kirundi. My general tiredness is probably not helped by my strategy of deliberate dehydration (no drinking means no peeing, no peeing means not having to find a place to pee in a remote village where children stick to me like glue). Will chug some water tonight.

April 13 – Woke up to the pouring rain. It is the rainy season in Burundi, afterall. As we eat breakfast in our hotel (a bit expensive at $10/night, my colleagues think – should be $8) fog creeps into the room through the open door. It reminds me of a Halloween Haunted House. After more interviews, we head back to Bujumbura. We go over the interview information at the office. I get back to my hotel in the evening. Pizza and gin and tonics follow (two things I never, ever tire of).