An adventurous journey home

My blogging has become a bit lapse recently as I have had the lovely Bebhinn staying at my house. Bebhinn is also a TMA with VSO and she has just started her placement in Rwamagana. I agreed to let her shadow me for a few days so she could see what the role entails.

Yesterday, Bebhinn and I visited one of my further-away schools. Unfortunately the head teacher informed us when we arrived that we could only stay for the morning as he had some business to attend to in the afternoon. We were not too upset by this and quickly made arrangements with our moto drivers to collect us at midday with the intention of being dropped in to town so we could do a spot of shopping, walk home and then get on with some admin tasks. Alas, it was not to be.....

Our motos arrived at midday ready to take us home but the Head Teacher then decided that we could not leave without taking lunch so our motos were asked to wait whilst we were presented with this:

After a delicious feast, we prepared to board our motos but the drivers had disappeared. Eventually we found Safari sleeping in an empty classroom. He told me it was about to rain so we should wait in the school for the storm to pass, and within minutes, the rain was bucketing down! The noise of it hitting the classroom roof was incredible - there is no way lessons can continue during that sort of downpour. Unfortunately the rain continued for another hour and we were not able to leave the school until 2pm. But then we were on our merry way.........

Until.....my moto broke down. I think rain water got inside the mechanism somehow which caused it to go "chug chug chug" and then die. (Technical terms, of course!). Bebhinn and I had quite the crowd of onlookers including a number of children who should have been in the school where we had been working. After 10 minutes of waiting, we decided to start walking home. We had a lovely walk for an hour or so, after which the motos, freshly mended, caught up with us, and whisked us home.

It was really nice to enjoy the landscape at a walking pace and we took lots of photos on our adventure. Here are a few of my favourites which demonstrate the variety of houses in my district.

As you can see Ngoma has lots of banana plantations. In the distance, you can just see one of the beautiful lakes, which lots of the teachers I work with enjoy visiting with picnics during the holiday.