Yes there is sun and a clear sky; why not? I’m in Minnesota, making Mexican. We just came back from a two day hop, finding bears in the woods. Actually we were scouting for patches of land where we could throw a wedding party and get married under the lofty North pines in August. We found a couple of spots as well and managed to scoff a bison burger and a litre of soda. These two food items sit in your belly like a couple of cinder blocks. Next time I will probably eat the salad. Did yrs know that I went into Burundi a few months back? The trip was done on the fly, in celebration of me being around for thirty plus years and also because we figured it was not good enough to simply be near Burundi. Grab some jelly beans and read on why don’t ya? Or better yet, join us for a taco salad and some Booker T and the MGs in Prior Lake.
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Confusing truck. Gas or milk?
Visa and Money. This currency was hard to come by and is utterly useless outside of Burundi.
The Burundian consulate in Kigali is both casual and empty. Once the old bloke with the gun on the door has waved us on in (We want to visit your country!), we wander into what feels like somebody’s under-furnished living room. There’s a ripped couch that looks suspiciously like my collage chair and a portrait of the current president. Arranging the visa is easy; once we’ve located a woman in the back room, we leave her with some photos, a passport and twenty bucks. She tells us that we can come back and pick them up in the afternoon, no worries. If only every other country was this easy. In all, we spend more time discussing marriage and culture then we do responding to questions relating to our motives in Burundi.
Rather than fly, we’ve decided to run with the potentially unpredictable Belvedere bus service between Kigali and Bujumbura. We’ve seen this particular bus company before; one time while we ate Chinese across the lot from their ‘bus graveyard’. A bus had been sheared off from the front to the back, about halfway up. It was the kind of haircut you do not want to receive unless you are looking to lose the contents of your head. Anybody who has followed my ramblings in the past will know that I don’t stop talking about bad bus drivers and crazy bus experiences. Africa is the holy grail of bus stories and the stories do not always end nicely. I think that bus drivers in Africa consider themselves to be warriors and they are constantly battling to drive more aggressively, or faster, than anybody else on the road. Nevertheless, we decided to gamble our trip in someone’s sweaty young hands and resolve to sit near the back of the bus (I read somewhere that this is statistically the safest place to sit on a bus? Catch enough buses and I guarantee that you will entertain similar plans).
We stopped here and picked up 50 jugs of milk to ferry into Burundi. The operation was very well run. A little girl distracted the passengers by smiling at us and suddenly we were all surrounded by milk.
After the familiar routine of turning up early to get good seats and realizing that
Bananas for sale. It was a buyers market in Burundi. Bananas everywhere.
everybody has turned up even earlier to claim the best seats, we sit back in our crappy seats to stare at those who have arrived at the last minute and must sit in the isle. A mountain of goods has been packed into the last seat of the bus; these routes are really just trade runs for people supplying Burundi with things that come cheaper in Rwanda. Everything is a racket. This time we’re smuggling milk in vegetable oil containers. The bus starts and we tackle the southbound jaunt, pegging a moderate speed and laughing all of the way. A couple next to us rocks their baby against the swaying of the bus and we open the window to feel Rwanda’s breath on our foreheads. We’ve done this road before, all the way to the boarder, so we know what to expect. Imagine a road that threads the face of bald hills, banana plantations that cling to the edges of the hills, and mud and thatch huts that spew happy children from their gaping mouths. Goats and women use their feet to tattoo the mountain with meandering paths that resemble complex arteries when viewed from across the valley. Trucks lie on their sides around u-bend corners, victims of cowboy steering and faltering mechanics. It all exists under an extroverted sun. Everything is a potential accident on the way to Burundi but we’re in crazy spirits today; the morning disappears alongside the rest of the country and suddenly we reach a sleepy valley, the border between Rwanda and Burundi, and the beginning of a new adventure.
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Burundi has recently survived a civil war. However, unlike Rwanda which gained international notoriety as a consequence of the 1994 genocide, Burundi seems to have maintained a far lower international profile despite a history of dispute and violence since independence in 1962.The two countries share many similarities. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa people have inhabited Burundi since early times and like Rwanda, relations between the Hutu and Tutsi people have been the basis for internal strife, resulting in a 1972 genocide that claimed between 250,000 and 300,000 lives, and a succession of coup d’états and grassroots violence between 1972 and 1993. In 1993, the first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndaday, was assassinated after three months in office. His replacement, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was killed less than a year later, when the plane he was sharing with Rwandan president Juvénal Habyariman, was shot down over Kigali (an act which ‘sparked’ the 1994 genocide in Rwanda). The rapid succession of deaths further aggravated relations between Hutu and Tutsi parties and led to a ten year civil war in which a further 300,000 Burundians lost their lives and approximately 550,000 were internally displaced. This is a phenomenal figure for a country that is less than half the size of Tasmania. Although attempts at peace deals were made during the war, Hutu based parties refused to buy into them and it was not until 2006 that a ceasefire was signed and the de-arming process began.
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It is hard not to mull this kind of information as you hop the border. The first democratic elections since the end of the civil war were rife with intimidation, perpetrated by the incumbent government. Ultimately all six challenging candidates withdrew their applications. Forty-six grenade attacks occurred around the time of the election, which occurred less than a year ago. It saddens me to know nothing of this country before coming to Africa and I can’t wait to meet people and see how the country has progressed in the past six months.
The goats were killed on the spot....
While the border crossing in Rwanda is an exercise in efficacy, the Burundian side involves a few hundred people all trying to get to a window the size of a postage stamp. While you might think that it’s the young men that you have to watch, in reality, the old ladies are far craftier and carry a mean shoulder barge. They pop up throughout the queue, appearing below your elbow, offering an orange peel grin and a mostly toothless smile. Offer one a spot in the line and fifteen of them jump in, running like ducks. Even with the granny queue jumping, we reach the window within half an hour and present our passports to the enormous bloke that sits behind the grills. I love leaning in on situations where English has not been invited. The problems that arise seem gargantuan. In this case there is a dispute involving the guy on our
...and taken across the road to be eaten.
bus, who may or may not have the passenger list for the bus. Either way, he waves a pile of pages in front of us, trying to attract the officer’s attention. Old ladies scream at him and the officer ignores him. He continues to persist until the officer starts shouting as well. Annetta and I are pushed against the grilled window. Meanwhile, our passports have disappeared and we literally do not share a common word of language with this man (except perhaps merci beaucoup, which will not be appropriate until we are given our passports back). Eventually, a young man with a likely smile and brand new uniform returns and we are through into Burundi.
Stay tuned for more on Burundi. I’ll be including some practical information within the next few posts because I think that it is important… for…people…to…know…things. Stay good and enjoy the sun folks. Woucher.
Joss is eating again.
Boys on bikes hang out under the flag.
