March 19 - This is a small place. The airport is almost right in town. Emmanual, a driver from work picks me up. The place looks VERY TIDY (it's known as the tidiest city in Africa, apparently). A bit dusty (deep red earth in these parts) but really well tended. Grass verges, no litter, no uncollected rubbish... Kigali is built mainly on the crests and flanks of many low hills ("Les milles collines" or the "thousand hills"). It's warm (but not hot), a wee bit humid (very pleasant, and this is summer – at about 2000m altitude). In town there are street-hawkers peddling the economist (!). Hardly any cars (opposite of the traffic hell that is Nairobi), a parliament building peppered with bullet-holes still (but no sign of damage anywhere else). It's small but spread out, I hear French, English and Kinya-Rwanda (the local language shared in this part of east africa).
Rwanda is a country of almost 9m people, but Kigali has only 600,000. This a very rural place, and yet it's the most crowded country in Africa. Almost every patch of land is given over to agriculture - as I'll see later, from the bottom of valleys to the tops of every hill/mountain, it's a heavily terraced and worked land. And yet 30% of the population don't produce enough food to feed themselves adequatly.
I am dropped off at the office and start work straight away...trying to get to grips with what's been done here so far in the project.
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