Jet lagged incoherent introduction

The past month has been a whirlwind-I can barely believe I'm lying in a random hotel in downtown Kigali listening to local yahoos tear it up on a Saturday night. But I digress.

My African (re)introduction began on my flight from Vancouver to London. My seat mate was a man from Nigeria, heading back to take care of his family as his father had recently passed away. Across the aisle was a family from Djibouti, a small East African country, next to Eritrea I believe. Their son was seventeen and three quarter months old. To be precise. But he was a sweet pea and spent much of the trip on my lap screaming Djibouti! And grinning wildly.

From London I headed to Zurich, and spent the night in a swish hotel, though my sleeping patterns, ahem, had been less than admirable in the nights leading to my departure and I was a touch...unglued? Shall we say? When I got on the plane in Vancouver, so I spent the night in Zurich dosing and waiting to catch my flight to Nairobi. In Nairobi, they announced that my flight had been cancelled. Visions of sleeping in dodgy plastic chairs in Kenya danced in my head, but they came through-put me up in another swank hotel close to the airport, and I kicked it in Nairobi for the evening. Not too shabby. Have been in Nairobi before, on my way too and from Cameroon, so felt right at home and was grinning from ear to ear as they crammed me into a van playing local tunes and whisked me off. Another man, Pieter from South Africa, also had his flight cancelled-he was on his way back to Darfur, where he works for the UN as a police officer. Neat guy. Had to do some bribing in Kenya to get all my luggage on the flight and prayed that my extra bag was not going to be the straw that broke the airplane's back. Thankfully, flight was not full and all was ok.

Yesterday afternoon I took my final flight of the journey into Kigali. In boarding I met two Doctors working for MSF, about to depart to the Congo in the Kivu region, which is really in trouble. Kigali is beautiful. It really is a land of a thousand hills. And Chrys from UNDP was there to collect me, totally on time. I was very impressed. So I have been deposited at a small hotel called the Dream Inn about a ten minutes walk from my office. The office is literally across the street from the President's home, so security around here is tight. Hotel Rwanda (now called something different but I didn't quite catch it-maybe Mille Collines?-will investigate further and report back) is around the corner from where I am. I've been told for $5 I can go for a swim in the same pool that kept over a thousand people hydrated during the genocide. In the meantime, I'm fighting with my computer that seems to feel a breakdown is in order. I spent all night fighting with it to do a systems rest0re-was finally successful this morning, and it seems to be working now but I'm not holding my breath. If anyone has any epic ideas as to why my computer would be intermittently seizing, and better yet, any ideas as to how one would go about fixing that, do tell. Normally these concerns are left to my rat of the Stu variety. For now, I'm going to try to figure out my living arrangements and hang out until I report to the office tomorrow morning for duties.