First impressions
on Geri Skeen (Rwanda), 21/Jan/2011 19:29, 34 days ago
I’m impressed! The country is surprisingly together, considering it’s one of the poorest in the world and considering also that in the 1994 genocide, a million people were killed, a million exiles returned, and two thirds of the population was displaced either internally or into exile. It was pretty much year zero. Yes, things don’t work as smoothly as they do in the UK, but it’s no worse than South Africa. People are friendly and helpful. It’s very safe; Kigali is Africa’s second safest city. Even here it’s safe for a woman to walk alone at night. Okay, don’t worry, I’m not going out on my own yet except in daylight.   55% of the population lives on below $1.25 a day (the US poverty line) and many live on well below that. It’s developing very fast though, as a result of sound government, low corruption and the willingness of some countries, particularly the UK, to provide substantial aid.I originally posted another paragraph here covering politics, media and ethnicity. I have since taken that down as I now understand that I might inadvertently displease the government and embarrass VSO and YWCA by writing about these subjects. Volunteer blogs are widely read. I will therefore not cover these subjects in this blog. It’s densely populated; Rwanda has 11,000,000 inhabitants and the country is the size of Wales. Its biggest foreign exchange earners are high end tourism, high end tea and high end coffee.  Let’s see if we can get high end handicrafts onto that list!