Nguynwe National Park



Standing next to an elephant skull.





Enjoying the view before the hike.



Walking across the canopy bridge.

Swaying 200 feet above the ground.

Another view of Nguynwe.  At the top right of the picture is Lake Kivu.

Rwanda has three national parks: Volcanoes National Park (gorillas and volcanoes), Akagera (savannahs, rhinos, elephants), and Nyungwe (monkeys and rainforests).  The Rwandan government is pushing tourism to the parks, especially towards Akagera and Nyungwe.  With the success of Volcanoes, Rwanda tourism is trying to parlay tourists into extending their visits to the other two parks.  With increasing infrastructure and knowledge of these areas, visits are expected to rise in the next ten years.

For a weekend trip, the training group went to Nyungwe because it is the closest park to our town.  Even though the park is close, it still took two hours to get to the park, and an additional hour drive through the park to get to the center.  In Africa, it takes time to get around, even to the close places. 

Nyungwe is a very diverse park, which contains 1000 plant species, 120 species of butterflies, and 75 species of mammals.  Due to varying altitudes of landscape and location in Africa, Nyungwe can support such a rich variety of animals, from chimpanzees to elephants (now extinct from the park).  Nyungwe also sits on a continental divide, water that falls on the southwest portion of the park drains to the Congo River, and water that falls on the northeast portion drains to the Nile River.  In fact, Nyungwe is the southernmost tributary for the Nile River (the Nile technically starts in Uganda at the northern end of Lake Victoria in a town called Jinja). 

Our group took a hike to the new “canopy trail.”  There are a ton of trails to hike, and one of the highlights is seeing primates, especially when tracking the chimpanzees.  Hikes vary from waterfalls to springs to uphill climbs.  The hike took about three hours, and was highlighted by the canopy walk (newly installed) where you swing about 200 feet above the ground.  It’s fun but unnerving (that’s partially why it is fun; you do sway a good amount).  To cap it all off, we were caught in a torrential downpour on the way back.  We learned firsthand why it is called a rainforest. 

My Host Family

Host families are given to almost every single Peace Corps trainee during their training period.  In most cases, the trainee lives with the family for the three month training period.  Our training group is not living with our host families; instead, we are living in group houses with LCFs (language coordinator and facilitators, which is a Rwandan that speaks fluent English).  The reason for group houses instead of living with host families is largely due to the logistics of housing a huge training group living with seventy different families. 

Typically, we go to our host families twice a week for dinner.  If there are any family events (dowry ceremonies, weddings), we usually attend these too.  Most of the trainees have been to their host family’s church and visited distant host family relatives.

The purpose of having a host family is to adjust the trainees to the family life, culture, cooking, and language of Rwanda.  The Peace Corps believes that the best way for trainees to learn and adjust is through complete immersion.  The family is the cornerstone of this cultural training. 

My host dad, Alexis, is a principal for an elementary school.  This elementary school also hosts a Protestant mass on Sundays, and holds my dad’s three cows and multiple rabbits.  Typically, it takes about an hour to walk from his house to the school.  Every day, he walks one hour up and down various hills to go to school, and then walks one hour back to home.  This doesn’t include walks into town or to the markets.  I estimated that Alexis walks at least seven miles per day.  Furthermore, Alexis’s daughters walk almost daily to the school to milk the cows, and return to the house holding two five-gallon containers of milk for the entire walk back.  Impressive.

Alexis has a wife, Soranje, who takes care of the children and house.  Together they have three boys (Marcel, Billy and Viki) and three girls (Esperanz, Reyez, and Bela).  Six children is a lot in post-genocide Rwanda, but not an unusual number of children. 

The two pictures are of me with Soranje and Alexis at a wedding, and me with Alexis and his cows at his school.  I milked the cows rather unsuccessfully, but it was a great time.  Enjoy.