Songa and Wrap-Up

Well we made it back home. Even better, we made it back without any major illnesses, injuries, or international incidents, the lone exception being a case of dysentery on Saturday. Real bummer about that, but still given how many people were in our group and all the, um, interesting things we ate,  it's great that more folks weren't taken down.

I'll do this last post in reverse order, with pics and details of our last 5 days in Burundi last.

I've been struggling to put everything we saw and experienced, and all the people we met, into perspective. The first several days I think we were all a bit overloaded by the drastically different realities of everyday life for people in Burundi compared to what we're used to. Then as the trip progressed it became clear that while all our shared experiences, pictures, and videos that we would return with could help our families and friends better understand Burundi and it's beauty, it's people, their rich culture, and their deep poverty and challenges, the only way to fully comprehend it all and empathize with them is by being there in person. Pictures and stories can do a great deal, but still fall short. So many times while taking a picture or being part of a celebration or situation, we'd lament how inadequate our photos or words would be. It's that beautiful a country.

Everyday life is so different in Burundi. Most people live in rural areas, and most people live in poverty, relying on subsistence agriculture. Decades of conflict and the effects of HIV have created 500,000 or more orphans. The country is severely overpopulated. Many lack access to safe water and health services. Literacy is low (66%) as is life expectancy (51 years). One could go on.

I won't pretend that visiting for 11 days gives me a very good understanding of the country or it's people, but the differences in day-to-day life are profound and immediately apparent. I kept thinking about how "rich" many poor Americans would appear to the average Burundian. One can be poor in this country and still have a color TV, automobile, and indoor plumbing. Not so in Burundi. And yet, we met so many great and interesting people, encountered so many smiles, so many happy children. Very humbling indeed, on many levels.

Well, I could go on, but instead I'll just close out with pictures and brief explanations from the last week of our stay. Please feel free to ask me any questions you like, or anyone else that has been to Burundi. One of the primary goals of this trip is spreading awareness of Burundi, and of the work of the Gazelle Foundation to bring clean water to it. An important take-away for me was what a difference in their lives can be made with even the efforts of a few.

A selection of the photos I took are available on my public Picasa Web Albums, here.

You might also be interested in blogs written by other folks in our group. (Much better writers than this just-the-facts-ma'am engineer.)  Take a look!

The Gazelle Foundation's blog
Elizabeth's blog
Terry's blog


Dan


Tues 7/5 - We took a day off after returning from Gitega at Rumonge Beach (still on the coast of the ginormous Lake Tanganyika). Lots of tourist potential down here, the air and water were clean and the beach picturesque. We also dropped by the Burundi Olympic training facility. (Not clear if it has been used as such yet.)

(Note that all the pictures below are high resolution if you click on them.)

Isn't the bloom on this banana tree cool?

Wed 7/6 - Big day! We traveled from Bujumbura to the Songa Commune to see part of the Foundation's water projects, meet with folks who live in the Nyamwango, Songa Fuku, and Mutsinda-Jenda water project areas, and visit with Gilbert's family on Mount Fuku.

 Those are tea plants, it was gorgeous.

This is one of many collection tanks, part of the Foundation's third water project, in Mutsinda Jenda.

We pulled up in our Otraco bus (after driving through insanely rough "roads"), and found a zillion people waiting to welcome us in their Sunday best. It was crazy! Dancers, drummers, singers, speeches, sit-down dinner catered in from Bujumbura, all for us!

I felt so humbled and overwhelmed by the attention, I mean it's not like I had much to do with bringing all of these folks water. But of course, we were, for the moment, the Gazelle Foundation's representatives, and it was really all the Foundation's members and contributors back home that everyone's appreciation was truly directed at.

Here's a few pictures, and others took videos of the celebrations and speeches. It was quite the shindig, they went all out to express their appreciation for the Foundation's water projects. A senator and the local equivalent of a mayor were present, among many other dignitaries. Speeches abounded, and Michael presented a great one on behalf of the Foundation.

After the reception we traveled the short distance to Gilbert's home on Mount Fuku. It was quite a walk, I was surprised how big the top of the mountain was! We really enjoyed and were honored to meet his mother, brother, cousin, nephews, and the rest of his family.

Gilbert's cows! :

The view up on Mount Fuku is really breathtaking:

The days are short in Burundi, at least at the moment. Sunrise 6AM, sunset 6PM. So by the time we made it off Mount Fuku and to our hotel, it was getting dark and driving on these crazy roads was getting interesting!

And to my surprise it was really a hotel we spent Wed and Thurs nights at. The St. Bernard Hotel at the Buta Monastery. The monks told us that all monasteries have hotels. Who knew? There were beds, running water, electricity, and (mostly) cold showers. They even made us dinner and breakfast.

Breakfast both mornings consisted mostly of huge cassava rolls, strawberry jam, fish-head and banana soup (hmm, thanks but no thanks!) , and coffee.  Needless to say, Tessa and I were starving by lunch! (What was lunch, you ask? More cassava bread, jam, and granola bars, of course!)

Here's the scene:

Thurs 7/7 - Today we walked parts of the various Foundation water projects in the Songa Commune. Checked the condition of the existing sources (springs), collection tanks, faucets, etc., and looked at some candidates for future water projects. As a result we also get to meet a lot of folks who use the water from the projects every day. We were quite a spectacle! It's not often I imagine that 16 mizungos (white folks) show up in these parts. Some of the kids looked like they'd just seen Elvis' ghost.

I've said it before, but Burundi is truly beautiful. We'd be hiking up a mountain-side, and someone would stop and say, "turn around!" and there'd be yet another gorgeous vista stretched out before us. We took pictures, but really they don't do justice to the real McCoy.

We also got to do a little 5k run in the mountains with some local Burundi runners. I think Gilbert may have set it up? These guys were fast, really fast, and they were used to the altitude, I'm sure they never had to leave first gear to pace us. (One fellow said he could run like a 13:40 5k!) Michael, Vasil, and I were the mizungo runners. We met the rest of the group after we ran to see the newest water source (freshwater spring).


These guys are building a collection tank. Collection tanks are usually located near a water faucet to provide pressure.

Pipes run from the various water sources (artesian wells) to collection tanks and water faucets. The sources can be many kilometers away, off on a distant mountain-top. There's no electricity or pumps, the water is gravity fed in all the Foundation's projects to date. There's no trenching equipment or backhoes, the (long!) trenches for the water pipes are dug completely by hand with garden hoes:

Here's a few pics from our little 5k run to one of the newest sources in the Mutsinda Jenda project. (I hung a camera on my Spi Belt.) Yes, one of the native runners was running these hills and rocks barefoot. Crazy!

Fri 7/8 - Friday we drove back to our home base (Kings Conference Center in Bujumbura) from the Buta Monastery. By this point we were starving and getting a little tired of the usual fair, so we went to Ubuntu for some surprisingly good pizza. It should come as no surprise that it took a couple of hours for our meal to arrive. There's no such thing as fast food in Burundi!

We hit the market downtown for some keepsakes and gifts, and then headed to the Burundi Youth for Christ main offices where we had been invited to dinner. We were met at the door by the Youth for Christ drummers who were totally awesome! Excellent and inspiring speeches followed. Really, the videos others took of some of them are well worth watching when they're available.

Sat 7/9 - Our last day! Michael and I took off running at 6am towards Kiniri University (same as last Saturday), this time with cameras in tow. Somehow the 2.4 mile haul up that looong hill wasn't quite as difficult as the first time had been (but it's still pretty crazy!). At the top we got sucked into a leg/core workout with some of the local runners - fun times! We even met a fellow who knew Gilbert up there.

Almost there, that's our destination up on the top of that hill behind the trees:

After breakfast we all headed to the airport in the now-red-dirt-encrusted Otraco bus, said our good byes to our new friends Jean Bosco and Jean De Deu, and off we went! So much fun, so many unforgettable sights and experiences!