Tour of the North

I was thinking about a blog post or two purely meant to give a visual of Rwanda. I guess I’ve kind of left such descriptions to the imagination. So here is a photo tour starting where I work/live at the Higher Institute of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry (ISAE) in Busogo and ending in the city near where I live, Musanze. The next tour will pick up in Musanze and continue to the capital city of Kigali. Note: Some of these pictures were majorly embarrassing/difficult to obtain (well mostly just the ones in Byangabo and the market) so I hope you appreciate each one. Enjoy…

Here is the inside of my house:  

Step outside my house and here's what you'll see: 

 

There are a lot of people working around the university whose job is to keep the place looking beautiful (they succeed, wouldn’t you say?). These are the children of one of the ladies who is usually working around my house:

 

Now we’ll meander up to the academic part of the campus. Here are just a couple images of the campus:

 

The place where I’ve been spending a lot of time recently is the newly-created “career center.” Here students can find career guidance (well, ideally), practice their English, and use the Internet. Have a look:

 

It’s an agriculture school in a rural area, so of course there are animals everywhere (and people to take care of them). They are used for teaching and also produce milk, eggs, etc. which are sold in the community:

 

And if we continue up, we’ll find the recently-built administrative building. I have an office in there, in which I spend very little time now that the career center is my unofficial office:

 

Now we’ll leave the campus and move to the nearby city of Musanze. First we'll have to walk to the small town of Byangabo. Here's Byangabo: 

Byangabo has a market day every Tuesday and Friday. People come from neighboring villages to sell the vegetables they grow (and clothes, utensils, etc.). This is where I buy my fresh fruits and vegetables. Here's the market: 

Now it's time to go to Musanze, so we'll take a taxi like this for about 30 minutes:

 

Here’s what you might see along the way:

We'll just stop at one village along the way. Getting to one of the villages usually involves moving down a big hill from the main road. This happens to be a celebration of "International Women's Day" from a while back. One of the handful of times I've ventured into a village like this one. 

And back to the road:

And now here’s our destination -- the “big city” of MUSANZE:  

Next stop: to the bus park, then Kigali. Hope you're excited!