We arrived on Wednesday night, after about 24 hours of travel we should have all been exhausted but the excitement of this new frontier had us wired. We met our Director of Operations at the airport and he gave us a quick briefing of what to expect these next few hours. Besides the damp humid air that hit us like a wall upon exiting the aircraft on the tarmac, there wasn't much culture shock.
We went to the Director's house/Flemish investment office in Bujumbura aka Buj in the South African embassy compound and his wife offered us some local beer "Primus" homemade corn bread from her sweet corn, grown in her garden and fritatas with veggies she also grew. We were then carted off to a hotel up the side of the mountain behind the President's house overlooking Buj and the Tanganyika lake with Congo mountains in the backdrop -Great view first thing in the morning.
Thursday morning was spent with Gillian, our Director's wife. She took us into downtown Buj, we saw the shops, grocery stores, hardware and electronic shops. After setting up a projector for our management team, we students boarded a Land Rover and undertook a 3 hour journey across the country to Muyinga where our field office is located. On this car ride, we saw people walking the sides of the roads with many bushels of goods on their heads, children with notebooks coming or going to school, as many as 4 people on a single bicycle and my favorite... Hitchin' a ride on the back of the bus.
Some people in Burundi get coal from the top of the mountain and ride it down to downtown Buj to sell. It's a few km and its a pretty steep mountain considering you are going from about sea level (or just above) to near 2000m elevation in about 30 km. These vendors do this on bicycles, they can do this up to 4 times a day I'm told. Riding down with a bushel of coal is tough but it's not as hard as the climb, so most of these riders hitch rides on the backs of trucks to climb back up the mountain. I found it rather noteworthy and curious how they all seemed to share the back of these trucks equally, sometimes sitting on the frames of their bikes and not even on the seats.
I've posted an album on Facebook and picasa I'll link here so you can peruse, but in the meantime here's a picture of what I consider, hitchin' a ride.
