It's been a while...
To be honest, our first month and a half in Burundi has been hard to write about. There have been a lot of difficulties scattered with a lot of good.
Our challenges started before we left, when both of our laptops developed issues that are particularly inconvenient in Burundi and we discovered unexpected significant travel expenses that had not been communicated to us.
Upon arrival in Burundi, we found ourselves on our own with little communication with our host organization for over a week. When we finally were able to go to the town where we would be working, we had to find our own housing with few local connections.
A few weeks after our arrival in Burundi we finally found a place to stay. Unfortunately, our first weeks in our new home were marked with minor and major irritations such as stomach parasites, bed bugs, ulcers, chiggers and jiggers – almost every non-life-threatening pest we've heard of. On top of that, we have been learning how to communicate with a housekeeper who speaks very little French, thinks that our pockets are overflowing with money, and seems determined to stand firm on his strange racial prejudices.
As far as the research, it has been a month and a half, and only now are the arrangements for the promised translation and transportation being made. I won't even go into the details of the expensive headaches that are visas.
Though we have not found help where we expected it, we thankfully found it in less likely places:
A young African couple with no connection to us took us in just from overhearing a conversation about us needing a place to stay.
While trying to navigate Bujambura's taxi park after sunset, a local couple teamed up with us to find a taxi bus in rush hour and surprised us and shocked the other people on the bus by paying for our, the 'mzungu's,' bus fare.
Henk's new colleagues, though having little authority, have gone out of their way to get him as much experience as possible with the project during this time of waiting.
We were welcomed by some volunteers working with Youth for Christ in another part of Gitega town, who invited us for some nice dinners and opened their hearts to us.
We also met another Dutch student doing research in Burundi with an organization that is partnering with our host institute. We met him in a hotel near our house, and found some striking similarities in our research interests and backgrounds. Amazingly, it turned out we had both grown up in the same town in central Ivory Coast and had even met each other as children, nearly 20 years ago! It seemed that our youth in West Africa had given us both an interest in African development work and so, through widely different ways, we had ended up together in the same town in Burundi.
Besides meeting some wonderful people, we've had some fun opportunities to experience the country's culture and environment. We visited a national park with hippos and many birds, a cultural center where we have walked in on a cultural group shooting a traditional scene for a video clip, and found out about a local concert featuring the country's top ethnic dance group. We were also privileged to attend a 'dote' or introduction ceremony of a relative of our new Bujumbura family.
Though our time in Burundi has not been without its difficulties, we are still happy to be here. We have been encouraged through nice experiences and chance encounters, and are motivated to continue the research for which we came.