Things we miss... and things we will miss

We're down to our last few weeks in Rwanda, and i think we are both actually starting to feel a little homesick... ironic for me, who doesn't even really know where "home" is, but whatever. So we've started making lists of things to do when we're back home. For anyone who's in the NY area and is feeling hungry, we have a comprehensive list of meals to cook since this sitting-on-the-ground-while-cooking-on-one-small-burner-with-pans-that-everything-sticks-to thing has gotten really old. Plus a lot of the food that I want to cook, Mike doesn't like, so I'll really need dining buddies.

Next, we have a multiple-page list of restaurants that we want to eat at immediately upon our return. There are more than 60 places to eat on this list. Can you tell that we really miss food?

There are some things we'll really miss from here, though. For starters, people are sooo friendly everywhere you go. Not sure where a specific restaurant is? Ask someone and they will personally walk you to it. We've also just made friends with the woman we usually buy for at the local outdoor produce market- she helps us with our Kinyarwanda, although we're not sure of half of what she says, we just repeat after her. Yesterday when we were there, we asked if she had lemons, to which she replied no but then yelled out what we're assuming was the equivalent of "Does anyone here have any lemons for the muzungus to buy?!"

The children here seem to be cuter than any kids I've ever seen anywhere, and I'll really miss seeing them around. Since parents here aren't as overprotective as parents in the States, you see groups of kids walking all over town together, talking to strangers, etc., and I'm really going to miss seeing so many kids all the time- you just don't see groups of little kids playing like that on the streets of New York. There's one little girl in particular who we used to see everyday when we left our house; we're convinced she had a radar for us, because she'd be nowhere to be found when suddenly we'd hear "Byeee!! Muzungu byeee!!" which seemed to be the only phrase she knew, and when we'd turn around to wave she'd let out the cutest giggle I've ever heard in my life. Sadly, we haven't seen her since we've returned from Tanzania, so I hope she's ok. There's another boy, Fabrice, who lives nearby as well. When he sees us he freezes in the middle of whatever he's doing, then runs over to hug us, only stopping as he collides into our legs- if he was any bigger, he'd knock me over. He then follows us to our gate and watches as we go inside. It doesn't matter how many times he sees us in a day, we always get a hug from him.

This was kind of a waste of a post, I just needed a distraction from working on our human rights book. :) xoxo