This Is Africa-experience

To get an impression of one of the women’s organisations, I booked the ‘This is Africa-experience’ tour in Nyamirambo. This is one of the oldest and most authentic suburbs of Kigali. It used to be the muslim quarter, but nowadays it has tons of shops, hairdressers, tailors, salesmen, restaurants and bars and has it become very popular with local youth as a hangout.

Nyamirambo Women’s Centre (NWC)
The Women’s Center was founded in 2007 by 18 women, all in different situations, but difficult ones nevertheless. They all come from different levels of society, some university trained, others iliterate. The aim of their organisation was to help other women within the area and teach them to read and write, organize English language classes or teach them certain skills to become self-reliant and gain an income. Especially the muslim women never had any education, but the overall mentality changed after the genocide, according to NWC.

In general, a majority of roughly 93% is catholic and only a small part is muslim. Some of the women do cover up when going out, of course they all do when going to the mosque, but in general these are very moderate muslims. The center gets funds through the European Commission and the Slovenian Peace Institute.

Together with the Canadian tourist from before, Sarah, Marie-Aimee and Vincente we set off on a tour through the area. We visited the local market, where they showed us women weaving carpets, sewing clothes, selling fruit & veg or stamping cassava leaves, onion and garlic into sombe paste.

I even learned a new word in Kinyarwanda: murabeho, meaning ‘goodbye’.

After the market our tour stopped at Lynda’s Boutique. She’s a tailor, making all kinds of clothes and embroidery. One of my friends ordered a cute little summer dress and Lynda is the one stitching it all up for me. I can’t wait to see the result!

Next stop was a hairdressing saloon. Nothing as cool as ‘Hair Force One’, but the lady made us each a braid. The blond vs black had a nice effect but I didn’t like it so much in the end, I took it out at home.

Our final stop was at Aicha’s place, who’d cooked us a Rwandan meal. It was a pity we weren’t able to help out as we thought we’d be cooking all together. Our lunch consisted once again out of potatoes, beans, rice, some sort of polenta made from cornflour (maizflour) and dodo, similar to spinach.

That was basically the tour. Nothing you couldn’t have done on your own, but nice to see the young girls doing an effort in trying to get more tourists to their area. They added little information, but are mainly there to translate whenever you have a question. As with everything, it isn’t entirely worth the money they ask although I was more happy to pay it to them than to some rip off company. I was a bit dissappointed knowing that the first company I spoke to tried to charge double for this tour while not adding any extra value to the tour. They also claim to take only 30% of profits while 70% goes to the communities. This example learned us that it’s definitely not like that. But more about 'my view on tourism' later on this blog.

I did talk to two Gradstudents from Rwanda University of Tourism. They totally get the picture, but are the first ones to graduate in Tourism. The programme is still very new, courses are taught by foreign teachers, so anyone who's currently working in tourism has actually never had a proper training. Which explains a lot... We exchanged ideas and thoughts and it was very interesting talking to these ambitious people. I hope they will bring some change to the local industry.

On Saturday I’m travelling to Ruhengeri (Musanze) in the Northern district. I’m hoping to see the gorillas, talk to some organisations and do a couple of local tours organised by another Community Based Tour Operator. Can’t wait…

Friday, April 15th – Kigali 27 degrees