The hiiiiills are alive with the sound of me wheezing

The first thing you notice are the hills. Landing at midnight at Kigali International Airport you fly in over the pinpricks of lights spread across the rolling hillsides, deep valleys and hilltop towns, reflecting the pockets of immense suburban sprawl growing out from the bright, illuminated centre of Kigali.

I landed at 1am Rwandan time (midnight UK time) after a 13 hour flight from Manchester, via Istanbul (no, not Constantinople). I had a lovely chat with the passport/VISA control chap at the airport who, after reading my affiliation letter from the University of Rwanda, seemed genuinely pleased to welcome me to his ‘beautiful country’. Then, still in the airport, I queued up to show my UK Ready to Fly COVID certificate, and, additionally, to pay $60 for an in-country regulation LFT, the results of which were recorded on my Rwandan Biomedical Centre’s visitor health certificate. The Rwandan government are rightly taking absolutely no chances with us contaminated foreigners.

 The first morning, then, I was advised by my new landlord to head to the Union Trade Centre (UTC), a shopping complex in the centre of town, from which I can get done a lot of the bureaucracy necessary when you arrive to stay for a while in a new country: a Rwandan SIM, exchange pounds into Rwandan Francs, buy some electricity for my new apartment, and at the same time get some food in for dinner and tea. Now, Google Maps told me the UTC was a mere 3.3 km away, a distance which in the UK wouldn’t even cause a raising of the eyebrow to walk.  

So, naturally, excited and enthusiastic to soak in the sights, sounds and smells of my new East African home for the summer, off I set on foot. In the heat. On major roads congested with exhaust fumes. Up the long, steep hill into town. By the time I got there an hour later, my sight was blinded by sweat in the early morning sun, the only sound I’d heard was the honking of horns of vehicles playing dodgems on the roads, and the smell of gasoline had long annihilated anything else the immense Kigali inner-city wildlife has to offer. I had a long sit down. I understood then why taxis and motocycles (taxi motorbikes) are so prevalent here – it is just foolhardy to attempt any kind of commute by foot. 

People look at you funny.

Still, at some point the steep roads, congested streets and dirt tracks needed to be attacked if I’m going to keep up my fitness in preparation for the International Kigali Peace Marathon I rather optimistically  signed up to, held on 29^th May, just weeks after arriving (just the half marathon, though. I’m not a lunatic). 

Before I arrived here I joined the Kigali Hash Harriers running group on Facebook, which it turns out is a bunch of global immigrants and Rwandans who meet every Saturday to bowl out together on a cross-country (VERY country) trail run, through swamps, crop fields, bush, rivers, mud and even, it turns out, over infrastructure (see video). It was on my first meeting with the Kigali Hash Harriers that I met my lovely new running partner-in-crime Berni, from the UK High Commission, though unlike me who just wheezed around a 10k every so often in the UK, she is an actual fit marathon runner, so I just do my best to keep up.

Now, a Hash is where someone goes before you and marks out a trail with little piles of shredded newspaper at every junction, suggesting the correct way to run, after which us runners then follow the course as best we can. So it's a bit like a cross between an Easter Egg hunt, a sight-seeing trip, and a gruelling 10k slog. Then afterwards we all collapse into some cold, cold beers.

It’s almost impossible to run longer than 100 metres around here without encountering a hill of some sort, so I’ve staked out a 10k training course that rises and falls like the temperature of an average spring day in Britain. This is mine and Berni's attempt at acclimatising to running in the thin air at 1500m above sea level, up and down the steep Kigali slopes, for the marathon . The 21.01km of the Kigali half is going to be twice as long, and with as twice as many hills, but, right now, 10k is really as much as I can manage!

Rwanda is known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. It feels like I run up half of them every time I step out of my front door.

Give a Rwandan a cow...

Here’s something wonderful that came out of devastation that all Reds can help with.

 On the 5^th June 2022 the Rwandan OLSC (Overseas LFC Supporters Clubs) will formally remember the victims of the Tutsi genocide. In just 100 days between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 people were murdered across Rwanda in a shocking genocide intended to exterminate the Tutsi ethnicity. 

On 5^th June, the Rwandan Reds will gather at Nyange Genocide Memorial site. As part of the ceremony, the Rwandan OLSC will also donate cows to the survivors and victims’ families.

Why cows? Cows are a valuable commodity to poor rural people in Rwanda. For some reason, Rwandans love their milk. Like, REALLY love their milk. The country has a network of milk bars, one in most villages, that people just stop in on their way to work or to meet friends. So anyone with a milk-producing cow will have a regular income over the cow’s milk-producing lifetime. And cows can be reproduced to make sure their owners’ income never runs out, and a cow to the market can also fetch a good price for the family. Owning cattle also reflects a position of good standing in their community, so a cow really can benefit a family enormously.

Here's a few good newspaper articles on what I'm wanging on about.

Each cow costs the Rwandan OLSC between £300 - £350, so do please give what you can towards the campaign. Whatever you can afford will make the world of difference.

 You can donate any amount of money at

Account name:
OLSC Rwanda Foundation
Kicukiro
Kigali
Central province
Rwanda
Postcode: 0

Bank account number: 4490385676  

Bank name:
KCB Bank Rwanda Plc
18 KN 4 Ave
Kigali
Rwanda

Bank swift code: KCBLRWRW
Bank code: KCBL
Pay code: RW
Code emplacement@ RW
Agency code: 161

Or, alternative, if that all feels a little complicated, give me a shout and you can donate via me, and I can just hand the OLSC Treasurer the money directly.

Kigali - first fortnight

 I’ve been in Kigali for a fortnight now, suffering in the heat and avoiding the mozzies, so I think it’s high time to write things down so I don’t get lost down the memory hole in the ravages of time.

When I thought I was coming to Rwanda, originally scheduled for May 2020 before the world closed down, I had contacted various networks, not necessarily for academia but just so I would know some local people there who I could meet for a coffee and could tell me the lay of the land. Informal fixers, if you will.

My first stop was, of course, the Rwandan branch of the Overseas Liverpool FC Supporters Club, or the Rwandan Reds as they’re known. After all, I was going to need somewhere to watch the end of the potentially historic 2021/22 season – League Cup already won, FA Cup, League title and European Cup all there to be claimed.

Once contact was made, I decided to chance my hand with the Rwandan Green Party. When you’re a Green, you’re part of a global family – the Global Greens, in fact. So I just contacted the info@ address on their website, and the next day got an email back from Frank Habineza, founder, President and current MP in the Rwandan parliament. Which was unexpected. He has a mighty and terrible story to tell, which I'll post about later.

I was also in touch with Germaine Hirwa, an academic a fellow member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. Germaine has been brilliant in helping me negotiate the bureaucratic maze that foreign academics need to negotiate in order to conduct research here.

 It’s hot here, as you’d expect, but not excessively. Even though it’s an equatorial country, Kigali is 1.5km above sea level. Which keeps the temperature relatively cool all summer (mid 20s), but also makes exercise really hard! Plus, we’re at the end of the rainy season heading into summer, but occasionally the heavens still open and a 30 minute downpour erupts.

I’ll do separate posts on each, but here’s a brief overview of the nonsense I’ve been up to so far: so far I’ve been for dinner with the President, Vie Pres and Treasurer of the Democratic Rwandan Green Party, am fully installed with the Rwandan reds at the Iwacu +250 bar, nicknamed the Anfield Road/Kigali Branch, been out running up and down the Kigali hills (much to the general bemusement of the locals, seeing a sweaty, red-faced, blue-eyed white bloke charging around the neighbourhood!) and took part in the Kigali 5k Night Run, and affiliated myself with the University of Rwanda, in the Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Resource Management.

 And, you know, done a bit of PhD research, too.