Week One - Hitting the Ground Running

Regards from Rwanda! This is the end of my first week in country and its been an exciting, fascinating, and fun time already. Below is a flash report - daily highlights from my week.

Sunday - travel delay by 7 hours; absolutely nothing to do in the Addis Ababa Airport; arrive in Kigali to an overflowing toilet.
Monday - out to Nyamata office for the weekly team meeting; back to Kigali for meetings with a livestock and agriculture specialist and a bee keeping specialist.
Tuesday - meetings and brainstorming - village tourism, brick making, jewlery, cards....
Wednesday - Visits to the basket weaving cooperative groups to follow up on their first international order!
Thursday - Spent the morning surpervising a school cleaning in preparation for painting and in the afternoon had a surprise visit from 2 Brittish Members of Parliment. Scramble to get the right people in the right places (including my team member Chantal tracking down a group of basket weavers from the cooperative!), only to wait hours for them to show. With any luck this will pay off...
Friday - bumpy morning in the village with 2 visiting agriculture specialists to understand the poosibilities for irrigation, which is poorly needed!
Saturday - finishing the proposal for the Brittish MPs for a new knitting cooperative.

That's it in brief. There were so many things which were striking, frustrating, exciting... its hard to remember them all, but in the future I'll try to write more regular to capture those things. For now, keep the comments coming - you have no idea what a shock it was to wake up early this morning and have no idea what I was going to do with my whole weekend!!

P.S. It couldn't be any different than my last few days in Hong Kong! Riding the Ferris Wheel at Ocean Park and drinking Proseco at Isola...