Getting from A to B in order to survive

There’s one picture of my days in Africa which is imprinted in my mind and continues to break my heart.  It’s of the exhausted face of an old woman, trudging up the precarious mountain path with an immensely heavy load of firewood on her back. Perhaps it’s my grey hair, but I was particularly sensitive to the older refugees in the Kiziba camp, and how incredibly hard every day’s physical work was for each person, from the smallest children to the oldest, most frail senior.  With no electricity or running water, that work involved ceaseless carrying.

Grocery Shopping

Walking was by far the most common way people got around.  I don’t mean on a sidewalk, for a short time, in the daylight.  Narrow roads were lined with rivers of people walking miles, in the middle of nowhere, day and deepest, darkest night.  Lugging food, firewood, water, basins of wet laundry, building materials- whatever needed to be transported- on their heads or backs.

Even the wheels are made of wood

In the camp, an ingenious hand-made scooter attracted our attention.  We had to watch that we weren't run over by the boys racing up and down the hills delivering loads of firewood.






In the hilly city of Kigali, motorcycles were a common taxi, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a passenger balancing a door under his arm as they navigated a chaotic intersection beside us!   In the middle of a congested downtown street, trucks, motorcycles and people on foot all shared the road, going about the business of transporting and making deliveries.

Riding side-saddle

Rwanda also had a uniquely adapted bicycle, with energetic riders eager to carry people or materials on an extra long and strong rear rack.











I had the hardest time believing that this different continent I was in was really Africa.  That got resolved on the day we went to visit a Giraffe sanctuary.  It wasn’t seeing the giraffes in their natural habitat that did it, however.  It was on our return to downtown Nairobi- catching a glimpse of a rider and his camel whisking past the capital buildings!

Cold and rainy, too

What was different in Kenya?  The donkey, sometimes taking the place of a human mule, hauling even larger, heavier loads on a rubber-tired cart.  And the rainy season began, turning roads full of potholes into a slippery quagmire.

Nairobi-Amsterdam-Toronto

As I buckled my seatbelt and began my long flight home, I tried to imagine what a refugee thinks and feels as they leave this world they knew.  For many, this strange new mode of travel will lead to a much less exhausting existence, a longer life expectancy, and hopefully, a brighter future, perhaps even for eternity!