Kinyarwanda buhoro buhoro

The title means in broken kinyarwanda(the local language)that I am slowly slowly learning it! I am settling in and I love it here.. It sounds really bad but I never want to go home! Haha but then again it hasn't even been a week so I may just change my mind! I have done lots of exciting things like been to an amazing market which sells everything you can think of and wouldn't be complete without the beggars , home butchery, children , bunches of bananas and boys hounding you saying 'Give me job' to carry your goods for you to your transport. The one exciting thing about it all is that you have to haggle down the price of everything as the locals put a 'white tax' on everything. And there is the odd 'muzungU' (foreigner/white man) comment. I think the highlights so far has been ,when visiting the neighbour children in their little shack the little girl said shyly to me 'I've seen you in that film'. Haha I had to laugh at that, and at the market two cute little girls called lucy and queeniue (who Narda and I called Nziza lucy and Nziza queenie (Nziza means beautiful)) started stroking my hair and my nails and face to see if I was real. Another highlight was starting my placement today, I was suposed to be working with street boys but apparently the street boy home had moved very far away so I started my placement with Narda at an orphanage which has only ever had one other volunteer from our organisation there (Eric), who is still there for a few weeks. It takes us an hour to get there, first you have to catch the public bus which is relatively flash by Rwanda standards then you catch another bus which looks like an old paddock car and you squash 20 people in it (and trust me there are always that many people in the van/bus as some drivers don't leave until it is filled up) and then I get dropped off at the end of this dirt road and I have to walk over 2kms to get to the orphanage, or I could catch a motourbike (a moto) but they are absolute lunatics on the road! So I don't think I will be doing that a lot! The orphanage has 49 kids about 10 are babies and about 10 are in their late teens .There are two boys Elias and another boy who are very helpful (Dámoure) and I am sure I will become great friends with them. The orphanage has absolutley no resources the walls are bare . I didn't see a single toy, the children's bedrooms consist of some clothes, a bed and bits of scrap paper and random calenders etc. The sweetest thing that almost made me cry was a girl Janine whose 17 gave me a necklace even though she has nothing, so tomorrow I am going to give her one of my necklaces. It was so sad and I have no idea how we are supposed to keep them occupied while its holidays with no resoures! Me and Narda went with Ryan another volunteer to a shop that sells stationary tonight (everything remains opens to crazy hours!!!) and we bought a book for all the kids and some big sheets of paper which we are going to write the abcs on and draw pictures of things beginning with the alphabet! It will be a good start and the kids can colour in! We really need resources! So if anyone would like to contribute financially please contact me as I have lots of brilliant plans up my sleeves!! I am also thinking of starting an adult education class, we were given a sheet of paper translating basic Kinyarwanda into English which is handy if we are going to the market or whatever and then me and narda were walking around the neighbourhood on sunday and we were hounded by children and women , narda got out her phrase book to try to communicate with them and then they completely swamped her wanting to know all the english words for Kinyarwanda words, she went through the whole book with them!!! I spent all that time entertaining the kids , singing and dancing and playing with my umbrella which they thought was extremely interesting! I was so hot, and I got burnt!ouww! But all the adults are so willing to learn english because Rwanda just changed one of their national language's from French to English last year so of course all the oldies have a huge dificulty with it and really need those skills for jobs !!!
Anyway I had better go I see my time is running out on the internet in the internet cafe! Keep you posted and ihjoro geeza (good night!)