Field Trips

     On Saturday, we took a few day trips to a few interesting places.  The day started with breakfast an hour later than the rest of the days this week.  After breakfast, we went for a walk across the valley our porch overlooks to a small village on the mountain opposite us. It was a ten minute walk, about, but it was as though we’d entered another world.  The Africa that everyone in the U.S. thinks of if they don’t know better is what this village was like.  Women in old graphic t-shirts that obviously came from America with patterned head wraps that matched their skirts sat on the ground outside houses made from red mud and tree branches and shaped clay pots with their hands as little kids ran around them and played, some without pants and all without shoes.  There was a unique dissonance, though, between the poverty that surrounded them and the natural beauty that surrounded the poverty.  Chris, my father, told David that the view from the top of the mountain was what Americans call a “million dollar view.”  And it was.  In any western country, a large house or resort or hotel would be sitting up there right now, drinking in the view that these poor, poor people have every day of their lives. 

     After lunch, we piled into the vans to drive an hour and a half to the source of the White Nile River.  While it may not be the exclusive source of the river, it is without a doubt the furthest one south.  It was a fun car ride through more of Burundi’s mountain country.  We passed through a number of small towns and even a wedding ceremony on our way home.  There’s so much life in this country, and it’s so beautiful to see how Burundi has become the picture of what reconciliation and healing can become.

     The source of the Nile itself was, when last Vickie was there, a pipe sticking out of a hill with water trickling from it.  It is not so anymore.  Now it’s a full on tourist attraction.  We were charged admittance, but given a tour.  Our guides told us of how it was discovered: a German explorer started in Egypt and walked upstream till he arrived in Burundi.  Where there once was a pipe, there is now a series of tile pools that the spring fills with the crystal clear water.  We all took turns drinking from where the spring feeds into the first pool; there is a little waterfall.  It tasted just as spring water should.  After we’d had our fill of spring water, we walked up a hill to where the bathrooms are.  There are two sets: the toilet shack and the cho shack.  The toilets, unfortunately, were out of order, so it was to be the cho.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the structure of a cho, let me explain.  Imagine the simplest of latrines: a hollow cement stool with a toilet seat over a pit where everything winds up.  Now get rid of everything but the cement and the pit. Add, however, little feet marks facing away from the hole in the cement floor.  You now have an idea of what we had to work with.  I acknowledge that, as a guy, it was not the same experience for me as for the women on the trip.

     Moving on from the bathroom situation, we walked down from the promontory where there was a closed bar-like building, picnic tables, and the bathrooms to the parking lot and then up another hill, this one more like a mountain, to where the man who discovered the spring commissioned a pyramid to be built in solidarity with the other end of the Nile.  It was about ten feet tall and very fun to climb upon. Many pictures were taken on and around the pyramid.  Our guides also told us about how the mountains we had been upon are part of a continental divide that dictates where rainwater will wind up, either in the Nile and therefore the Mediterranean Sea or Lake Tanganyika. It was a very cool place.

     We came home exhausted but full of wonder at the things we’d seen that day.  Cards and dice (no gambling, I promise) were played and we went to bed, excited for church the next day.