Radio Rwanda

Everybody dies famous in a small town - and for a big city Kigali is a very, very small town. Tuesday afternoon our friend Charles called and told us that he has two friends who do a radio program every week, and they needed guests for that evening. Since it interfered with dinner, the highlight of our day, it's a good thing we owe Charles many favors, or we might have said no (Charles is Collin's brother, of Ivuka fame, and pretty much runs everything with iron-clad efficiency). As it was, we said yes, grabbed our fellow volunteer Margaret (MARGE!) and got a very cool inside look at mass communications in the developing world.

The two hosts of the show are women, which we thought was awesome. They do an English-language show called The Melting Pot, which they hope reaches people trying to learn English, but they're pretty sure just reaches people who know them personally. Their show is on a Muslim station, so we were told no swearing and no Jesus. This is a shame, because what ended up happening was that all of us sat around and traded ridiculous stories of things that happened to us due to communication failures and culture differences, and some of our best stories definitely involve Jesus. Nevertheless, we managed to be entertaining enough to get invited back again next week! We will most likely be in the middle of our last trip to Gisinye and unable to take them up on the offer, but luckily, through us, they have tapped a rich reserve of volunteers with many hilarious accounts of our ineptitude. We also got to meet Mark, a friend of theirs who is organizing a genocide awareness march on April 7th, the national day of remembrance. There are going to be marches in Kenya and Uganda as well, and next year, they're hoping to organize one in NYC, which we will totally be attending. Mark actually worked as a radio host for awhile and it definitely showed; he was incredibly professional and lovely to listen to. He also wasn't bad to look at - we suggested he should look into TV. The two ladies also graciously caught us up on some of the music we had missed over the last three months (hello, Wyclef did a new "We Are the World"?! why were we not informed!!), and entertained us by attempting, for what we would discover was the one millionth or so unsuccessful time, to get the call and text-in system at the station to work for them. They also broke some things, like a chair and a set of headphones. Basically, it looked a lot like it would probably look if the Manolos were allowed to run rampant around a radio station with no chaperones - AWESOME.