Rwanda is full of surprises. We’ve have a lot of great ones, such as Freddy delivering us a fridge and a working wireless router. This morning’s surprise was 90% hilarious, 10% tragic, although I’m sure that it will change to 100% tragic soon enough. When I went to the bathroom, I saw water everywhere and the toilet had collapsed and sunk into the floor. I went to the dining room and found a note from Lama, that hilariously explained the situation. Here’s the note and the toilet:
Our busted toilet
So that put the toilet that Lama and I share out of commission entirely. That’s fine, we have two bathrooms at the house. Except Kara’s bathroom doesn’t flush anything that’s not liquid, so toilet paper and other favorite washroom substances float around. So no pooping in our house anymore. But Lama had called Charles and set the repair of the toilet in motion, and Regina was over before lunch and completely on top of things. She already had an electrician and plumber going to work by noon. Another thing that happened by noon was the plumber getting hammered.
Kara and I spent the morning to afternoon working, but since Lama wasn’t around to translate I couldn’t really do much as far as the project went, so I decided to spend the time learning. Since sound is my biggest problem (my shotgun mic going down, every location being terribly noisy) I started messing around in Soundtrack Pro and watching tutorials and reading so that I can get really efficient with the program. So I installed Soundtrack and was trying to install bonus media, and I was graced with the day’s second excellent surprise: the Final Cut Studio installer decided, despite me telling it specifically NOT TO, to reinstall Final Cut, overwriting my newer version with an older one. What does that mean? It means all the editing I’ve done that is saved as 6.0.2 versions are useless until I upgrade again. No sweat? No. Sweat. I need to download the upgrade, but that is virtually impossible in Rwanda. At the blazing download rate of 1 kb/s it will take a day to download what I need. Too bad that internet can’t go 20 minutes without dropping out and canceling the download. Sigh. At least I’m not super deep in the documentary edit, otherwise that would have been a disaster.
At dusk, Regis, Lama and I set out and got some more shots for our film. We had talked to Sigfried and he had gone to Kigali to see his family so he was out yet again. We finished shooting everything EXCEPT the scenes requiring Sigfried, and some of it was amazing. The sun was setting perfectly like I needed, we found some kids to stage a soccer game that I needed, and I ended up getting all the shots I needed. Regis has done a really good job and I really hope we get those scenes with Sigfried when we get back from Kigali so I can finish it. I don’t want all this great stuff to go to waste.
So that night, after dinner, I got the final surprise of the day. When the electrician/plumbers were at the house, they fixed/turned on the hot water heater we’ve had at our house the whole time, and I took a HOT SHOWER. It wasn’t warm like Bethel hotel. It was hot. I almost got burned. It felt incredible. It’s really funny to lose the toilet and gain hot water in the same day. One thing Rwanda really puts a new spin on is one of my favorite games, Would You Rather? I love playing it with Lama and Kara here, because in Rwanda the questions practically ask themselves since they’re always real choices you have to make. I ask things like, “What would you rather have? A constant, fast internet connection, or a working fridge?” (pre-fridge) and Lama and Kara are like “oooohhhhhh! TOUGH ONE!” It’s awesome. So today’s would you rather is would you rather have a working toilet and cold showers (yesterday), or hot showers and no toilet (today)? We all agree we’d take the toilet.
