walk to work

Phil: I'm setting off to work this morning in the cool before the sunrise, to trace a route all the way to work on foot, following the valleys and footpaths used here by so many, people whose only means of transport is themselves. Literally going, as one says here, na maguru, with legs. Come with me? 

Kigali is a very walkable city. Valley bottoms within this ever-more-developed city of hills often remain a delightfully rural mixture of marshland, bananas, corn and sorghum fields, edged by a flotsam of tin-roofed, mud-walled homes of Kigali's poorest. At dawn in these bottomlands, mist hangs low and cool, mixing with the tang of eucalyptus smoke. By first light the dust before many a humble dwelling will already be swept clean in scalloped strokes by women and girls, the soft scratching of their hand-brooms as familiar and necessary in heralding the day as the cock's crow.

The movement begins in the narrow alleyways, dark figures in hoodies and scarves wrapped against the cool morning air, shaking off sleep, horking and spitting. A pattern coalesces, building strongly and purposefully uphill, toward the shops, workplaces, schools, businesses and taxi stands of the flying-sardine-can minibuses we ride to work each day, increasingly outnumbered at rush hour by single-occupancy four-by-fours, clogging the paved thoroughfares snaking along Kigali's many ridges.

Heading down into the valley the overwhelming impression is of a river of people on foot: reverse-gravity tributaries of smartly-dressed office workers in dress shoes threading precise steps through the ruts and puddles, carrying briefcases or only a phone; shaved-headed flocks of school kids of indeterminate gender draped or bursting out of treadle-machine uniforms, little sisters holding an older sibling's hand, dark blue skirts nearly brushing the dust; fully grown young men and women on their way to secondary school, in resistance to the uniform their individuality expressed in a muted display of belts and bracelets, hairstyles and cell phones clutched tightly in the hand or pressed to the ear.

Pouring up out of the valley, up from Nyabisindu and its run-down market where the latest, infuriatingly senseless grenade attack targeted one of the more ragged and ramshackle settlements, killing two people and wounding a score of others.

I follow the pitched, hard-packed dirt lane down through the neighbourhood to the marsh, past women setting up stalls for the day, a kid squatting against a mud wall, breakfasting on a small 2-pack of biscuits.

Across the marsh rises the hill of Nyarutarama with its shopping centre and homes of the newly rich.

Crossing a log bridge over a thin stream as the sun rises higher in the sky.

At the bridge are fish ponds, newly dug by hand, their spill-ways and rabbit hutches still under construction. In a tried and true system, the rabbit droppings will fall into the water to feed the fish.

 

 
Alongside the high walls of the Nyarutarama Estate, the tramped dirt path rises and falls, skirting the edge of the fields that look east towards the old Remera cemetery and our house on the slope of Kimironko ridge. At this time of day the path is busy in each direction with men and women going to work and school kids with private school uniforms. Stepping out of the fields a few paces ahead, a small woman in a simple head scarf shoulders her asuka hoe and adjusts her wrap at the waist, her cultivation finished for the morning. The pace is quicker along this stretch of the path, the coming workday adding momentum to the leaps to be made, with haste or with grace, over the many blue-grey sewer streams from the homes above.

Across a patch of open field, and the path joins the dirt road crossing the valley from the Kibagabaga suburb, and we walkers are enveloped in clouds of red dust raised by car-commuters speeding from their gated mansions toward the paved road on the ridge.

Up through cultivated vacant lot, along a poor laneway and I'm across the busy traffic and down the other side, following a cobblestone residential street leading to the reservoir that's settled against the green-tended slopes of the private golf course.

Connecting trails wind past the golf course and primary school into the next valley, where I can glimpse the university on the top of the hill of Gisozi. Partway down the slope but hidden behind another hill is the Kigali Genocide Memorial where we work.

From here it's just a short, stream-leaping jog across a corn field to the main valley road into town. Depending on the day, I can pick up a moto by a roadside stand that sells earthenware garden pots, or I can continue on for another twenty or thirty minutes, na maguru.
Umunzi mwiza - Have a great day!