Woke up to find our four friends had spent the night under the truck. Cold and wet, and still wearing tinsel necklaces, they huddled around our breakfast fire drinking mugs of coffee Vicki made them as they supervised Albert’s pancake cooking. They then enthusiastically shoved pancakes, bread, bananas, and jam into their mouths.
The fire illuminated a line of bright faces – each quite different in colour and features, sharp boned and angular through to broader, darker and more squat features. It wasn’t until I spent the time in the police station with Per that I started to appreciate the marked differences in colour and facial shapes that I could not see when we first landed in Africa. Then I noticed major tribal variations but not more subtle differences. But now I can see that these children are as different from each other as we are from our travelling companions. I noticed some stunningly beautiful women in Bukavu but maybe I am only now really noticing the differences.
We bid our friends a temporary farewell and drove out of a campsite littered with ribbons of sparkling tinsel from last night’s revelry.
Back into Bukavu where we visited the Burundi Embassy and the bank before settling at the main hotel to write. Went via the fromage shop and a bread hawker to a cheap lunch spot, a "worker's cafe" of sorts, where we crammed with locals onto couches to eat skewers of tender meat, the doorway continually darkening with the outlines of people selling peanuts and hard-boiled eggs.
Crows nested back to camp, marvelling at a country where cattle can be driven down main streets, pigs wallow in the waste pipes coming out of factories and cultivated land extends to the very edge of the town. Our long-horned caw skull skill provokes great interest even though we are back in long-horned cattle country, children pointing at it with bemused expressions. Wonder if they think we ran it down and killed it? Or ate it? The truth of course is nowhere near that interesting.
Geoffrey’s post-lunch drunken revelry in the back of the truck and the laughter it provoked reached us in the crows' nest as we rumbled back up into the hills beneath a stunning stormy sky of thick grey cut by patches of blue sky ringed by pink and orange clouds. Set up camp again under an increasingly threatening sky – last night's companions slowing drifting in.
Very different night of quiet chat around the fire with eight boys, learning about their schooling, their faces again lit by firelight. Ben had recorded last night's concert and replayed it for the boys, who moved in their seats to the music they'd made for us. It started raining after dinner so we packed everything up and climbed into the truck, the boys remaining just a short time before drifting away ... or so we thought.
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