Travels With Nicholas Kristof: ‘There is no High-Five in Rwanda’

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  06.15.07 | 8:35 AM ET

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reprised his Win a Trip With Nick contest this year, and he and the two winners—a teacher from Chicago, Will Okun, and a a Rhodes Scholar-elect, Leana S. Wen—have landed in Rwanda.

For the next couple weeks, Kristof, Okun and Wen will be filing stories, blogs, photos and video from there as well as Congo and Burundi. Like last year, the correspondents are filing insightful and dramatic dispatches and, unfortunately, those dispatches are also currently housed in the subscriber-only TimesSelect section of the Times Web site.

Okun, whose students strongly recommended that he not try to be funny, writes that he wants to “relate to other uninformed young people who seek a fresh, unlearned and detailed perspective into the daily life and youth culture of sub-Sahara Africa.” So far, he seems to be providing that. And he’s also kind of funny, which isn’t something I’ve often seen in writing about sub-Sahara Africa.

He writes about the group’s first day in Kigali:

At the end of the day, Leana (who had previously lived in Rwanda) and I walked up and down the hills of the capital city of Rwanda in the dark of the night. With few streetlights, bodies would quickly emerge out of the pitch black and just as quickly, brush by and back into the night. Who could have ever guessed that an African capital city could be so safe? Or that there was a stellar Indian restaurant? There we ended the night as we ate dinner with two beautiful girls who are members of a group called Orphans from Rwanda and are currently attending college to study computers and finance. When speaking of their success, one girl said in clear English, “It does no good to look bad, there is no time. You must move forward.” I even coaxed one of the girls into admitting, that yes, I do look like Brad Pitt. I went for the high-five, but no! There is no high-five in Rwanda.

Tags: Global Village, Africa, News and Briefs


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