The first time we walked through the village of Kibuye, it was early morning. Dawn was twenty minutes away, but lots of people were up and about, getting ready for the day's work. On the corner of the main intersection of the village, a shop stood open. Bright…
At Kibuye, a calorie-dense nutritious porridge was developed to help combat malnutrition. The name, Busoma, is an acronym for its ingredients: Burundian soy, sorghum, and maise. Each serving is around 500 calories with balanced proteins and carbs. Fidele Niyongabo, the manager of the Busoma factory, walks us through the process.…
Kibuye has a primary school that serves 1200 kids. The sprawling campus sits north-west of the hospital. It's summer, so we meet older students at the soccer field in the evenings. One highschooler, Audas, has been taking Computer Science for two years. Here, taking a CS class means…
Kibuye Hope Hospital is a sprawling, dense campus surrounded by a high wall. It sits at the bottom of a hill bordered by two valleys. Banana trees, eucalyptus, and pines frame the road that winds to the hospital gate. Dawn breaks, glinting off the blue roofs and casting shadows up…
Hello from Burundi! Amahoro! Ni sawa! Bonjour! Twenty-two hours of flying through four airports to Burundi. Three hours of driving the most adventurous roads to Kibuye. Three days took us all the way around the world. Oliver and I start in Pasco, WA and fly to Denver, CO. From Denver…
My brother, my dad, and I traveled to Burundi to install a solar system at a rural teaching hospital. The whole experience was technicolor, and I was challenged to my core. As an "umuzungu", everything I thought I understood about the inequities of life was given a visceral…
This is my first international trip. I like packing light, but it is a challenge to pack light for something you haven't experienced before. This is not my brother's first international trip. His packing sense comes from months of pure grit and privation in foreign languages.…
If you'd like to get updates from the blog sent to your email, it's pretty easy. Head to our subscribe page, enter your email, and you should be good to go. Unfortunately, our pigeons caught the flu. Any subscriptions to our "pigeon delivery" option…