Today was a walking picture show

The future home for the Beauty School of Rwanda
Did we mention that Jeanne and Sylvie are letting us
use this name until they come up with a permanent one?

Alix meets a salon stylist and makes a new friend

Barb and Jeanne film the salons with a little help from a Bpeace and Barb supporter, David

When a buffet is this good we can pile high too!

Do we look full? Enjoying our lunch
From left to right: Malyse, Susan, Alix, Barb, Francoise and David

Walking for money.

We are in search for local money because we will need it to bridge funding gaps for the school. With that in mind we began the morning with a race walk through the city and down the tree-lined streets that house many of the NGO's and embassies in Kigali. It was a great way to experience the town and get some exercise.

Our destination was the Dutch Embassy for our meeting with Ben Rutten in the office of Economic Cooperation and Private Sector relations. He encouraged us to apply for several possible funding/partnering opportunities which the Embassy sponsors and/or funds. He reinforced our belief that vocational training is extremely important toward recovery and is a high priority for the Rwanda government. Mr. Rutten encouraged us as he believes our school is a good candidate for funding. It is what he calls "innovative”, bringing something not already available to Rwandans, and provides career opportunities. We agree.

Taking the “before” pictures so we can begin to draw the “after”.

When we can not bring experts to the field we bring the field to the experts. Technology is a huge enabler for our remote work and typical of this mission we used some of our time here to gather the information which will allow our team in the US to work in the coming months.

So we headed to Jeanne and Sylvie's salons to take a critical look at their space and begin to explore how the space next to Jeanne's salon can be renovated into the school. It's currently being used as a restaurant but with a little bit of imagination, we envisioned a beauty school coming to life. To help our experts back home develop equipment and layout recommendations we videotaped each of the salons. Some of the clients were camera shy, but Barbara managed to get some great footage of the salons and the stylists at work.

Food is a critical part of every mission.

We made our way through the crowds Kigali bus terminal area to have a late lunch at another Bpeace associate’s restaurant. Lunch at Francoise's place was the highlight of the day. Since you can make only one trip to the buffet, Francoise's customers create towering layers of food covering every course from appetizer to dessert. Malyse, Jeanne's daughter joined in as we piled our own plates high. Everyone was looking forward to true African food and this was some of the best.

Personal contributions

Late in the afternoon, Barb spent some downtime helping Jeanne's daughter Maylse work on college applications for US schools in the Serena lobby.

David Nganele, aka Barbara’s boyfriend and mission travel companion, has contributed a much-needed piece of equipment to the Bpeace team. The phone we have all been using for years, which Richard pointed out has been with Bpeace longer than he, has absolutely no numbers left on the buttons. For Barb this made dialing near impossible, until she added numbers using masking tape. It was decided that a masking taped covered phone didn’t fit her high powered consultant image, so she and Bpeace were presented with a brand new one! Thank you for the field donation David!