Crazy transportation issues and a party with puppies!!

Friday I got a ride in the ambulance to the hospital where another volunteer works. We were both going to a party that weekend, so I thought I would just hang out at her house until we were picked up and then they only had to make one stop. Well, she didn’t pick up her phone before I left, so I didn’t know that she went into town for the day. I got to her hospital and went to her house and sat on her front porch for an hour or so, then I got hungry, so I stashed my bags in her little storage place outside and went to the cantina at the hospital and bought a hard boiled egg and a banana. I went and sat on her back porch and ate my lame lunch, then sat back on the front porch, but the sun was getting too hot, so I went back to the back porch for a while, then decided to move and i saw a little girl staring at me through the bushes. I said hi and she came up to me and gave me a hug and asked me to teach her English. I told her to come back tomorrow and went and laid on the grass on the side of the house. I laid there for about an hour listening to my ipod, then my phone battery was getting low, so I packed up and headed for the hospital. I went into the office building and no one was there, so I just sat outside. The anestesiologist, whom I met during a dance party came and sat with me and I charged my phone while we talked and listened to music. I got a hold of the guy who was picking us up and so I started walking to the main road because he had never been to her house and didn’t know where it was. Half way down the dirt road, a taxi went by and my friend was on it. I was already on my way and he didn’t know how to get to her house, so I decided I would keep going and meet him at the road and we could come pick her up afterwards. When I got to the main road, I got a call from him saying he would be there in a half hour! I left too early. One of the doctors came by with a volleyball and a net and asked if I wanted to play, so I said sure and went with them. There was a soccer game going on with a the entire primary school and some secondary school kids, so I got surrounded and they came in really close. I got a little claustrophobic. Then I got a call from my friend saying that he forgot his license at home and the police pulled him over and wont let him drive, can I drive stick and do I have my license on me? He said he would pay for my moto to the road he was stuck at, but I needed to come now and drive the truck. My manual driving skills leave a LOT to be desired, so I called my friend who was packing at her house and said she needed to come now, we have to take a taxi and drive the truck. About 50 children decided to follow me from the game and surround me while I was trying to talk to my friend on the phone and just stood and stared at me for the 20 or so minutes before my friend met me. By the time she got to me, my friend had called and said he was on his way; the police let him go. We sat around for quite a while until he called and asked where her town was and if we were on the main road. Long story short, he was about 25 minutes from her town thinking he had already passed us, so he kept turning around and around but never going far enough. We finally started walking and told him to just keep driving, that he wasn’t where he thought he was and we found him on the road. There were already three other people in the truck besides the driver, so we had to squish in. Two of our other friends met them on their dirt road and said they would just walk until they picked us up and then we could take them the rest of the way. Well, since getting lost and finding us took so long, the ended up almost walking the whole way (almost an hour driving!). We finally got them and a friend and I sat in the back with all the bags, it was dark by this time. Dinner was amazing, we had pizza and salad with two kinds of lettuce!!! Their dog had seven puppies, and two of them are named after gossip girl characters. I got to hold and cuddle them all weekend, they were only two weeks old. That night we had a sweet dance party and finally crashed around 2am. Saturday, we went to the lake and had a picnic lunch and then watched movies after a delicious dinner of burritos (with homemade tortillas, which took forever to make considering there were 11 of us!). Sunday, we had tortilla chips and guacamole for breakfast, played some bananagrams (themed Michael Jackson and things you miss from home), watched some Gossip Girl on the projection screen and then got into the truck just as it started raining. The car fogged up so badly we had to keep wiping it down every few seconds and it was raining so hard we couldn’t see and had to stop in the middle of the road for a while until we regained a little visibility. And it started hailing at one point! I was so afraid I was going to have to take the moto in that ridiculous rain, but thankfully by the time we got to my town on the road, it had stopped. They dropped me off there and although I called beforehand and asked for the moto to be in the town at 3:30 (I didn’t get there until 4:15) it didn’t show up until almost five. When my moto driver arrived, a drunk policeman who was not on duty, came over and took the key out of the bike and was pushing my backpack off of the moto and saying that he couldn’t drive me (the drivers from my clinic don’t have driving permits). The police guy who was talking to me the half hour I was standing in town helped and we finally got on our way. He sent me a message while we were driving that I didn’t answer which said “sorry, that man was drunk, he can drive you home now and come get his key tomorrow”. The moto driver stopped two or three times to tell his debacle to others on the road (we had to go the back way, so we were on the foot path the first part of the drive and it was super muddy and full of puddles and the rounded log bridges where not fun to driver over), then the police guy called me because I didn’t respond to his text message and I talked to him for a while and he said sorry and then I gave the phone to the driver and they talked and I heard him say “muzungu…abanyarwanda babi….afite ubwoba” meaning something about me thinking Rwandans are bad and that I was scared. Then he passed the phone back to me and the policeman apologized yet again and told me not to have fear and that he would buy me a fanta tomorrow when he came into my village to return the key. I got home in the dark and the policeman never showed up to buy me my fanta.