After much planning and organizing by our team leads, Theresa C. and Doug M., as well as great support from the SCAW office, Team Rwanda 2024 was officially ready to head to Kigali. Team members Michael and January B. from Victoria, Theresa from Kamloops, Doug from Stratford, Margo L. from Port Stanley and Carol and Joep D. from Penetanguishene were eager to go.
Michael and January flew a western route from Victoria and arrived in Kigali on Sept. 21, as planned. The rest of the team flew the eastern route from Toronto to Brussels to Kigali, a total of around 16 hours flying time.
Travelling these distances is not always easy. Besides being on the long side, the group from Toronto had to be routed through Montreal, then they switched aircraft and flew overnight to Brussels. The plan was then to continue on several hours after arriving in Brussels and fly direct to Kigali landing around 6:30 pm. All was on track until 10 minutes prior to boarding for the final leg of our journey when the flight was cancelled. Then came the scramble to get rebooked so that we could still make the deadline of arriving at Kigali on Monday, September 23. Three hours later, we sorted out the remaining flight segment and, after spending Sunday night in Brussels courtesy of the airline, we arrived a day later than scheduled. Monday was planned to be a travel rest day with only the pre-distribution meeting scheduled for 5:30 pm.
We were joyfully met by some of the Rotary Club members after we landed and cleared customs and arrived at our accommodation by 9 pm. We will be rested and ready to go on Tuesday morning to start distributing 5,000 bedkits to children that really need them. We will continue this work over the next 11 days.
Our overseas partner, The Rotary Club of Kigali Virunga, has also been very busy sourcing and organizing the bedkits, selecting the children who will receive them, planning the logistics of transportation and deciding on the location to meet the children and be generally available to help this distribution run smoothly.
The process of getting the team to the country, meeting the overseas partner volunteers, getting to the various distribution sites and meeting both children and parents while representing the donor on site are all part of the interesting challenges that SCAW travel volunteers experience. No matter how much planning that is done, there will always be surprises that further challenge completing the task at hand and those surprises make this very special volunteer activity quite interesting.
And we do all of this . . . for the children.
Team Rwanda 2024
Rotary Club of Kigali Virunga 🇷🇼 and SCAW 🇨🇦