16th March 2023
Lonely beaches, local kings, and unexpected delicacies – On the Bissagos Islands in Guinea Bissau
When we left the tiny airport, the first thing that caught my eye was the metallic blue and white taxis. Despite being an older Mercedes model, most were in reasonably good shape – at least compared to the crappy old taxis in Dakar, where doors or windows often don’t work, and the interior is falling apart…
25th April 2020
Calming Places
These days, whenever I feel anxious at the current state of the world, I remind myself of my last visit to Japan in December last year, fifteen years after I did an exchange year with a host family and eleven years since I went back for an exchange semester. I hope this text encourages you to look back, find your own calm place in your memories and bring it into your present…
19th January 2020
Eyewitness Account of an Unlawful Police Operation
The following is an account of a police operation that I encountered in Nairobi…
18th May 2019
Life in Kenya vs Rwanda
It’s the season of Kumbe Kumbe – when it starts raining, the flying termites are coming out of their mound and fill the streets like moths. With their disproportionally large wings, their contact surface for raindrops is too high, and I can see them tumbling and finally drowning in the gush of water rushing down the roadsides. My taxi driver explains to me that in the western part of the country, close to Kisumu, where he is from, they are a delicacy…
15th July 2018
Recap of Rwanda
I am sitting at the tiny Kigali International Airport and recapping my time in Rwanda – the last two months have flown by while engaging in volunteering activities, organising events, and doing weekend trips. Even though my time was so short, I will surely miss the country and its people…
20th May 2018
First impressions
It has been three weeks since I arrived at Kigali’s tiny international airport and first set my foot on African soil. Even though expats living here are telling me how much of an easy start into Africa Rwanda is, I have found myself amazed and sometimes also overwhelmed by how different it is from other developing countries I have seen so far…
23rd April 2018
Setting the scene
What do you know about Rwanda? Most of my friends told me that they have heard about its genocide and could roughly point it out on a map – but did you know that Rwanda is one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, that it has the world’s highest representation of women in parliament, and that it is one of the cleanest and safest (saver than Germany and the UK based on the World Economic Forum) countries in the world? No? Then read on…
Maria Knodt 