I attended March for Gaza on January 13, 2024 with six of my kids, along with thousands of other people. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when there was almost no news coverage of the event.
Even when I searched for coverage, anemic articles a couple of paragraphs long described the protest. Longer articles mentioned the DC event, but focused more on other protests that happened around the world the same day, particularly in Paris and London. Several articles implied that the DC protest was characterized by violence.
I was at the DC protest.
I will bear witness if the media won’t.
I’m back from the Jane Austen retreat. Every part of my body hurts, I’m exhausted, but I had such a good time. I wanted to share a little about the weekend while it was fresh on my mind.
A safari truck came to pick us up on a Sunday morning from our lodgings – I don’t want to call it a hotel, but it also kind of was. Called Ndaza Escape, it’s located in Kinigi, Rwanda. It had three rooms and was really nice.
The safari truck driver took us to the welcome center at the foot of Mount Bisoke where we’d meet our guide and the rest of our group.
This was an act of trust. The Chaplain and I knew the hike would take all day, but we had no idea about the elevation or the level of effort it required, and we hadn’t packed proper mountain climbing clothes. We knew we’d be hiking, but didn’t realize we’d be climbing a volcano.
We left on a Friday, and drove for hours from Kigali, Rwanda, to an ecolodge overlooking tea plantations about an hour from the canopy walk we’d be doing at Nyungwe National Forest. A GPS search says it takes about 5 hours. There was much to see, and the long drive wasn’t a hardship.
What should we pack? What will we do? I asked many times in the weeks leading up to our trip. Along with an unexpected slam from Delta, we were going to a new place I knew nothing about.
I didn’t want to fill my head with other people’s ideas, so I wasn’t doing a lot of internet research, and limited my reading to a couple of authors from the region. Our friends and hosts told us they were taking care of the itinerary, so we just needed to show up.
So we did. We showed up.
