We drove into a sea of humanity at the livestock market in Ruhango. Cows and goats are everywhere! Andria and I were the only "white" folks to be seen so we drew a crowd as we walked around looking for 30 goats to buy. John knew exactly what he was looking to buy and pay for the goats. At first we asked a couple of the Rwanda men to go and get the goats for us. With hundreds of goats to choose from we thought we could count on a few guys to do our "dirty" work. But it was soon apparent that we would have to do our own screening. We first ran into a problem because we didn't have enough 1,000 Rwf bills to make the 13,000 Rwf that we were buying the goats. So Andria and I made a quick dash to the local Fina Bank where our friend Innocent is the branch manager. Thinking by the time we get back that we would be well on our way to the 3o goats. Well, like all things in Rwanda, it takes a little longer than planned. Everyone thought that their goat was the best and deserved a sale. Finally after five goats bought we began to write down the names of the people selling using their national ID card. With so many goats being bought we wanted to make sure we were buying from legitimate sellers. Children and adults all crowded around as the muzungus (that's what they call anybody with money and means) began to buy goats. Finally we had our 3o goats.
Then we had to pay the Revenue Authority for tax on each goat which came out to a little over $1 per goat. We decided that we could haul the goats in our Land Cruiser. The idea of poop and pee all over the inside of our vehicle wasn't the greatest but it would be very expensive to hire someone to haul the goats the 30 minutes to Gatagara. We had lots of help loading up the goats.
The goats behaved quite well other than a lot of noise. We arrived at the Cell Office and unloaded the goats into a classroom because it still was 2 hours before the give-away.
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