Category: Our People
Our Stories:
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A Cyclist Learns to Talk: Michel’s First Walking Tour
The tour guiding side of our Gorilla Highlands Ambassador Training (GHAT) was completed last week; and what better way to mark that than to throw one of the trainees straight into the fire? Today we had a Kigali Walking Tour for a group from Germany, and we invited Michel Iragena to shadow our guide JP…
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The Office-Home We’ve Waited Years For
Do you know how long we’ve been trying? For years and years and years! Finding a Musanze landlord willing to let us a house as both an office and a residence has been a struggle, since mixing the two changes how it’s taxed. But now we have it, and on Monday we hosted our first…
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Papa & Mama Abby’s First Guests
How rewarding! A week ago our office team spent a full day on Uganda’s notoriously terrible roads of Kisoro, preparing the ground for three Slovenian ladies about to embark on a three-day hike. Today we hosted them for lunch in Musanze, Rwanda, hearing their impressions. It all went swimmingly! But let’s start with the most…
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Ask for Teacher, Pour Some Beer
Ask anyone in Bufuka, our little village on a Lake Bunyonyi peninsula, for “Teacher” and you won’t get directions to the primary school. You’ll be pointed to a home filled with laughter, chat, and the smell of obushera, the local brew. That’s where you’ll find Meble Kyarimpa, a 58-year-old grandmother of five. She’s never stood…
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Cape Town: Third Time, Slovenian Charm
See the ship bathing in the sunset light over my left shoulder? Not far from it lies the Cape Town International Convention Centre, where your ML Rwebandira took to the panel on Monday, 13 April 2026. Oh yes, it worked! It felt pretty unbelievable: I knocked yet again on the door of South Africa, with only…
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Four Tiny Troublemakers, Gone
Remember Sammy, our resident rat-chaser? She’s been having quite the adventure lately. It all started with the former official cat of Edirisa on Lake Bunyonyi. He’d swapped his cushy lakeside life for the bush, but curiosity got the better of him when he clocked lovely Sammy. So back he came, and before long the two…
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24 Hours to 25 Years — Join Us Online
This frame from our Treasures exhibition looks back a quarter of a century, to the moment when Edirisa — the mother of the Gorilla Highlands idea — was unveiled to an equatorial community on 20 February 2001. * * * That’s why we travelled to Lake Bunyonyi this morning — Diana and Sasha from Rwanda, Elie from…
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Let’s Create Provia’s Homestay 2.0
When Provia’s son approached us with a request to upgrade some of their homestay facilities, he had no idea how far our proposal would go. After all, why stop at repairing toilets if we could in fact improve the houses themselves? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if guests arriving on Lake Bunyonyi’s Habukomi Island could opt…
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Mama Nelly Is Cooking at Nkora Again
We have some big news to share: Hadidja Nyirababikira, better known as Mama Nelly, is back in Nkora on the Congo Nile Trail! Six months ago we shared her life story and her decision to relocate to a more urban area. What has changed? “I found a new business opportunity,” Hadidja explains. “I now buy…
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