A Day in Rwanda: Kigali, where the hills keep the morning moving

You wake before the city is fully awake, in Kigali, Rwanda, in a room on a hill where the curtain is thin enough to turn grey before the alarm rings. The first sound is not traffic. It is a rooster somewhere below you, then the careful cough of a motorbike, then another, answered from a different slope. Kigali does not rise flat. It lifts itself in pieces. Roofs appear at different heights, as if the city has been folded and unfolded by hand. The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda says many parts of Kigali grew by at least half between the twenty twelve and twenty twenty two censuses, and you feel that growth in the morning: new buildings, old shortcuts, roads that seem to know the hill better than your map does.