The Moto Driver and the Delivery Fee: On Trust, Scams, and Living Abroad

It started simply enough. My wife ordered from Rwanda Nuts, and a moto driver was sent to deliver the package to our place in Vision City. Moto drivers aren’t allowed inside the gates,  a rule I’ve come to accept as just part of the rhythm here, so they wait outside by the main street corner. No problem. I volunteered to drive down and collect the order.

I got there. I called the driver. Nothing. I tried to explain where I was standing, and somewhere in the back-and-forth of language and geography, we were completely missing each other. I walked. I waited. I drove around. Forty minutes passed, and I gave up. I turned the car around and started heading home.

Then my phone rang. Someone who happened to be nearby, with better English, helped bridge the gap. I figured out where the driver had probably been waiting this whole time, drove there, and found him. Order retrieved. Mission accomplished, or so I thought.

On my way home, he called me. The delivery fee, he said, was 10,000 RWF.

I paid it. I sent it over MoMo without a second thought, because I didn’t have any information about what had been agreed between my wife and the company. I had no reference point. So I paid.

But 10,000 RWF is unusually high for a moto delivery. When I had a moment to think about it clearly, the sinking feeling set in. I’m pretty sure I was taken advantage of.

What bothers me most isn’t the money. It’s the pattern.

I keep getting caught out like this, too willing to assume good faith, too slow to question, too quick to pay. I walk into these situations open-handed, and sometimes that openness gets exploited. It makes me angry. Not just at the people who do it, but at myself, for still being this way after it’s happened before.

There’s a version of me that wants to draw the obvious conclusion: stop trusting people here. Build walls. Assume the worst. Protect yourself.

But I don’t want to live like that, and I don’t think it would be fair to Rwanda, or to the many people here who have been genuinely kind, generous, and good to us. This country has given us real experiences and real connections. A bad delivery interaction doesn’t erase that.

Still, it’s hard. When trust gets punished, the instinct to pull back is completely natural. I’m still figuring out how to calibrate, how to stay open without being naive, how to extend good faith without making myself an easy mark.

I don’t have a clean answer. Just a 10,000 RWF delivery fee that cost me 40 minutes and a knot in my chest on the drive home.

Nature's Fireworks: The Flat-crown Albizia of Kigali

Kigali has a way of surprising you if you pay attention.

This bloom, small enough to miss, extraordinary enough to stop you, belongs to *Albizia adianthifolia*, commonly called the Flat-crown Albizia or Peacock Flower. It's a tree native to the forests of East and Central Africa, and in Rwanda, it's part of the quiet, persistent wildness that exists alongside the city's famous cleanliness and order.

What appears at first glance to be a feathery purple puffball is in fact a single flower made entirely of stamens, no petals at all. Hundreds of filaments radiate from one central point, white and pale at the base where they emerge from the tiny true flowers, then deepening through lilac to a rich rose-mauve at the tips. The effect is something between a sea anemone and a firework frozen mid-explosion.

The trees belong to the Fabaceae family, legumes, and are cousins of the acacias and mimosas. Their leaves are bipinnate and fern-like, and they share a remarkable trait with many of their relatives: nyctinasty, the folding of leaves at night or in rain. Stand under one of these trees at dusk and watch the foliage close, leaflet by leaflet, like a slow-motion gesture of sleep.

I photographed these in Kigali at close range, trying to capture something that language struggles with, the particular quality of biological beauty that seems designed not for us, but for the bees and the night.

*Spotted in Kigali, Rwanda 📍*