This One Goes Out to All the Grandmas

Presenting: An Overview, only three weeks late.

I realize this may be the type of post only my grandma reads, but alas. Here are the details of life and work in the last three weeks:

Thurs March 7: On arrival, we were met at the airport by members of ALARM and escorted to their guesthouse at the Center for Forgiveness and Reconciliation. The center sits on a hill in the outskirts of Kigali City, in a sector called Kagugu, which feels far-removed, but views over Kigali city are amazing! Also amazing are the avocados that grow and fall freely all over the path outside our room, and the giant hawks that attack them.

Our good friends from Wisconsin, also met us at the airport, although they’re not really from Wisconsin. Rachel is from England, and Ricardo is from Mexico, and their two little boys have the cutest Mexican-English accents you’ve ever heard! They are living in a sector called Kimihurura, on another ridge in Kigali City, working for UNICEF (Rach) and the University of Sussex (Ricky). These are the friends we went to Cuba with a few years ago, and it was a total coincidence to meet here at the same time. Fab. They will henceforth be referred to as R&R.

The third sector we have become familiar with is Kacyiru, which is where our host family lives, and we’re able to walk from here to the library, several Internet cafés, the burrito shop and the Embassy. More on this Fam later.

I tell you these locations up front so you can appreciate this inner monologue, which demonstrates our learning curve as we try to navigate between these different sectors on different ridges by taxi and public transport:

Where do R&R live again?  Kitchy-huru? Kimikura?  I know it’s not Kacyiru, because that’s where Ben lives.  And it’s not Kagugu, because that’s where ALARM Center is. So it must be Kimyhura. Wait Kinyahurura. Wait Chimy-hu-ru-ra. Yes! That one. We are going to Kimihurura!

The city is sprawled across four ridges and valleys, with the city center on one ridge, the main government buildings on another, and different sectors and cells on other ridges. Typically (but not always), the nice big houses are on the ridges, and the poorer houses and communities are in the valleys. At times, you can see where you want to go directly in front of you, but there’s a valley in between, and it’s on the next ridge, so navigating around the valley makes getting places counter intuitive sometimes.

The country of Rwanda is about the size of Maryland, but with 11 million people crunched inside. Every square inch of rural land (except the national forests) is terraced and farmed. There are five provinces—Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern and Kigali. The City of Kigali is divided into three Districts, 35 Sectors, 161 Cells, and 1061 Umudugudu (neighborhoods). All these distinctions make it confusing when telling a taxi where to go, and really confusing when I’m trying to understand what they’re yelling out of the matatu (taxi minibus), and really super confusing with all the interchangeable ‘k’ and ‘ch’ and ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds.

We spent Friday Mar 8- Monday Mar 10 at the ALARM center combating jet lag, organizing ourselves with phones and internet connections, meeting the staff of ALARM, and learning about their mission, programs, projects, and activities. We had an unexpected interview with two university students being sponsored by ALARM, both graduates of the IWE girls school mentioned below.  We attended a National Rwandan League basketball game on Saturday with R&R, the KIE University Fellowship Church service on Sunday with Ben, the country director of ALARM, and met with members of the Rwanda Christian Lawyer’s Association on Monday.

On Tuesday evening, we picked up a three-person team from Grace Community (our home church) who had come to explore a formal partnership with ALARM as one of the church’s Frontline Ministries.  With this group, we packed in a quick tour of all ALARM’s main projects within the country into four days. By Friday, we had visited a vocational training center for street kids in Kabuga (above), a boarding school for girls called the Institute of Women for Excellence (IWE) in Rwamagana, met with a group of pastors and government leaders in Nyirangarama who had participated in a leadership training facilitated by ALARM, spent two nights at a rehabilitated coffee plantation making strides in economic development and reconciliation in Cyimbili, visited with a women’s microfinance group in Musanze (the Volcano town!) who call themselves the Social Blessings Women’s Group, and ended the week at Ben’s Baptist church in Kacyiru on Sunday. We said goodbye to our new friends and saw the team off on Sunday evening, played catch-up and joined our host families on Monday, and attended a joint Rwandan ex-pat Bible study Tuesday with R&R.

Back to the host family: We are staying with the country director, his wife, and their five daughters, who range in age from 2-20! Ben’s home has been a sweet time of visiting, talking, and coffee drinking, because shortly after moving in with them, the rains began and the electricity stopped. This has provided lots of time for conversation and visiting. We have loved fielding questions from the oldest daughter (age 20) about life in America, as her impressions have been almost entirely formed by E! –

• “Does everyone there have loads of money to spend on breast implants?”
• “Are people really like the Kardashians?”
• “When the police are called, do a helicopter, and a news van, and 50 police officers respond every time?”
• “Is it true that when you call 911, the police come immediately?” 

She has had a response like, “I knew it!” almost every time we’ve set the record straight, as though E! has been trying to trick her all along. She is bright and fun and has answered all our equally ridiculous questions about Rwanda.

We have also enjoyed conversations with the second oldest (age 18), who is an avid debater. Her most recent debate required her to take the affirmative position on whether or not Rwanda will become a middle income country by 2020. It was interesting hearing her arguments for both sides.

The youngest three are adorable (ages 2, 6, and 7) and have really warmed up to Jeff. He’s thrilled about this since my own nieces have taken almost three years to even stand next to him in the same room :)

Meals have been consistently the same, no matter where we’ve been. There is always some form of irish potato, either boiled or fried, always rice, always beans, and usually some kind of ugali bread or cassava. Ugali (left) is Swahili for this special maize bread, and the texture is like a smooth, tasteless grits patty. Ubugali (right) is the Kinyarawanda word for Cassava Bread, which is green and stretchy, tasteless, and is made to absorb the flavor of other foods and to swallow without chewing. It has taken some getting used to :/  Three-four nights per week, we’ll have fish, chicken or beef. Breakfast is boiled eggs, bread, banana and sometimes mango or passion fruit. The exception is when we are taken to buffets, and there we also find avocado, fried cauliflower, and pasta salad. We have obviously remained healthy and full (fat).

On Wednesday (Mar 20), Jeff, Barry, and I returned to the IWE girls’ school to spend more time with the staff, interview some of the girls, and get a better understanding about what life is really like there, and what attending this school means for the girls and their families. In all, the trip took 7 hours, and we were only at the school for 2! The bus system is hectic and slow, but, you know. We made it. IWE and the Kabuga Voc Center are next on my list to write about in-depth, so be looking for those.  On Wednesday night, we met the husband of the next PT director for Hillside Clinic in Belize at Hotel des Mille Collines, which was the hotel portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda. It was kind of surreal and eerie to be there, but what a small world! He was there doing contract work for a few weeks with World Bank on vocational training success.

Barry left for South Sudan on Thursday, and Jeff and I met with the Country Director for As We Forgive on Friday. The meeting was blessed, and I am moved by the work this organization is doing- along the same lines as ALARM, but more narrowly focused in their reconciliation work. If you have the chance to read the book As We Forgive or watch the award-winning documentary ($8 on Amazon), DO IT! It’s captivating. I can’t wait to write about this more in-depth. The most meaningful story was the recalling of a woman’s work toward reconciling with an avocado. There, now you’ll have to read the blog when I find the time to write it :)  We plan to attend some memorial week activities with As We Forgive, squeezed into our time with ALARM that week.

We took Saturday and Saturday off to catch-up on notes and writings, walk around the city, and get our bearings in our new Sector. We discovered the public Library, which was beautiful, and found several coffee shops and Internet hot spots, although “hot spot” should be renamed “slowest internet I’ve ever seen in my life spot”.  We spent Saturday night celebrating the birthdays of R&R at their home, meeting new friends and dancing the night away, and Sunday morning at Christ’s Church Rwanda waving palm branches. So fun!

On Monday Mar 25, we packed up again and loaded the matatu to come back to Cyimbili for a week. Our purpose this week is to spend time with the workers on the plantation for ten days or so to integrate as much as we can into life and work in this magical little community. We will work alongside the daily workers, picking, shelling, washing and drying coffee. We will interview some of the workers, go on some home visits, collect audio recordings of the coffee-picking process and different language clips, and… wait for it… roast our own coffee! We hope to check out the Congo Nile lakefront trail, which may become fundraising trek for World Next Door in the near future, and we are trying to convince the police boat to ferry us over to the island across the lake to see the farming on the island, and to capture a bird’s-eye view of the entire Cyimbili plantation.

Today, Tuesday, we are working our way down a task list of things to accomplish while we’re here this week, but we have been stalled by the rain. The workers went home, and I am now trying to find ingredients to make an “American” breakfast and dinner, per the request of Anastasi, the house lady. My plan is Eggs in a Basket (which I call one-eyed sailor, though I don’t think that would translate, really) and French toast for breakfast. You should have seen the way everyone gathered around my laptop and scratched their heads as they studied a picture of cinnamon. Also, syrup. We’ll be eating cinnamon-less French toast with honey instead of syrup, and for dinner we’ll have vegetable pasta. This, in exchange for learning how to make Ugali (maize) bread, and Ubugali (cassava) bread.

How can you pray for us?

Well. For starters, there’s all this.

Also, as we get to know people, outer layers start peeling off. Stories and little details about things I hadn’t considered emerged, for example how teenagers get moody during April (memorial month) even though they were only infants or 2-year-olds during the months their families hid or fled before and after the genocide, how the entire country is irritable because of all the triggers accidentally sparked by government leaders or commemoration speakers, or how hurt and angry some might feel when speakers who didn’t experience the genocide give speeches to or on behalf of the country during the memorial period- all of these things are anticipatory stressors. Even facial expressions are changing in preparation.

All this to say, I’m praying about approaching the memorial time with the right balance of respect, emotion, reverence.

So. There you go.

Three weeks packed into one irresponsibly long blog post. You’re welcome.