Our field here in Uganda has what we call a field pastor. Rick and Janie Burkhalter are our field pastors. They currently live in Kansas City, but are from different places in Texas. They’re a real sweet couple. They just left yesterday, but we had them here for about 3 weeks. Over the 3 weeks we had a tons of prayer meetings and other meetings, plus we hosted them at our apartment for a couple of dinners, so we got to know them fairly well. They are a total blessing to our field and it was real nice to have some who isn’t on our field to talk to.
A few weeks ago (right after they arrived) we had a team dinner on a Saturday evening, so we all ate together and had a sweet time of fellowship. The next morning we were all supposed to have church together and hear a message from Rick and Janie after Nick and I did worship. Well the house where we had dinner on that Saturday has a satellite dish and we discovered that we could watch playoff baseball starting at 1:30am, and Nick and I are big fans of baseball. So we stayed up and watched baseball til about 5:30, went home and slept for 3 hours and then got up and went to lead worship and do church. It was totally worth it to watch baseball for the first time in 2 months, but man was I exhausted?!
Teaching has been a bit of a challenge lately, but I’m very much in a routine when it comes to planning lessons and such. They just turned in a “sandwich book report” and that was actually really fun to look through and grade. I’m trying to get them to a place where they can learn on their own. Discovery learning is the best way to learn, I’ve decided. So I’ve been working on teaching them how to teach themselves and how to find the info they need to help themselves.
I think it’s going pretty well… there are some things we still need to work on. Just this week we went back to basics when it comes to writing a simple sentence. I’m finding more and more that I expect more out of these kids than they seem to be capable of. I guess I’m just trying to think back to 6th grade and compare how I was taught. I’m so sad to say that I don’t hardly remember 6th grade… man I’m getting old! (hey my b-day is only two and a half months away, fyi!) I also had a different teacher for each subject so I’m sure I learned things differently in each class.
Grades are due this week and I haven’t even started. We have parent-teacher conferences next week, and the principal is observing me. It’s going to be crazy!
All that said I truly don’t believe that I’m called to be a teacher forever. ☺ I still know that I am called to be here, right now, in this moment, so I’m glad to be doing the work of the Father.
Something VERY exciting… the Beth Moore books got here on Tuesday, which means yesterday I started the bible study with my discipleship group at KIU. It was the best meeting yet! I talked for about a half hour and then I said, “I’m done! I hear myself talk all the time. I want to hear from you. Tell me what the Lord is teaching you, or not teaching you. Go!” And FINALLY they talked. Every one of them had something to say and it was a great time if laughter and prayer. Those girls are so much fun. I think that they’re really excited about starting the study, but honestly I’m a little nervous that they aren’t going to take the time to do it. There are 5 lessons a week and each lesson is about 30-45 minutes to get through. BUT they are co in depth that if you just skim over stuff and don’t do it full heartedly, you won’t get much out of it. Be praying for them and for me and for our time management.
So last Thursday was the beginning of a 5 days fall break from school. We had been talking about what we wanted to do, whether stay in Kampala and have a restful time, or go exploring and be adventurous. Well obviously I’m all about being adventurous, so we discussed Kenya as a possibility and then we discussed Rwanda. Now if we decided to go to Kenya we would have a free place to stay thanks to some friend and we’d feel very safe. If we went to Rwanda we had nowhere to stay and it’s not as safe for female Mzungus. So we talked to Nick about his plan and he didn’t have one of course, so we told him our ideas. Well he was in Kenya when I arrived so it hadn’t been long since he had been there, so we told him we’d go to Rwanda, but only if he was for sure gonna be with us and not just leave us and wander alone. He decided being our bodyguard worked for him and we decided to make it a ministry trip too by stopping in southwestern Uganda in a village called Mbarara. WGM is thinking of it as being a possible place to plant a team and start working on church plants. So we went down to scope it out, get a feel for what it would be like down there, and see what the possibilities were. We drove our car down there and I have a connection through one of my student’s parents, so we found a safe place to park it before we went to Rwanda.
We got to cross the Equator and stop and take some pictures there. It was a cool experience and I’m excited to say I’ve been in the southern hemisphere now!
On our way to Mbarara we pulled off because we thought we saw a big soccer tournament in this little village. It turns out it was an Independence Day celebration. We had forgotten that the 9th was Independence Day. So we were standing with the rest of the crowd when the MC of the event invited us to come sit under the tent and listen to the speeches and stuff. Being white, usually wherever we go we are instant celebrities, especially amongst the children. So with everyone watching they had people move and we were given VIP seating. Nick and I actually sat right behind the main speaker, a member of parliament. They brought us drinks and were VERY welcoming. It was really cool to experience and see the dedication to this country. There were songs and poems read and then some people got up and spoke... about what we have no idea really. It was all in Lugandan. Some was translated for us, but not a ton.
Anyways, Mbarara was great. I really enjoyed the town. There were some really cute little markets and the people were really nice. We checked out a soccer game on the campus of the university there and we caught part of an outdoor concert too. It was nice. We stayed in a really nice hotel, but got eaten up by the mosquitoes... usually nice places have mosquito nets. Aw well.
So on Friday we got up and got ready to catch a bus into Rwanda. From Mbarara it’s supposedly a 6-hour bus ride to Kigali the capital, but of course it took longer. We had to stop at the border and do all that stuff… yay for a new stamp in my passport, so obviously it took longer. The drive to into and through Rwanda was breathtaking! Man, what a beautiful countryside! We saw some really gorgeous waterfalls on the drive in too. Rwanda is so different than Uganda. The roads are winding and beautiful, and the hills/mountains roll ever so gently into one another. It’s actually very peaceful.
Well we arrived at about 8pm, so we got a special hire and drove to the place we were staying. We met these people from Cornerstone ministries and they have a branch in Kigali, so we got to stay at the house for free. Deuce is the leader at the house and it’s a house of all college age boys who love the Lord with all of their being. We were greeted with the love of Christ and the Spirit moving in that place was super evident. The guys were all so genuine. We didn’t spend a ton of time Friday getting to know them because we were all pretty beat. We went to bed so we could have a full day exploring Kigali. We got ready and headed into the city. The first place we went to was the Memorial Center. It’s the genocide museum. Wow, it was amazing. It was incredibly difficult to stomach, but well worth experiencing. I learned so much stuff… I didn’t remember much of how or why things happened in 1994 other than a million lives were lost because of tribal wars. (huh, much like what is happening in Darfur right now.) It took a long time to walk through and read about all of the events leading up to April of ’94. There were lots of pictures and even videos of survivors who have lost their families. There was an entire room dedicated to pictures of victims that were donated by their families. There was a room full of clothing worn by victims. One room was just full of skulls and bones that were unable to be identified or matched up, so they were put there instead of in one of the hundreds of mass graves throughout the countryside. There were videos of survivors describing in detail watching their families get hacked because of the identity. Upstairs there was a room I had a lot of trouble being in. It was full of these huge pictures of individual children and under each picture was a plague that had their name, their age, their hero, their favorite food, their favorite thing to do, their demeanor and other stuff like that, and then under that it said how they were brutally murdered. Some macheted, some shot, many raped and then macheted. One little girl was stabbed in the eye and then the head. I saw the pictures, saw their innocence and couldn’t think about anything but my nieces. Some of the children shown were the exact ages that my girls are now. Some were much older and had last words written, and some were infants, unable to defend in anyway. I can’t even think about all of the children lost. Children were one of the main targets because they wanted to wipe out the next generation. Yuck.
Moving on… next we took bodas (motorcycles, the cheapest way to get around) to a place to have lunch and buy our bus tickets home. It was so nice riding the boda in Rwanda because helmets are the law and each driver has an extra helmet for their passenger. So we had a nice lunch and then headed off to find “Hotel Rwanda” aka Des Milles Collins Hotel. If you’ve never seen the movie, you should btw. It’s very factual. It of course wasn’t filmed at the actual hotel, but the events and the way things happened are very true to real life. Anyways, normally you can walk through, tour the hotel, and have supposedly good crepes (crepes jiggle, so I don’t care about that), but it was closed to renovations. We were so bummed, but it was cool to be able to talk to the guard and hear his story. He wasn’t working there during the genocide, but he lived through it.
We walked back and found what we thought seemed like the center of town. We found an amazing coffee place and just relaxed and talked for a few hours. Then we explored a really nice craft market before settling down around a beautiful fountain for a few more hours of chatting. The scenery was awesome.
I do have to say that the people in Rwanda aren’t nearly as friendly as they are here to whites, but I honestly don’t blame them since the whites deserted them in ’94. I’d have a hard time looking past that too. Also the main language other than African languages spoken in Kigali was French, so it was much harder to communicate with people. Nick is fluent in Spanish, I took a couple years of Spanish, and Jean had French but didn’t remember much of it at all. Compared to Kampala, Kigali is cleaner and less hectic. There are about a third of the people living in Kigali that there are in Kampala though, so it makes sense. I believe Kigali and the rest of Rwanda has done a great job at proving to the world that it is going to be okay. Too bad it took about a millions lives to get there.
After hanging out for a couple of hours we went back to the house and had the most amazing time with the guys! They taught us some Rwandan dances (which I did not love doing because dancing is NOT my forte) and we taught them some American dances. Then we had an all out jam/worship session. There were two guitars, an amazing hand drum that Nick is in love with now, and a keyboard, along with some beautiful African voices. We sang and praised the Lord late into the night and then headed to bed because we had to catch an early bus the next day.
So after some craziness we boarded our bus and headed back to Mbarara to pick our car. I slept some of the way home, but it was a LONG ride on a real crowded bus. Very uncomfortable, but hey, it’s Africa! We finally got to Mbarara around 3, got the car, ate some breakfast/lunch/dinner and headed out. The drive back is about 4 hours in daylight. We got on the road at about 5, so we only had 2 hours of daylight at best left because of the bad roads. You can’t go very fast at night or you’ll blow a tire in one of the thousands of potholes.
BUT what was excited is that while the sun was just falling below the horizon we looked out as we’re flying through the countryside and see zebras! Yeah that’s right, real, wild zebras! Not in a zoo. It’s the first animal besides monkeys that I’ve seen. Except for the normal ones like cows, goats, dogs, cats, and chickens. We pulled over and got out to get some good pics. We were very stealthy so we got pretty close before we started to scare them away. It was awesome! We had a lot of fun being sneaky. Mission impossible was running through my head as I hid behind bushes. ☺
We got home at about 9:30 or 10 and then realized that NICK had left my keys (to my house, classroom, and desk) and his keys to his house in the hotel in Mbarara, in a drawer, where they were safe. So it wasn’t the best way to end an amazing trip, but life goes on. We’re still in the process of getting our keys back. Be praying that people are doing what they tell they are doing and that the keys make it to us eventually. There’s some stuff in my desk that I really need.
So today after school one of the first grade parents that we’re friend with came up to us and said, “hey, I just bought a monkey on the street, want to see him?” Of course we jumped at the opportunity to hold a real monkey! So we get to her car and he’s just lounging around. I got to hold him and he even feel asleep in my arms! So darn cute! We think he’s just a baby. Anyways… she asked us if we could watch him for two hours while she did some stuff, so we got to babysit a monkey this afternoon!! How awesome is that?! He was so funny. I decided that I would call him Jameson because he seemed very proper. So we hung out with Jameson for a couple of hours, took pictures of him, fed him random things, and watched him climb the bars on our door a lot. He was swinging from the curtain at one point, but he didn’t like it too much so it didn’t last long. He relieve himself on our floor a number of times and made a huge mess with what we were feeding him, but he was so darn cute it wasn’t a huge deal. I was holding him and rubbing his head and neck and he passed out within about 10 seconds. He slet on my lap for a long while until Nick and some others came over to see him. Finally they came to pick him up and take him home, but it was pretty the most exciting afternoon ever! Let’s hope he didn’t have lice or something, right?
So, life here is moving along quickly. I’m coming up on 3 months here real soon, which is insane to think about. I’m missing my family a ton right now. We haven’t been able to connect much in the last few weeks, which has been a bummer. The internet has been real tricky at school lately, so if I owe you an email please be patient. I’m working on emailing everyone back real soon. Maybe this weekend even.
Thanks to all who continue to pray and support me while I’m here. Your prayers are felt and the Lord is responding. I’m praying for all of you as well. Be blessed this week. Much love.
To see pictures of the Rwanda trip check out... http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043813&l=8357d&id=161500306
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