Preparing for a New Trip to Africa

It has been just over 2 years since Andrea and I had our first trip to Africa. They say that those who visit will fall in love with it and always return. That has certainly been the case for me and Andrea. She has been in Tanzania for a month studying Swahili at the University of Dar es Salaam. The rest of the family leaves to meet her in Nairobi on Thursday, July 7th. My main regret from my last trip was not being able to share the experience with Darla, Alyssa and Nate. Well, the whole family is joining in on this trip. We'll see what they think about it! I'm a bit apprehensive, wondering if this trip can possibly live up to the last one. Can we all share in such amazing, life changing experiences? Will they see and live the things that we did last time so that they can understand the connection that we made last time? I'm sure it will be different, but I pray it will be as powerful. As they say, it's in God's hands. May he bless this adventure, and bless the missions that we are about to partake.

The Start of Our Rwandan Adventure

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my trip to Rwanda. I had never traveled to Africa, and I had never traveled for two weeks with Andrea, my teenage daughter. I had hoped that she and I would learn an appreciation for how blessed we are, and I hoped that I would feel like our trip helped make some small difference to the people we met. I also hoped it might help her and I build a special connection. I wrote Andrea a letter just before we left. In that letter I said in part “it seems to me you have been wandering a bit in your life, waiting and wanting to see what your purpose is. I don’t know that you will find that in our journey. But I pray that this journey will at least help you start moving in the right direction towards that purpose”. Looking back, I would say that the trip exceeded even the greatest expectations that I might have had. Andrea and I shared amazing experiences, and got to peer through a window to the world through which few are blessed to see. We don’t know yet exactly where the journey we started in July 2009 will take us, but we are both moving in the right direction!

The seed for this trip was planted almost 9 years ago, when I attended an Amy Grant Christmas concert. During intermission, Amy pointed out that a brochure for Compassion International had been placed under each seat. Compassion is a faith-based organization that provides spiritual, educational, and financial assistance to disadvantaged children all over the world. For a monthly donation, individuals sponsor a child that is selected for them by Compassion. After that concert, our family asked to sponsor a girl from India that was the age of my oldest daughter, a girl from Africa that was the age of Andrea, and a boy from South America that was the age of my son. Based on those requests, our family became the proud sponsors of three beautiful children, including Umuhoza Clementine, a young girl from the rural village of Marumbi in Rwanda, to be the sponsored child for Andrea. Andrea and Umuhoza corresponded over the years, and Andrea said that some day she had hoped to visit her. After years of talking about the visit, we decided that Andrea and I would try to visit Umuhoza the summer before Andrea’s senior year in high school.

As the summer of our hoped-for visit approached, I asked William Mwizerwa if he or his wife Ebralie had planned to visit Rwanda that summer. William and Ebralie were natives of Rwanda that had moved to Brentwood and lived just down the street. I had met William through cub scouts in 2002, when my son and his son were both in the same den. William and I began to talk, and I learned about his family. They had escaped the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, spent six years in Kenya, and finally found their way to Brentwood. William works for African Leadership, an organization that helps with many projects to assist the people of Africa, including spiritual and financial help in Africa. It also helps assist the African refugee population in Middle Tennessee, with William serving as director of refugee missions. I told William then about the girl we supported through Compassion, and he told me more about the work he did with African Leadership. We became friends, and I became a supporter of African Leadership.

Fortunately for us, Ebralie had planned to visit Rwanda this past summer, so Andrea and I were able to begin planning our trip with Ebralie. The fact that she was going to Rwanda was an amazing stroke of good luck for us. To say that Ebralie was instrumental in the success of our trip would be a major understatement. Our ability to travel with her was just the first of many blessings we discovered on our trip. We met with William and Ebralie to make arrangements for the trip, and our excitement grew. Also, Andrea began tutoring African refugee children under the African Leadership program. The children were from Burundi, the small country just south of Rwanda. Through that program, Andrea really began to make a connection to the people of Africa and the challenges they faced. Our trip was planned, the flights were booked, and Andrea and I were going to Rwanda!

Getting There

There is no direct flight from Nashville to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Instead, our flights took us from Nashville, to Detroit, to Amsterdam, to Nairobi, to Bujumbura, to Kigali. This path totaled six flights, almost 10,000 miles, 21 hours in the air and 37 hours of total travel. Yet the first minor miracle we experienced was that every flight and all baggage arrived on time. The flights were generally uneventful, but I did make two observations. First, English is truly the international language. The signs and announcements made in both Amsterdam and Nairobi were predominantly in English, as were the flight attendant announcements on the Kenya Air flights. Second, when we landed in Bujumbura (the capital of Burundi) on our way to Kigali, it was pitch black outside. We landed at about midnight, and there was not a light to be seen. In fact, as the plane hit the runway, I thought we were still above the clouds. Only after we had landed did floodlights come on at the jetway to show that we were at an airport. How could there be no lights to be seen on take-off or landing in a city capital? This was the first sign that we were not at home any more.

We landed in Kigali at 2:30 am, and were met by a greeting party of about 10 people. The greeters included Mary, Ebralie’s sister, along with her daughter Grace. There were also several members of the Kanombe Church, which we would visit the next day, including the pastor, Pastor Julius. They all gave us a very warm welcome and gave each of us a bouquet of flowers. We made the quick trip from the airport to the Presbyterian Church guest house, our residence for our stay in Rwanda. Despite how tired we all were from the trip, my senses were quite alive even on the trip from the airport. There is something about international travel that keeps one’s observations keen and on alert, even at 3 am after 37 hours of travel. And the main thing I observed were the hundreds of people out on the street walking, even at that late hour. We would later learn what a common sight this was.

I was also surprised and a bit alarmed that the police had set up a barricade on the main road leading to and from the airport, pulling over all vehicle traffic. This was an unsettling first experience in the city. Countless people had asked me before the trip if it was safe to go to Rwanda. We all knew something about the massive killings in the country 15 years earlier, and the perception lingered that crime was on ongoing issue. I later learned that the Kigali police man check-points throughout the city at all hours of the day and night. It is all part of a campaign to control crime, and it must be working. Kigali felt every bit as safe as any city I have traveled in. This feeling must have been shared by the people of Kigali, because there were people out walking in amazing numbers everywhere we went. Fortunately the fear of Rwanda as an unsafe, politically unstable country could not be further from the truth.

The Kanombe Church

Pastor Julius, the head pastor of the Kanombe Church, came to visit us the next morning after we all had some sleep. Ebralie left early to visit her mother, so I met with the pastor to show him the gifts we had brought. Before the trip, I had asked for donations from people I knew that I could give to the people of Rwanda. Ebralie had said that what we discard in America is welcomed in Africa. I took this to heart, and brought 150 lbs of gifts. The main gift I brought were T-shirts from the YMCA, given to me by a family friend, Judy Sumislawski, who works for the Middle Tennessee YMCA. Judy gave me 270 shirts of all sizes that had been left over from various membership campaigns and other outings. To me, these were the type of T-shirts that stay stuffed in the back of the drawer. But when Pastor Julius saw the shirts, he was overjoyed. He particularly liked the YMCA saying on all of the shirts – “Building strong kids, strong families, and strong communities”. He repeated this saying in English a few times with great passion, smiling with approval. These were just white cotton T-shirts with colorful decorations. But to Pastor Julius, the shirts were like fine fashion clothing.

As we laid out the shirts, he particularly liked the children’s shirts we had. He wanted to give them out to the children’s choir, named “La Victoire”, which is French for “The Victory”. We picked out 36 shirts of various sizes for them. We also had 15 nicer collared shirts for the men’s choir, and gave them about 80 shirts for the regular choir and the church elders. Pastor Julius was so excited about the new “choir robes” that his church would have.

At church the next day, we arrived just before 9:30 am. The children came running up to us when we arrived. Many of them spoke a little English, and said “how are you”. We had also learned some Kinyarwanda, and replied “amakuru”. We first toured the new sanctuary that was under construction. This new facility would be significantly larger than the current building. We would later learn that a larger sanctuary was definitely needed, as the church would be packed for service. It was interesting that this new facility, like buildings throughout Rwanda, was only partially built. It was common to build as much as possible with funds available, and stop when the money ran out. Building would resume when more funds were available. The builders just had faith that the funding would come in time. Ebralie said that First Presbyterian Church of Nashville was assisting with funding, but they found through experience that it was best if the US church did not try to provide all of the funding. Rather, it was important that the local church lead the effort and felt totally vested in the project. If projects were mainly led, funded, and driven by the foreign church, the long-term success of the project was much less sure. In post-genocide Rwanda, there were many well-intentioned but ill-conceived projects from Western churches that did not produce the benefits commensurate with the time, money or effort invested. This outcome was primarily a result of the process being pushed from outside Rwanda, without the inside perspective or local ownership of the project.

We were seated up front for the service, and greatly enjoyed the music performed by the choir. Their voices had such passion, and with only a goat-skinned drum as accompaniment, the songs had a distinctive African flair to them. At a point in the service, Pastor Julius instructed the children’s choir to come behind the sanctuary, and I met them there with the shirts we had for them. I soon learned that their excitement over the shirts exceeded that of Pastor Julius. They all quickly changed into their YMCA choir robes, and then lined up in front of the congregation to perform. It was a beautiful sight, with the children singing and smiling, wearing their new shirts and praising God through song. The YMCA of Middle Tennessee now had 36 little ambassadors wearing its shirts in Rwanda. Building strong kids, strong families, and strong communities indeed!

Lunch with the Pastor

After church, we headed over to Pastor Julius’s home for lunch. I felt so blessed to be able to share time with him, his family, and some church elders in his house. Visiting people in their homes gives a visitor much more of a sense of being in a country, learning customs and traditions that you just don’t get from a hotel or restaurant. When we arrived, everyone was seated in chairs and sofas around a coffee table in the living room of the house. We started with pleasant conversation, and I was glad to learn that the Rwandans at Pastor Julian’s house spoke French in addition to their native Kinyarwanda. I am conversant in French, if no longer quite fluent from my days as a college student in Paris for a semester. Between their limited English and my somewhat limited French, we could hold an enjoyable conversation.

I was interested to learn that French had been an official language of Rwanda, harkening back to the days of French Belgian colonial ties. While all natives spoke Kinyarwanda, those who attended secondary school (comparable to our high school) had learned French. This meant that virtually all professional and business people of Kigali spoke French, but most of the working poor and rural Rwandans did not. However, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, had led a push to have the official language changed to English as of the first of 2009. President Kagame had said that English was the business language of the world. It was also the language of his larger trading partners Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to the east and north, as opposed to the smaller, poorer neighbors Congo and Burundi to the west and south that speak French. He felt if Rwanda was to advance its economy, it benefited everyone to learn English rather than French. Having seen the prevalence of English in the airports of Nairobi and Amsterdam, I’d say he is right.

Back at Pastor Julius’s house, it came time to eat, and we all practiced a tradition of washing our hands with soap and a bowl of water brought into the room. Lunch was served buffet-style on the coffee table, with the traditional meal of stewed meat, rice, fried potatoes and plantains served. We all drank passion fruit juice, served from concentrated fruit juice with water added. It was great! All of the guests ate together with the local men, but notably the local women did not join us. One of the older women then came in and joked about the fact that Ebralie and her sister Mary ate with the men. She noted that they were wearing pants (as opposed to traditional skirts worn by the other women). She said that because they now wore pants, they were becoming part men and therefore they now ate with the men. After a laugh, Ebralie told the story of how when she was a young girl in Rwanda, the girls were told that they could not eat goat meat or chicken, two favored meals in Rwanda. Girls were told if they ate goat meat, they would grow a beard like a goat, and if they ate chicken they could not have children. Such stories of wearing pants and eating goat meat did illustrate how Africa in general, and Rwanda in particular, are male-dominated societies.

After lunch, the women took some chairs outside and sat under the shade of banana trees, leaving the men in the living room. As soon as the women left, the men began to ask me how things worked in America. In particular, they wanted to know how much men had to work around the house. They said in Rwanda, when the man comes home he wants to relax. But the women were beginning to expect the man to help with chores around the house and help with the children. They wanted to know how we men handled this in America. I found it interesting that this was the thing they were most interested in, particularly after the conversation regarding pants and goat meat. I explained that many years ago, American men also wanted to come home and relax. But, as women entered the workforce, it has now become more of a custom for the household chores to be divided more equally. I told them that as the chores are divided more evenly, things are more peaceful and happy in the home. They thought long and hard about my answers, but I don’t think they were happy with what I had said!

After spending the whole afternoon enjoying the company of our hosts, we headed back to the Presbyterian Guest House for the evening. It seemed like we had seen and done so much, and I had already learned so much about the people from our visit at the church, and the home of the pastor.