"The Best Christmas Ever": Singing, Dancing, and Puppies

Some weeks require a lot of reflection to really flesh out one of these entries, but other weeks are so full I don't even know if I will have the time and energy to just report it all.  Monday feels like something that happened last month, but that was only a week ago.

Actually we began a bit unconventionally because Rebecca headed up to Gitega by cab on Monday morning.  Oren had a half week of school which included classes on Monday and Wednesday, so I volunteered to be the one to stay with the kids on Monday.

The plan was for her to go up on first and do at least two of the three meetings we needed to have with our Gitega partners before the end of the year.  She would stay the night with Yolanda, then I would come up on Tuesday with the kids, Felix, and Marcelline our cook.  We would leave the kids at Yolanda's house with Marcelline while Felix, Rebecca, and I went to the final meeting with UCEDD--the association that runs the Hope School.  

We had several reasons for meeting Innocent and Beatrice, the directors of the Hope School, but one of the exciting reasons was the opportunity to tell them about the half container of books they could expect from MCC as  result of the efforts of Rebecca's mom.  (She had agreed to seek donations and go up and sort them.)  Incidentally, if anyone would like to make a donation of children's books for school, please send them to:

Books for Hope School Burundi

Material Resource Center

517 Trout Run Road

Ephrata, PA 17522

We are particularly interested in French language children's books, but English kids books, or picture books would be great as well, particularly books illustrated with photographs rather than drawn characters. Also posters, etc. for classroom walls would be welcome.  (Like a periodic table of elements, Alphabet, color wheel, etc.)  

Beatrice and Innocent were thrilled to hear about the book shipment, especially since they had been praying about how to get funding for a library, which is a requirement for any school that wants to offer classes up to 10th grade.

After the meeting Rebecca, the kids Felix and I planned to head back home together.  

The plan went pretty much as expected.  I prayed a prayer of Thanksgiving for Rebecca's safe arrival taking the cab.  (Which incidentally will take as many people as it can hold and drive full speed up the mountain. --On the way up on Tuesday, I encountered a head-on collision between a matatu (taxi van) and a dump truck that had happened the day before.  The saying " There but for the grace of God go I" comes to mind frequently, and is a reminder that life here is a gift and not an entitlement.) Rebecca was glad, in principle, to make the trip this way, since most of our volunteers need to travel by public transport all the time, although confessed some anxiety as well. She also said it was also good to have the experience of walking from meeting to meeting in the town of Gitega.

I spent the day on Monday playing with the kids after Oren came home from school, then after they went to bed I worked until about 11pm to paint the house.  I had a goal of finishing the living room, dining room and hallway before our huge Christmas party we had planned for Thursday (the 23rd).  I succeeded in getting one color on that evening.

The kids were not terribly difficult to care for, especially with Marcelline's help and they were excited about going up to Gitega on Tuesday and playing at Yolanda's house.  As I said, the drive up and meetings went off without a hitch and we were back in Bujumbura on Tuesday evening.  

We got back to Bujumbura in time to go by the Horst's house for dinner.  Lara's parents, sister and brother-in-law were visiting, so it was nice to see them.  Her dad worked for UNICEF and her sister and brother in law currently work with the EU in Congo, so we had some interesting conversations with them.  (I was reminded again of how lucky we are to be working in Burundi rather than DRC.)

I was up until the wee hours painting when we did get home that night as well.

Wednesday was Oren's last day of school and I went to work in the morning as well to finish up some last minute details before Christmas.  Among them was getting documentation for our car so we could drive it to Uganda where we will be going for a 6-day R and R (vacation) next week.  We also took the car in for servicing for the trip and borrowed a car of our friends while it was gone.

We did a lot of prep for the party on Wednesday, including finishing painting.  We also had an unexpected visit from our landlord (who lives in Ethiopia).  It was actually a good thing because we agreed to extend our lease for at least 2 more years at what is still very reasonable rent for such a nice place.  (I don't know if the painting was to his taste, but he did not lodge any complaints on seeing it. "Breaks the monotony," he said.)

Thursday was the big day for our party. We had invited about 50 people with the expectation that not all would come.  We, once again, moved all the furniture in the living room out onto the porch thus turning our living room into a ballroom for dancing.  (We left the tree in the room.)  There was one problem that threatened to put a serious damper on the event.  That is, the increasing intensity of road work in our neighborhood reached an apotheosis that very afternoon and the construction crews had cut off all access to the streets near our house making parking in our gate, or even nearby, an impossibility.  Despite that we did have about 40 people (counting adults and kids) show up.

The program was ambitious.  We had several dances prepared as well as Christmas carols and several stories.  We had asked people to bring a dish or dessert as well as song or story from their country of origin.  We had Danes, Dutch, English, Burundians, Canadians, Francophone Russians, South Africans, Americans, and Germans represented.  One highlight was hearing a verse of "Silent Night" sung in each native language represented at our party.

The food was really good as were the stories and singing.  We did several of the dances including "Strip the Willow" (actually the Virginia Reel) which has become a Christmas tradition for me and Rebecca ever since we did it at the home of Professor Jeff Walker from Vassar College with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY the last year we lived there.  (He told us about it being the dance mentioned at Fezzwig's party in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.)  I think our friends did very well at the dancing,  even though it was not really a part of their family traditions.  

The party was quite successful from our perspective and the paint job on our house got many accolades, especially the large yellow circle I painted on the rust wall in the hallway.  The party was one of the highlights of the week, and even Yolanda came down from Gitega in time to join us for it.

Friday was Christmas Eve day. We spent the morning at the home of German friends, doing an exercise session, sharing coffee and taking a dip in the pool in their lovely garden. That is indeed one compensation for not having a white Christmas: enjoying a nice outdoor swim instead! The only disappointment was the fact that we did not get our car back that day, despite the promises of our mechanic.  Fortunately we still had the loaner from Tim and Jeanette, our South African friends to get to church in.  The road work, however, made getting into our driveway impossible once again, this time because a road-grader had lowered the road more than a foot below the bridge for our driveway so we could not enter it by car.

We did drive to church for a 6pm service though with the plan of leaving the car back at our friends' house when it was over.  I had forgotten that special Burundian services can be quite long and we did not even get home until after 9:30 pm.  The service was nice, especially the way Burundians sing most of the old standards like Angels We Have Heard on High, and Joy to the World, with a drum beat and clapping and dancing.  But we barely made it to the end as a family and the kids were asleep before we got home.  

Rebecca and I worked together to set out gifts under the tree and stuff stockings, but I conked out at least an hour before she did, and she did all of the finishing touches.  

The kids were up just before 6 and were excited to see a wooden train track around the tree and presents.  They really wanted to open them and we did so quite early.  For me, I was pleased to see the display under the tree as quite modest.  About a dozen presents, not overly materialistic.  The big hits were extra lego duplos to add to their lego sets, and extra train track to add to their train set.  Oren said to us that it was "the best Christmas ever."  That even despite the fact that his much anticipated 'wooden tank engine without a face' did not get to us in the mail on time, and he received instead a promissory note from Santa saying the elves were hurrying to finish it and send it in the mail next week. 

As if all this was not enough, the really big event of the week happened on the night of the 25th.  Bella had her puppies.  She was in labor much of the afternoon on Christmas day and was looking for a place to give birth.  We put a table out on the porch and put a mattress under it and covered it.  She was happy to use it.  She began bearing around midnight and had four puppies by the next morning.

David and Oren were ecstatic and before I could stop them, they had climbed under the table to sit with Bella and the new babies.  I was really surprised that Bella did not snap at them, but let them come in and even pick up the puppies.  Rebecca and I literally had to drag David out from under the table several times during the day as he was ready to settle in and move in with them.  

We went to church this morning, once again back in our newly inspected and tuned-up LandCruiser.  We spent the day at home, Rebecca and I taking turns watching the kids while the other napped.  It had been a fairly sleep-deprived week and we really feel in need of a vacation.

The day ended with a debriefing with our small group where we finished the book of Nehemiah.  My next entry may be late depending on whether or not we will be able to have internet access at the place we are staying in Uganda.  It is an island on a lake, so I kind of doubt it, but I should be able to post on Monday or Tuesday.

Driving Lessons and School Pageants

An Oren special.  Good picture of mommy I think.

Question: How few cars does it take to create total gridlock in an intersection?  I have seen as few as 3 successfully enter simultaneously and  keep each other and all traffic from being able to proceed forward for 15 minutes.

Driving is definitely getting worse here.  I have not wanted to comment on it, probably some denial, but I don't think I can let another week go by without mentioning it.  It is interesting that there are some trends that we can observe in even 2 and a half short years.  I know when we came here in 2008, the civil war was barely over, there were still nightly curfews and while the roads were atrocious, the traffic was not really terrible.  I encountered few traffic jams beyond a slight slowdown around the central market.  The roads were, of course, so bad that there always seemed to be a self-imposed speed limit to keep from destroying one's vehicle.

The roads have improved dramatically in the past 2 years.  Almost all the major routes in and out of town have been repaired, and the main road upcountry is completely repaired as far as divots and cave-ins.  (It is still a narrow 2 lane road most of the way up.)

But I really think the dramatic uptick of accidents I see is only partly related to the improvement of roads and a general increase in speed of driving.  It is very apparent that the number of cars driving around and even more, the number of motorcycles, has skyrocketed, all of this since the elections this summer I believe.  

Now Bujumbura is a small town and the largest artery in and out is still only a 2 lane road.  It does not take much to greatly exceed the capacity of the infrastructure of the city.   This has led to nearly constant traffic jams and gridlock on the route called "Rumonge Road".  It actually does not take a lot of cars to create gridlock and drivers here are quite awful and impatient, so upon encountering slow moving traffic, for instance, drivers will pull into the road sholder or oncoming lane and block oncoming traffic and create massive jam ups when they cannot get back on their side.  

Also, because Bujumbura has been a city with relatively few vehicles for many years, there is neither the driving etiquette, nor the infrastructure (stop signs, traffic lights, highway center lines) to create orderly traffic flow.  Most intersections have no signs whatsoever and crossing is a free-for-all.  The strategy is to  go in fast and appear to be the most crazy reckless person in a kind of game of chicken to see who will yield.  Generally the biggest car wins.  (Having a landcruiser is definitely a good thing.)  The other strategy is to get your car into a situation where you are the cause of the huge traffic jam then everyone does their best to get you through.  All of this is exacerbated by the fact that there are 4 rush hours per day.  One in the morning, then going home at noon for lunch (no one eats in town, not even schools have cafeterias, EVERYONE goes home for lunch.)  Then there is the 2pm return to work and the 5pm return home rush hour.  The weekend is worse because Saturday is wedding day and you cannot imagine the amount of traffic that get jammed up as hundreds of weddings end everyday at 5pm and everyone heads to their receptions.  One can wait an hour to go less than a kilometer.

Police are of little help as everyone pretty much ignores them or treats their hand signals as helpful suggestions rather than requirements.  The motorcycles are the worst and utterly a law unto themselves.  As I said, their numbers are on the increase and now the streets are teaming with them.  They are the taxis of the city.  During rush hour, as the cars creep along, they pass by quickly in constant lines and huge hordes, stopping for nothing, driving absolutely anywhere on or off the road, never yielding, and completely ignoring the police or any other common-sense rules of driving with the intent of arriving to one's destination alive.

I have to say, I have, almost daily taken extreme evasive action to keep a motorcycle from using my car as an object on which to commit suicide.  The most dangerous thing I do is make a left turn because seeing you stopped on the road at an intersection with your left signal on does not impede them from zipping up and trying to slide by on the left side before you make the turn.  I took defensive driving when I was 16, but even that course was aimed at keeping oneself safe by anticipating other drivers' moves.  But implicit in the course was the assumption that other drivers did not want to die.  I can't say that about some drivers here. 

If you are intuiting, from this introduction that we are going to go on a trip upcountry this week, you would be correct.  I used to dread the trips up the precarious mountain road teeming with freight trucks coming down from Dar es Salaam at high speed, but now I am thinking that city is more dangerous than that.  I still typically have to take serious evasive action to avoid being hit when driving up.  

Actually Rebecca will be going up by taxi on Monday to Gitega for some meetings with partners, and will stay the night with Yolanda, I will go up on Tuesday by car with the kids and Felix.  We will have another meeting on Tuesday then come back down on Tuesday afternoon.

Looking back this week, the highlights seem to be around events preparing for Christmas which we have  been doing a much better job of than in past years.  This was the week of children's Christmas programs, and both Oren and David had Christmas program at their schools on Friday and Saturday.  

This was David's first Christmas (or any school) show.  Rebecca and I left work at 11 am to come and see the kids sing Christmas carols under a big tent set up for the parents.  I tried to get pictures of him and his class singing "Petit Pere Noel" but the camera battery died.  Actually he, and most of his class sat stone still for the whole sond while his teachers sung and tried to animate them.  It was still cute, especially to see him as the only mzungu in his little class of preschoolers.

Speaking of mzungus (and getting old), Rebecca had a funny encounter at David's school earlier this week.  When she dropped David off, one of the administrators asked if she knew anyone who could be Pere Noel for the Christmas show.  (She said it was clear by the question that they were hoping she would volunteer ME.)  They had a Pere Noel (Father Christmas) suit with beard and mustache but no one to wear it.  Rebecca knew I would not be available but suggested our pastor Emmanuel Ndikumana who also has a daughter at the school (and was standing nearby).  The secretary (who is Burundian) laughed out loud and said "Oh no, I have many African brothers who would be happy to help, but the children here will never accept a black Pere Noel, they will know he is a fake."  Rebecca said it was a funny exchange and Emmanuel laughed to.  

When she told me, I was slightly amused, but left with the question: When did I become old enough to be considered a good candidate for Pere Noel?  I am not fat, or grey, or bearded, or grandfatherly, but hey, I'm white so I guess that is good enough to fool kids around here.  (Actually the European Pere Noel is not fat at all, and in fact St. Nicholas, who visited Oren's school this year is tall, skinny, and wears a cardinal's mitre.)

Oren's Christmas pageant was a small part of a very large art and craft fair at his school called Marche de Noel. It features a lot of local crafts by artists and artisans as well as tons of food.  Oren made a brief appearance on stage with other children in the maternelle (preschool) to sing an English rendition of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and Jingle Bells.  It was a lot of fun and I think every expatriate in Burundi was there.

This was the last full week of school for David and Oren only has classes this coming Monday and Wednesday before the Christmas break.  I taught my last ballet class this week for the semester.  I had an ambitious plan to teach the kids a few variations from the Nutcracker but was not able to get them to a point where it was presentable.  They will be ready for the spring though.  The problem is that the classes this year a really huge and trying to teach even a simple dance takes forever.   I still enjoy doing it  though.

House painting continues, and my goal is to have the living room and dining room done by our Christmas Party this Thursday evening.  We have invited many of our friends from all countries to bring a dish and traditional Christmas song from their country.  There will also be contradancing and we will be clearing all the furniture out of the living room.

In the theme of putting recipes into the blog, which seems to be a recurring theme this month, Rebecca was invited to a 'gal's only' cookie exchange on Friday.  She was to bring 4 dozen cookies and was told she would return with 3 dozen of mixed variety (a dozen would be eaten on site).   She made a sort of Christmas ginger molasses cookie that you might be familiar with.  The difference is, that she used Scottish treacle in place of molasses.  (Treacle is to molasses what heavy cream is to skimmed milk).  I could not believe how incredibly rich and delicious these cookies were!  If you can get your hands on some treacle, you should try it.

I will mention another small work victory.  We have been approved to have a container of books sent by MCC to us.  This idea came out of many requests from partners with schools for books to make a library.  It is hard to imagine that virtually no primary or secondary schools in the country have libraries here or even a single book in any classrooms.  There are virtually no texts.  Things are written on a board and copied.  

Even at Universities the entire library might be the size of a library at a preschool in the US.  Books are very expensive here and quite rare.  Not surprisingly, literacy is about 40%.   The only bookstore that exists in the country gets 1 container of books per year and sells them at exorbitant prices.   (There is a library at the French Cultural Center but its membership fees would make it prohibitive for most Burundians to join.)

Rebecca's mom, who is a librarian was interested in helping us get some books here and offered to help MCC sort donated books (french and english language).  When we receive them we will be able to distribute them to the Hope School to help them create a library, as well as 2 libraries we support through the Friends Church in Rwanda.

We have been excited about this, but are also a bit concerned about how effective this input would be.  We talked to a friend who is a school teacher here (Joy Johnson) who did warn us that many of our children's books make a lot of cultural assumptions.  For instance, there are many about friendly animals or pets.  To a Burundian a dog, for instance, is a terrifying attack animal and having one in the house would be tantamount (to us) of having a pet rat or pig.  

Also, in her experience, Burundian children do not make distinctions between reality and fantasy as easily as children in our culture because of lack of exposure, so stories about fairies or fantasy creatures would be quite terrifying and presumed to be true and of demonic origin.

She suggested some kids books, non-fiction, with real photos of people from other cultures for instance as good teaching material.  We will see what we get, hopefully it will do more good than harm.  It is easy to see a need, but I am learning more and more that we have to be careful about the assumptions we make when we try to find a solution.  

My biggest concern is that books have such commodity value that it would be hard to imagine that they would not be stolen and sold (even by teachers).  I think the idea of a reading room open at certain hours in a school is more realistic than a library that lends books out for people to keep overnight.  I will let you  all know how this all develops.

I will close with a nice picture of a letter that came in our mail recently.  We frequently get letters that are misaddressed to our box and have to be resorted.  Last month we got one that was supposed to go to the French Ambassador.  This week however, we got a card destined for one SEM Pierre Nkurunziza.  That is Son Excellence Monsieur Pierre Nkurunziza, who happens to be the President of Burundi!  Somehow the sender had put our box # on it.  (I scratched it out so it would not come back to us again.  Hopefully the post office will get it right the next time.

Remember When...Taking Time to Give Meaning to Our Lives

Oren and Daddy making Sugar Cookies this week.  He took them to school to share with classmates.

I am having trouble finding the narrative unity of this week.  The biggest challenge for me of writing a weekly blog is to retell the week's events in a way that makes a point.  That is a personal goal, not a necessity I realize.  But perhaps this topic is a place to begin:

In our small group this week we continued reading the book of Nehemiah.  (by the way we have a new member, a single gentleman named Peter--an Australian, who has come to help out at the Montessori School where David goes for preschool).  I led the discussion and felt a bit challenged by chapter 9 which is primarily a long recounting of Israel's history--a retelling, by the returnees from exile as part of renewing the significance of the Holy Days of yore.  It is very long, pretty much recounting everything from Genesis to Deuteronomy.  Frequently the words "Remember when..." begin a new paragraph.  The telling is an intentional exercise, a conscious reminding to the Israelites and their children of how to understand the facts of their past.  It is told in the context of their God who is "ever faithful, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy"--the One who has put up with years of stubborness and disobedience from them and their forefathers.

This chapter, though, led to a very interesting discussion in our group about the importance of regularly recounting our own history.  History, we concluded, is a dead set of facts until it is retold.  The Jews at the time of Nehemiah understood this and ‘remembering’ their history was, (and continues to be), an important part of their high holy days.  But REMEMBERING is not simply recalling!  It is a retelling of the events with interpretation from a perspective.  In the case of the Israelites during the restoration, it was an act of seeing God’s steadfast love and abiding with them through all that happened--good and bad.

But what about us now?  I realize from my life, and especially in preparing for Christmas that what we call ‘traditions’ actually function in the same way.  It is not a mere repeating of past events or going through the motions of ‘what we always do’, but it is, rather, an act of ‘remembering’--a very present and future-looking activity based on an interpretation of the past.  We are ‘remembering’ things to our children that we consider important when we practice them in a ritual of repetition.  In our small group we recognized together the error that we as parents may make in thinking that our children unconsciously absorb or intuit our values by osmosis, without the intentional act of telling and reminding them.  Our children learn about us and our values in the times we take to ‘remember’ things to them.  Grandparents are great ‘rememberers’.   Children really love to be ‘remembered’ to, but often those of us in between childhood and old age tend to find the whole exercise a bit redundant.  We are often hurrying heedlessly through the very ‘productive’ years of our lives and can miss out on this very important activity.

So for me, this blog serves as my act of ‘remembering’ and that is why I try to find a narrative unity each week and commit to the tradition of Sunday evening re-telling of the weeks events.  That is, I am finding the meaning in what we did each week, from my perspective as a father, husband, missionary, and most importantly, a follower of Christ.  Some weeks I feel more up to the task than others, because ‘remembering’ is much more difficult than recalling.

That said, there were highs and lows this week which I will mention more in the way they impacted me than the order in which they occurred.  We continue to prepare for Christmas, with our young children.  The daily Advent calendars with chocolate behind each little door that opens is a big hit with the kids and a great teaching moment.  I might also mention that we have been blessed by no illness in the family for 2 weeks straight.

Among the personal highlights I want to acknowledge the steady improvement in my morning swim workout.  It is a spiritually important part of my day, (I do it right after dropping the kids off at school), and follow it with a daily reading from the Bible in a year and prayer.  It really prepares me to have a serene attitude before the many daily frustrations we face in trying to work and even live here.  But there is also evidence of real physical and technical improvement.  While I continue to swim a mile every day, I now do a full quarter mile of fly stroke (every 4 laps) as part of it.   Having the opportunity to swim here is a true blessing!

(I want to mention that I remain ever grateful to coach Ron Terwilliger in Poughkeepsie who taught me that swimming is truly a spiritual discipline.  He did this by opening up the Poughkeepsie Middle School Pool and preparing a work-out at 6am every morning.  I went twice a week for 2 years even on the coldest bleakest winter mornings--often standing shivering outside in sub zero temperatures waiting for the doors to open.  That was great preparation for enduring the hardships of mission work )

I am also very pleased with the progress I have made in painting the house.  The living room is almost done and looks great!

Among the aforementioned frustrations several have piled up in the past weeks.  The biggest one is related to the continued roadwork outside our house.  It is progressing at a snail’s pace as they are apparently planning to cobblestone our entire quartier.  Large groups of people (mainly women) come out daily to work with picks and shovels, digging ditches, and lining them with stone and concrete in preparation for the roadwork.  It is a project that appears to be on the scale of building one of the great pyramids of Egypt (only with smaller stones).  The problem is, nothing seems to move forward.  Often the same job is done over and over again several times.  Also, more and more ditches are excavated across roads each week and now every road out of our quartier is cut off from the main road except one single-lane path.  It is clogged with cars every morning and very difficult to  pass by.  

It is hard as a westerner to see planning not organized around western values of efficiency.  Instead of concentrating work around finishing completely some access routes, the philosophy is to do everything one stage at a time.  So all ditch digging everywhere is the current stage.  It appears that everything will be destroyed before the rebuilding phase begins.  Access routes will not be finished ahead of any other part of the project. 

The bridge to our house is still the makeshift wooden ‘ladder’ we must use, and continues to deteriorate.  Last week the workers removed it every morning to work on our ditch and we were forced to put it back ourselves every evening.  Sadly, while we left our car outside of our house in the late afternoon on Friday, someone quickly removed the entire rear light unit on both sides of the car, making it very dangerous to drive and a pain to replace.  Since it was done Friday we are needing to wait until Monday for repairs.  It is annoying and hard not to feel that as the privileged mzungus in this country we are fair game to be ‘eaten’ at any sign of imprudence and vulnerability.  I know that not everyone here is a thief but it is a real frustration to have our car (and our friends cars) preyed upon in this way anytime we leave them unattended on the street.  (The good news is that our mechanic can simply go to the black market area and buy the lights back for a much lower price than one would have to pay for new ones.  It is like a game here, and sadly, one of the few ‘creative’ income generating activities I have seen.)

Fortunately it is possible to keep all of the highs and low in perspective here, and while the annoyance of replacing lights is a pain, the rewards of being here are in evidence abundantly.  I don’t often talk about specific accomplishments at work, since administration of our program is not always glamorous, but I want to mention one:  I was very happy to have successfully advocated to MCC for an additional emergency grant for our program the Hope School for the Batwa.  I have to say, there are few foreign aid programs I know of in the world that do so much with so little as I see in this school.  

MCC, along with another donor supports the school, although last year the other donor pulled out of funding teachers' salaries.  This left the school with a shortfall of 4 months of salaries for teachers this fall ($6000).  (MCC essentially pays for the spring and the other donor paid the fall).   The school was in danger of closing as a result, but MCC was able to find enough money to keep it open until our new grant kicks back in next year.

What I want to emphasize though is the amount of money such a program requires compared to what it does.  The school pays $1500 per month for all teachers’ salaries.  THAT IS FOR 22 TEACHERS EACH MONTH TO TEACH 500 PYGMY CHILDREN!  The entire teacher payroll for the year is $15,000.  I know there are American teachers and administrators out there—can you imagine? A teacher here makes about $68 per month!  It is sad they are paid so little and often in schools here they do not end up getting paid even what they are owed because of shortfalls.  But they do such incredible work and in my opinion, are providing the only real hope for marginalized people like the Batwa.

What is sad to me is that much foreign aid passes over such projects as this because it does not ‘burn’ enough money.  Large donors (even Christian ones) want partners and programs that can use much larger amounts of money.  $15,000 per year is considered too cost ineffective to administer.

But that is what I love about MCC!  It is an organization that has fewer resources but seeks out small partnerships of people doing very effective work—a lot with very little.  The hardest thing for us is that often we can barely provide our partners with enough money to do the very good work they do, and yet must watch as larger organizations waste money on large projects that mainly subsidize corrupt officials, or line the pockets of unscrupulous managers (that includes church leaders here as well as others).   I have found that with foreign aid, less is more as far as direct grants, but it takes a lot more time and energy to find the right people to partner with to do meaningful work with integrity here.  Often much accompaniment is needed as well to help them get the most out of a grant.

We have continued to enjoy being with our children this week.  David has really been maturing quickly and his personality emerges more clearly everyday.  He is easy going, and quite a joker.  He loves to laugh even at the expense of teasing his hypersensitive brother a bit.  They do play together well in general though.  David is happy to be the ‘monster’ that chases Oren and his friends around the house when they come to play.   He is also getting bit enough to hold his own on the trampoline with them.

The most notable thing about him though, is his great love of all animals.  He is a bit of a Huck Finn, walking barefoot everywhere he goes, picking up frogs, lizards, snails, even cockroaches, guinea pigs, or any other living thing he can trap with his hands.  He is an expert at catching these often tiny animals and has a natural instinct about handling them gently.  It is fun to watch him bring a critter he has found running around the churchyard to show to a group of young girls at Sunday school and watch them scream.  His best friend though is Bella our retriever and I have no doubt he will be thrilled to see the soon-to-be-arriving puppies.

  I think that is enough remembering for today.  Until next week, I hope you will take the time to ‘remember when’ with those you care about this season.

Bonus Photo:  Saturday morning exercise and brunch crew.  

Focus on the Family and More Cross-cultural Recipes

The boys have 2 matching shirts that look great together.  Here they are sitting on our docile, very pregnant dog Bella. (dsiclaimer: No animals were harmed during the writing of this blog.)

Mango season is coming to an end, as far as our trees go.  I don’t think I have said much about mango season and the number of buckets of fruit we got off our trees.  Since this is our third mango season here in Burundi, having fruit trees that produce this tropical delicacy does not seem as remarkable as it did when we first moved to this house.  

Actually it is not all good to have such a ‘resource rich’ yard.  We do answer knocks on our gates on average 3 times a day as passing school children ask for some of the fruit.  We don’t want to be miserly and we were giving it out regularly last year, but we discovered that that brought a ten fold increase in the number of people asking.  Once I invited a group of 3 kids to come in to pick some for themselves.  Before I realized what was happening they and 10 of their friends bolted in the gate, scaled the tree and made off with about 100 in less than a minute.  My bourgeois sense of generosity and gratitude was certainly affronted in the face of such poverty and privation.  Since then, I hand them out at the gate but more frequently ignore the incessant knocking around midday.  

Speaking of mangoes, I want to mention another great recipe substitute we heard about and tried out with relative success.  Rebecca used some of the green mangoes that had fallen off of our tree this year as a substitute for apples in an apple cobbler.  A very green mango has much the same texture and taste of a granny smith apple.  She did discover that a mango is much dryer though and does not get very juicy when cooked.  She added a bit of water to the mixture about part way through but I think next time we will try precooking the mangoes in water sugar and cinnamon before putting them in the recipe.  Anyway, any expats in Burundi who want to give this a try, let us know how it works for you.

This was definitely a week of enjoying a ‘normal’ work routine in Bujumbura.  No trips upcountry and only 2 visitors staying over a night.  One of the visitors was Dina, the wife of Jimmy Juma (the Congolese couple working for MCC South Africa who had been waiting for visas and stayed with us for a while.)  They did finally get their visas and Dina was on her way to Johannesburg.  She stayed the night with us Wednesday, then I took her to the airport Thursday night.  We were very happy that they were finally able to be successful in receiving the visa so Jimmy can start his work as regional peace officer down there.

The second visitor was Yolanda, who was down from Gitega over the weekend to get some supplies and to have a meeting with the American Friends Service Committee and the partner she is seconded to this Monday.

Because this was a relatively calm week with regard to work, it meant that Rebecca and I had time to be more intentional about doing things with the kids.  I made a real effort to play with them, and involve them in projects at home.  One of the things they have really loved is getting prepared for Christmas and we were able to finish trimming the tree with lights we bought at the Chinese version of Walmart.  (called T2000).  

The other project we launched, as threatened, was to begin painting the house.  Although hiring a painter is quite cheap here, I was interested in experimenting with some accent walls so I wanted to go and look at colors myself.  A foray for construction materials and hardware are always interesting because they usually involve a trip in the the Quartier Asiatique (Asian Quarter).  The odd angularity of roads that seem to go every which way reminds me a bit of the West Village in New York City, compared to the relatively grid-like layout of the rest of Bujumubura.  It seems like just about anything you could want can be found there, but it takes quite a bit of hunting.  There are numerous hardware stores that all seem to sell different seemingly random things.  One I went to sold mainly safes and shower heads, while another had printer ink cartridges and cement.  I found many paint stores that sold just paint, but I had to go to a completely different store to buy brushes and rollers.  For anyone who likes to complain about trouble finding things at Home Depot, one day in the Asian Quarter here will quickly remedy that indulgence.

I might add that at Home Depot you can buy many ready-made items like framed-out doors and windows, and, of course, sheet rock.  Here in Buja if you build you start with cement, sand, gravel, bricks, and if you want to splurge for stability--rebar  (most don’t bother if the building is under 3 stories).  Finishing walls is all about smoothing out concrete. Windows are all made of iron bars.  Virtually nothing is constructed out of wood here (termites).   

I did succeed in finding the items I wanted and bought 4 colors of paint varying from a deep rust to harvest gold, cream, and white.  Oren was very excited about helping me paint a wall and we finally got around to painting one panel of our living room on Saturday afternoon.  He actually did very well.  He is a fairly compulsive child and did his best to cover all the white spots and not go outside the border.  It was fun to have a father-son project and Rebecca did her best to keep David preoccupied as he does not share his brother’s predilection for meticulous neatness.  (He is actually in a particularly impish phase of scribbling a bit on all the uncolored pages of Oren’s favorite coloring books.)

The weekend was fairly eventful beginning Friday evening when Rebecca went to a 3+ hour elders meeting at our church.  I stayed home with the kids and played.  Marcelline, the cook, was sick again so I made dinner.  It was a Thai orange fish curry. It was my own invention and a bit of genius if I do say so myself—taste was exquisite.  (Rebecca and I loved it, but so did Oren.)

Thai Orange Fish Curry Recipe:

I sautéed broccoli, onion, and eggplant in sesame oil then added coconut milk (a full can), fish sauce, and Thai yellow curry paste and simmered them about 20 minutes.  Then I added about a half cup of some very bitter orange marmalade that is made here, and finally added cut up filet of a mild white fish (like perch--about a pound).  The taste of the Thai spices with the bittersweet orange was the perfect combination with fish.  I served it on rice.

Saturday, besides house painting and morning exercises, we went as a family to a Birthday party for one of Oren’s friends, a Belgian kid named Timeo.  Most of the children in his class were there and it was a good opportunity to meet some of the parents as well.  Among his classmates is the daughter of the new director of the primary school at the Ecole Belge so we have come to know them. Her daughter also takes my ballet class.

After the party we passed by the beach to watch the sunset over the mountains, then joined Zachee and Timmy for dinner at Ubuntu, the restaurant on the Lake.  

Sunday was quite a busy day as well.  We went to chuch as usual but stayed an extra hour because Rebecca did some training of other Sunday school teachers on some Advent lessons.

After that, we picked up Rachel, one of our friends who babysits for us from time to time, to watch the kids as we had a special event that evening.  We were invited by J.B. a friend who works in one of our partnerships, to come and speak to a group of 50 couples who meet monthly at his church to talk about how to be better parents and spouses as Christians, AND to discuss the many issues facing them as parents of children in a rapidly changing urban context.

I had had a chance earlier in the week to meet the pastor and talk about what we might share.  My initial impulse was to give some Biblical foundation for family planning.  (Burundian families are huge and often education is sacrificed for children because of lack of money for school fees.)  But as I worked I changed the focus more generally to what we hope for with regard to our children’s future and what things we as parents do to help bring it into being, and what things we do that might work against our aspirations.  

It was interesting because I feel like I had as many insights into our own challenges of raising children in our culture as the other couples did about raising their children here in Burundi.

I asked the question:  What do we hope for, for our childrens’ future?  I had used the passage, again, of Moses on Mt. Nebo, looking into the Promised Land, to which he led his people for over 40 years, but did not set foot in himself.  But for him, the promise of what was to come for his descendants, was sufficient for him, I believe, to die a happy man--knowing his efforts were not in vain, even if they were not for his own personal gain.

Many of the parents had high aspirations for their children, education, good jobs, wealth, but always with the idea that they would be raised to be followers of Christ--compassionate, selfless, honest and committed to working for the improvement of the country. I was glad to hear them talk about values and not just material ends that they wanted their children to achieve.

I asked the couples to share in small groups the following questions:

1) their birth order in their own families and how many siblings they had.

2) what responsibilities they had for other siblings and parents (school fees, housing, etc.)

3) how many children they had.

4) what they feel are their responsibilities to their own children.

5) what they feel their children’s responsibilities are to them (ex. support parents or other siblings)

I was hoping this would open up some reflection on the ways some choices we make as parent will affect the opportunities we create for our children or prevent them from having.  I was affirmed in this as some of the men I was with shared about the struggle of trying to find school fees for so many children.  (One young man had 4 children, the oldest of whom was 5!)

But I also realized something for myself about my own children and children in our culture. I appreciate the fact that we do not feel it is ethically right to make our children work as ‘slaves’ for the family.  Generally, as parents (and a Nation), we feel we are financially responsible for their educations, often through College.   We give our children, compared to most of the world, an unprecedented amount of freedom to allow them to maximize their potential and often ask little in terms of them having responsibility, while they are young, beyond token chores and tasks.  But there is a downside to this.  We are raising, and many of us were raised, as a generation of hedonists—concerned entirely with ourselves and our own self-actualization.  I think the Global Financial Crisis is the apotheosis of the values of this generation

Here in Burundi, as I said, older children may be financially responsible for younger siblings and for aging parents.  School is not an entitlement and parents may make choices about sending some and leaving others at home to work to help pay for the ones in school, or to feed themselves.  Children here are by and large very polite, respectful, and have a very mature sense of responsibility at an early age.  But so frequently I want to weep when I see potentially brilliant minds which are not permitted to expand. I find a stultifying lack of creativity here and an incapacity for people to think for themselves.  (Independent thinking is not a virtue here--blind obedience is.)

So I find that to raise a child well means living in a dialectical tension between freedom and responsibility.  Too much freedom, leads to selfish nihilism, but too much responsibility will snuff out any chance for developing, intelligent, adaptive, thinking, individuals who can respond creatively to the challenges of the future (obedient robots). 

As parents I see that in my own culture we may err one way while those here err the other way, but no one has a monopoly, or maybe the secret recipe to successful parenting.  We do, though, have a chance to learn from each other.

Rebecca also had a fascinating exchange with the women in her group.  (Seemingly women have even more responsibility in their families of origin than men did.)  Many of them also confronted the fact that if they were wanting to instill their values in their children, they would probably have to spend more time with them and not hand them off to the nanny, which is the normal thing that Burundian families do here as both parents are often working.  (Nannies are usually girls between 11 and 18 who are poor relatives or orphans that can’t afford to go to school.)

Rebecca and I came home feeling very fulfilled from the time we spent with the group.  As a reward to Rachel for watching the kids, we went out to Khana Kazana (Indian food) with her and Yolanda when we got home.  The weather was perfect and the food was excellent, it was a great ending to a very satisfying week.  

Two Thanksgivings and a Farewell

Marcelline separating beans for our Thanksgiving succotash.

Rebecca and I are sitting here in our bedroom this evening still reeling slightly from the just-ended whirl-wind tour of Grandma Jean.  It seems like she just got here. She arrived exactly 2 weeks ago on Sunday evening on a Brussels Air flight to Bujumbura, and departed in the same way this evening.  

Rebecca and the boys took her to the airport while I stayed home to lead the small group Bible study that meets on our house on Sunday evenings.  (Rebecca was able to stay for about half of it.)

I said reeling because this was a very full week, which included, among other things, two Thanksgiving dinner celebrations on Thursday and Saturday.  But I don't want to get ahead of myself here.

Monday really felt like a 'getting back to work day.'  Coming off the retreat the past week meant catching up on a lot of email and other administrative tasks. Ruth and Krystan as well as Jodi were still at the house until Tuesday morning, although they all had made dinner plans to visit others on Monday night so we had a fairly quiet dinner together with just Jean and the kids.  

Probably as a result of all the activity and travel of the past several weeks, illness began to set in and affected many of us.  Both Oren and David have been sick with bad sinus infections and fever, and sadly Jean got hit with it as well.  Both kids missed school during the week at least once, and David was out for several days with high fever.  So doctor appointments and starting a regimen of antibiotics for both boys and Grandma Jean were part of the week's offerings.

Wednesday was probably the low point of the week as far as illness as it seemed everyone but Rebecca and I were in bed with fevers, and we considered whether going through with our ambitious Thanksgiving plans for a large dinner with Burundian friends the next day was a good idea.  We did not want to cancel it as there had been considerable planning and preparation put into it even the day before. Among the things prepared were several crafts, like little turkey napkin rings constructed by Grandma Jean and Oren.  

We weighed our options and decided that in our experience, most of the viruses we have contracted here go away in about 24 hours so we did not change our plans to proceed with the Thanksgiving meal. 

Last year we had invited a group of Burundian friends to share Thanksgiving with us at our house.  My parents were visiting at the time and it was a great opportunity to have them meet several of our Burundian friends all at once.  We decided to recreate the event again with Rebecca's mom.

This year we included many of the same friends to join us again.  We had Onesphore and his two children (his wife is still doing a medical residency in France), we had Zenon and his family (he is a partner from Campus Intervarsity ministry), and Zachee, Bridget and Tim and our program officer Felix. With Jean and us we were a group of 15.   It was good that most of these folks had some knowledge of English which meant Jean could talk with them as well.  (At one point in the evening she recounted the Thanksgiving story from the Native American perspective of Squanto—the Indian who assisted the pilgrims.)

It was very nice to share this meal with Burundian friends.  We did our best to make some traditional Thanksgiving favorites and came up with some great hybrids of Burundian and American food.  Succotash was not hard as white beans are available here, as are sweet potatoes (white, not yams), as well as regular potatoes and pumpkins (for pie).  Recently some stores around here offer rotisserie chickens for sale, so I bought 3 of those as well.  

The real challenge was to be the cranberry sauce (for me the sin qua non of Thanksgiving ‘fixins’).  There is no way to get fresh cranberries here and to date, I have not seen any cans of it imported.  Rebecca came up with an awesome substitute though by using a fruit we find locally called a japanese plum or tree tomato.

I have not seen these fruits in the US before, but here they are quite common.  They have a very deep red interior and a thick skin that looks like a plum.  The taste is generally very tart and astringent.  Usually it is squeezed out as a kind of dressing on fruit salads made with mangoes, bananas, and pineapples.  They are not very good to eat alone unless you really love sour fruit.

But as a substitute for cranberries it was almost indistinguishable and in some ways even better.  Rebecca wrote down the recipe, however if you are not in a country where you can get Japanese plums (tree tomatoes) it will probably be hard to reproduce.  But here it is.  

Fresh “Cranberry” Relish for Burundi

(guaranteed 100% cranberry-free)

Add into blender:

4 medium carrots (sliced into pieces) OR 2 carrots and 2 apples (seeded and quartered)

8 – 10 Japanese plums (Tree tomatoes) 

* to do this, cut plums in half, and scoop out flesh and purple seeds from each half into blender with a teaspoon. Use everything but the outer skin.

1 orange with peel still on (quartered, remove seeds and tough center section)

Juice of 1 lemon

½ cup sugar

½ cup pineapple juice OR ½ cup other juice (apple, mixed berry)

Blend until a smooth consistency, about a minute. If the blender has trouble, add a little more liquid, either juice or water.

Pour into a dish, chill and enjoy.

Probably the mzungus enjoyed this addition the most, I think the Burundians could have taken it or left it.  But they did have a great time together and we are glad to have a reason to get together with Burundian friends in the evening.

Thursday was not the only Thanksgiving dinner we had though.  Through Oren’s school we have connections to a few American parents.  One of them, Olivia, has a daughter in Oren’s class.  She is here with her husband and 2 children.  He is part of the UN mission here working as a lawyer to reinforce the capacity of the Burundian justice system.  She invited us to a real American Thanksgiving dinner with TURKEY!  (It was brought in through the diplomatic pouch of the Dutch embassy, I think.)  

There are a handful of Americans who have children at the Ecole Belge, it includes us, the Horsts and an American woman named Ann Glick who is married to one of the diplomats with the Dutch embassy.  We were all invited to share Thanksgiving together at Olivia's house Saturday evening.

We took Jean and the kids and went over in the afternoon on Saturday.  The only thing I can say about the food is it was fabulous.  There were 2 small turkeys cooked to perfection as well as filet mignon, pork stuffing, sweet potato French fries, all other standard Thanksgiving offerings including pumpkin and shoo-fly pie (complete with flies that had to be shooed!).  Rebecca’s cranberry sauce may have been the runaway favorite though.  This was a group of people who could definitely appreciate the importance of it, and would also miss its omission at a meal claiming to be Thanksgiving.  I think she passed on the recipe to several people there.

What was interesting about the event was the unusual concentration of Mennonites there.  Besides Rebecca and Jean (bretheren) we had the Horsts who are Mennonite, as well as Ann Glick who is Mennonite as well.  Since there is no Mennonite church in Burundi I think that every Mennonite in the country was at that dinner, completely by serendipity. (Olivia did not know this about the invitees at all.)   When it was time for a pre-meal blessing, Ann suggested we sing #606 (a version of the Doxology humorously nicknamed the Mennonite National Anthem because it is so well-known by all Mennonites.)  It is quite impressive to hear with all the complex harmonies and parts rendered seemingly spontaneously.  There were a few guests from Ecuador and Benin (UN colleagues) as well as the other Americans who seemed quite impressed by it.  I certainly was.  I think the propensity of Mennonites also accounted for the tastiness of all the food as Mennonites are some of the best cooks of simple, traditional food in the world.  (If you don’t believe me, check out the More With Less Cookbook.)

It was really great to have a second Thanksgiving meal with this culturally very diverse group.  It is also always interesting to hear about the work of other expats who find themselves here in Burundi.  There is a fairly large UN mission here, but unless they have kids in Oren’s class, we are not likely to have much interaction with them.

The kids also played very well together as they are all in the same school.  I will certainly not forget it soon and will probably see if something like this can be created next year.  The fact that we had the chance to share a tradition cross-culturally, but also participate  in it with those who share our own cultural traditions was a special blessing this year.

Sunday was our last day with Grandma Jean and we took her to church in the morning.  I am happy that she decided to assist Rebecca with the Sunday school class she is teaching.  Rebecca has been offering an English medium class for non-french speaking children at PTI.  There are quite a few ex-pats who come to the service, particularly from Kenya and Ethiopia, which are Anglophone.  She is up to about 20 kids now and it is a really good class.  (Thanks to some very good curriculum we brought with us from the US this summer.)

I am glad also that Jean took some pictures of the class to get an idea of just how modest a Sunday School classroom at the church is.  As you can see there are no desks or even chairs.  Children sit on the floor.  There are no supplies whatsoever, but fortunately we have a stock of crayons and Rebecca photocopies pictures for them to color.  Other crafts are very limited because it is almost impossible to buy things like straws, pipe cleaners, cotton balls, and other kinds of craft supplies.  Nonetheless she makes do and the kids seem to really like to be there.

We came home in the afternoon and Sunday and actually took out, cleaned up and started to decorate the Christmas tree.  Oren has been very excited about doing this and to share some of the decorating with Grandma Jean.  (In case you are wondering about the tree, it is artificial, made in China and pretty scrawny, but seems to have held up well the past 3 years.)

Sunday evening we had our small group again.  Jean needed to be dropped off about half-way through so Rebecca started with us then took Jean and the kids to the airport while I finished with our group.  

There was much to be Thankful for in all of this.  We had a great time with Grandma who helped us out a lot in her first week and has even committed herself to help us in the future with a campaign to get some good children’s books sent to Burundi to share with our partners who run schools.  (Particularly the Hope School for the Batwa).  It is always a tremendous blessing to have ‘representatives’ from our families and friends at home to bring their love and support out here.  It is true that absence does make the heart grow fonder.