A Birthday, Anniversary, and Two Roadtrips

Our SALTers, Annie, Bethany, Janelle, donning African prints on their last night in Burundi.

Despite my tiredness this evening I am committed to getting this last post up before we get on a plane tomorrow evening and head out for our four week break in Baltimore.  I am, thankfully, at this point, back in Bujumbura at our house and have spent the good part of the afternoon cleaning it and getting it ready for our departure.

Our two SALTers from Rwanda are also here with us now, as I had picked them up on Sunday and returned with them on Monday.  Tonight we had all 3 SALTers over with Jennifer Price and Felix to celebrate a last meal here together.  It is hard to believe they have been here for an entire year already.  Or maybe it seems like they have been here for far longer.  Time is very elastic when one looks back over the recent and distant past.

Having guests over for dinner also gave us a good excuse to celebrate Rebecca;s Birthday this evening!  Timing is not perfect for this event as we are trying to get everything done before leaving, but this is a milestone year.  We had a nice dinner and Jennifer had brought over some amazing pastries and mini-cheesecakes from a very chic Belgian patisserie.  It was as good as any Birthday cake. 

I think we will celebrate both Oren and Rebecca’s Birthday with family on the night we arrive in Baltimore.

I mentioned shooting the rapids last week, and I guess now we are sort of in a pool at the end, but I do want to recount a bit the last 6 days that have brought us to this point. 

I believe I left off last week in Gitega, where I was playing host to our area director and US International program director.  Mark Sprunger is the former and Ruth Clemens the latter.  Ruth came with her husband Jonathan and daughter Hannah and got a whirlwind tour of Burundi. 

Having someone come for a 3 day visit and trying to show them as much of our program as possible is a challenge.  We do try to select to give a good cross section of our work.  We startedon Monday morning with a visit to our big food security partner Help Channel that does a food for work program involving reforestation.  This is where Jennifer Price is seconded.

After lunch, we left for Gitega on Monday afternoon and met our peace partner MiPAREC in the early evening.  Jonathan and Hannah took a tour of Gitega with Felix while Ruth, Mark, and I met with our partner.

We stayed the night in Gitega, The next morning we met a partner that does community development called UCPD.  They had a new technical education program supported by MCC in a nearby commune and we took a 45 minute drive out to see their activities.  We were able to see some of the trainings in action including a sewing workshop, a masonry class and a carpentry workshop.  It is always humbling to see the extent to which all of these skills are manual and not what it might be in our country.  There is no Home Depot, or power tools, or electricity for that matter.  The sewing machines are all pumped by foot, and all carpentry is done by hand tools, including planing lumber to make planks.  (You cannot really buy a readymade 2X4 or 1X8, you usually have to make it from some rough long cut logs.)  The kids, though, seemed serious and grateful to have a chance to work.  Most had to leave school because they could not pass the 6th grade national exam.  They found themselves out of work with few prospects.  We are hoping this program will give them a marketable skill that can be used in their community.

Joid's house

In the afternoon, we picked up Innocent, the director of UCEDD, who runs the Hope School for the Batwa.  We went with him down the very bumpy washboard road to Nyangungu where the school is located.  We arrived in the evening and got rooms at the Seminary in Burasira where we planned to stay the night.

Jodi Mikalachki, our former service worker who still lives in the area, very graciously offered to invite us all over for dinner.  So we went over to her house in the evening and had a very nice time visiting with her.  She is a great resource for experience in living and working in the context and had some stories to share about working at the school as well.

We slept well in the seminary despite the cold weather, and the ice cold showers the next morning.  It was very quiet there as the seminarians are all on summer holidays right now.

Welcoming ceremony

We walked up, after breakfast, the one kilometer hill to the school.  It was actually remarkable to see how much the area has changed.  The road at the bottom is being paved and will soon be a major route.  This certainly detracts from the quaintness of the area, but will probably do wonders for commerce, especially for some of the small farmers. Hopefully even some income generating activities for parents of the twa children who attend the school.  We walked past the construction and up through the Batwa quarter to give Ruth and family an idea about how the twa live and work here.  It is very evident that they are extremely impoverished, but there are also some encouraging signs like some good farming techniques, and even a few huts with a tin roof.  We also saw many samples of the gorgeous pots that are made by the women in the village. 

Although school was out, our visit t the school was somewhat fortuitous.  On the morning we went up, the grades from the national exams had just come back.  There are national exams at 6^th and 10^th grade.  In order to continue into 7^th or 11^th grades, they must pass the tests.  Success rate in Burundi are notoriously low compared to our ‘no child left behind’ mentality.  Typically a school will be able to get 40 percent or less to pass. 

Meeting with parents and taachers at the Hope School

The Hope School blew us all away this year by having a success rate of 62% in the primary school and of the 11 tenth graders 7 succeeded (4 boys, 3 girls).   Three of the boys were batwa.  Even more impressive to me was a young man named Alexandre who is a twa and began school in the nursery school Hope School opened  (It started as a nursery school).  He continued to advance each year after that as the school added a grade each year from 1st -10th grade.   They added the 10^th grade this past year.   He graduated, the first and is the first and only one thus far to come through from the beginning, and he is looking at going into a premed program for the superior cycle of secondary school.  (The French system is somewhere between highschool and junior college at this level.)  If he succeeds he could be eligible to go on to University.  In my view, this could be a huge encouragement for that community to see one of their own go through the Hope School and go on to medical school. 

Our group did see the school, despite the fact it was not in session.  And we were greeted by a group of parents who did some traditional Batwa welcome dances for us.  After that they joined us in a classroom where we had a meeting with parents, teachers and students who had come to see us.  We had a very interesting exchange talking about the rewards and challenges of the school.  I encouraged the parents there to see us as parents as well, rather than donors as we discussed the challenge of educating our children.

3 Graduates, Alexandre is on the right.

Alexandre, the young boy who finished 10^th grade was there and I was able to ask him a question:  "Alexander, you and your classmates told us in our last meeting that the biggest obstacles that you face to succeed in school were 1) hunger, and 2) lack of light to study at night.  Despite these obstacles, you succeeded to finish all the way to 10th grade.  To what do you owe your success?"

He answered humbly, "There is only one reason for my success.  And has been by the grace of God, who has helped me succeed."  

Innocent added that certainly that is true, but that he should not discount his personal perseverance in the struggle succeed in school.

After the parents meeting, about noon, we headed back to Gitega to drop off Innocent and then headed back down to Bujumbura.  It was a long day of driving and we were happy to get back to Buja in the early evening.  

Us with Felix, Ruth, Hannah, Jonathan.

Thursday everyone was leaving.  Ruth and family were heading to Bukavu to see the MCC DRC program and Mark was going back to Nigeria.  I did manage to beg off driving Ruth and family to Bukavu as I was completely worn out, and Felix offered to take them for me.  That was also good because it meant that I could work during the day and have the evening free to celebrate Rebecca's and my Anniversary (our 9^th).

Jennifer Price offered to babysit the kids and we were able to go out to dinner at a restaurant called La Palmaraie.  We had a very nice dinner together and enjoyed the short respite before the final push.

Rebecca who had been home with the kids the whole time and holding down the fort now had to go into high gear.  She was preaching this past Sunday, and was given a topic, in our reconciliation series, to deal with the question of justice and restitution.  She took time on Friday and Saturday to prepare, although we did take a bit of time off Saturday afternoon to swim with the kids. 

Saturday evening we went out to eat again at an Indian restaurant Tandoor because we had to have a brief business meeting with someone from MRDF (Andrew Edwards) who works with one of our partners.  We had a nice chat and the Indian food there was not bad at all.

Sunday Rebecca preached and really hit the nail on the head.  She talked about justice and restitution from the point of view of the offender and the victim.  She used the story or Zaccheus and made the point that while the offender may offer restitution freely, it is not a prerequisite for grace nor forgiveness.  Christian forgiveness, even for the Christian victim needs to come, not conditioned on restitution, but as a free act.  (caveat: This may take a great deal of time, of course.)

She also challenged the church further to seek out the offender and not just the victim.  The church community needs to reach out to support both victims AND offenders.  Jesus was certainly an example of that.  She gave the example of someone who is beating his wife and how the community must respond both to protect the wife, but also to bring the man into a place of accountability and work to bring him to a place of repentance and restoration.  (The mistake that is made is to think such problems are merely between a husband and a wife in Christian community.)

The sermon was a big challenge for the church here because ministering to victims is normal here, but the idea that the sinner (the offender) should be sought like a lost sheep is a very strange idea.  Excommunication is a common practice here for any number of small infractions so the idea of working to restore a fallen member is quite foreign to most people here.

Sunday afternoon I took the car and headed back to Rwanda.  I was heavily loaded with a basket of fruit that easily weighed 90 pounds.  We had bought 2, one for the host family in Rwanda and one for the one in Burundi.  Rebecca was going to a dinner on Sunday evening in Burundi with the latter and I was going to go to a dinner with the Rwandese family. 

I got to Kigali about 6 pm and met Bethany and her host mom and dad about 7pm.  They were all very worn out as a result of the day's festivities prior to my arrival, but custom really dictates that we share a meal, so we went out to a restaurant.  We asked what they had ready so it would not be too long a wait and they told us brouchettes.  But despite their assurances, the cooking time took a full hour, so we did not leave until about 10 by the time we were done.  It was the right thing to do, but none of us were completely up to it given our exhaustion.

I spent the night at a guesthouse then went back and picked up Bethany then Annie at the house on the church compound.  There were quite a few farewell wishers including all of Bethany’s students from the technical training school (Mwana Nshuti).

We drove back to Bujumbura without incident and arrived Monday afternoon.  I had intended to start the blog then but was too wiped out and fell  asleep quite early.

It is now about 11:30pm and we have a big day tomorrow, although we do not fly out until about 8pm.  We will be traveling back with the 3 SALTers, just the way we came a year ago.  We are a bit ahead of the curve with packing and housecleaning for once.  Hopefully we can stay that way up until we leave.  We will send the kids to play school tomorrow so they will not mess up the house again. 

Prayers for a safe journey home.  Will post again in a week or two.

Bonus photo:  Our SALTers a year ago when we met them at Dulles.