New Creation and a New “We”

Rebecca with Pastor Acher, our pastor in Burundi, who
served as one of the translators for the Institute.

Last week, as Paul posted this blog, I had already left the family in Bujumbura and was busy at work in Uganda. He and my mom had a fairly uneventful week in Bujumbura. Of course, they both worked hard, especially my mom, making the most of her time to volunteer at Hope Africa University library. Still, there wasn’t much new to report. So, Paul said that I should be the one to write the blog this week.

I had been invited to facilitate worship at a weeklong gathering of Christian leaders, seeking a way forward for reconciliation in the African Great Lakes Region. For more details on this “movement of restless leaders” you can visit their website. www.dukereconciliation.com But rather than giving you a professional summary, I want to try and describe the experience of being part of this week, on a journey through lament, pilgrimage and towards a new creation.

The Assignment: Getting Started

I arrived in the afternoon on Friday, in Entebbe on the shores of Lake Victoria. As I came out of my room I was stunned at the sight of giant kingfishers over the wall, and a flash of vivid red and black gliding down from a tree (a bird I’m still waiting to identify) – someone neglected to tell me that I would be longing for my binoculars in Uganda! The bird life was immediately striking, and I had time, so I took a walk down to a botanical garden nearby. It was beautiful, right on the lake, filled with majestic trees of every variety – and also filled with people getting started on their (loud) Friday night parties. It was refreshing to be able to take a walk in a fascinating natural setting and not be an object of fascination myself. That evening, I was able to meet informally with many of the leadership team members of GLI, and also have some time to prepare myself with prayer. I was thankful for that opportunity for a few hours of solitude and rest.

On Saturday morning, the leadership team headed out to Ggaba Seminary outside of Kampala, the site of the Great Lakes Initiative (GLI) Institute. Again, I had a little time to explore the spaces there and contemplate again the particular challenges of facilitating worship for this event. First of all, this Institute is intentionally inter-confessional. I needed to be ready to help Anglicans, Pentecostals, Catholics, Quakers, Methodists and “confused people” like myself all enter the presence of God in worship. Second, the Institute is international, and, for example, worship in the new nation of South Sudan takes on quite different forms than it does in Tanzania. Third, the region and thus the participants, are multi-lingual. We used English and French to communicate during the Institute, but neither one is the heart language of most Africans from the region. I felt a special burden to be sure francophones felt included and valued in what could be an exclusively English setting. As I prayed and planned for this responsibility, I was repeatedly grateful for my experience with Donna Dinsmore in the Chapel Planning Group at Regent College, where we planned weekly worship, dealing with the same challenges.

Oh, did I mention another challenge? I couldn’t help but feel insecure about being a westerner, asked to facilitate worship for Africans. Do you get what I’m saying? What do I have to bring to people who really know how to worship with enthusiasm and devotion?  I think there may have been something important about having an “impartial” facilitator. I insisted on asking the Planners for a co-facilitator who was from the region, and they found a very capable and willing young man named Liberty. But he was quite sick with malaria by the time I arrived in Uganda. So during the time we might have had to get to know each other and practice together on Saturday, he was resting, trying to recover enough to join me on Sunday. Thus, I practiced alone in the beautiful octagonal chapel, marveling at the light coming in from all sides and the amazing acoustics, and also wondering at the images of 22 African saints carved into a set of windows. And then I also spent the afternoon as part of a planning meeting of all the partners of the GLI.

Worship in the Ggaba SeminaryChapel

On Sunday morning we had a very simple and powerful prayer time for the GLI, led by one of the faculty wives. And then each of us was off and running on our tasks. Participants started arriving. Arriving faculty needed to be briefed. My co-facilitator Liberty finally arrived, but we were not able to really start planning for the evening worship until 5 pm. And then we had to tackle a whole host of technical problems with the newly installed sound system and PowerPoint—no big surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with those things before. As a result, Liberty and I found ourselves starting to lead the worship time with very little idea of what would happen musically.

Fortunately, I had planned quite carefully for worship the first night, in terms of non-musical things. We were remembering Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and read a portion of one of his speeches. There was a scripture read as a bi-lingual litany. We had a corporate prayer of confession, and then I offered words of assurance. The songs went fairly well, although I mostly had to lead them myself with guitar. I sat down to listen to the keynote speaker, a Catholic Archbishop from Uganda. And next thing I knew he was talking about how challenging the GLI is, in a positive way: “Here, we are, in a room full of bishops, and who pronounces the absolution? You there, Rebecca, are you even ordained? (“Not yet”) And not only a layperson, but also a woman! And not even a big, tall woman, but a small one! And we bishops, we just sat here and accepted it. This is subversive!” I was just about crawling under my seat at that point, though his point was good-natured. I had completely forgotten another major challenge facing me in this assignment: being a woman in a culture where church leaders are almost exclusively male. There were some other critiques from the leadership team of the worship and opening plenary that night, and I went to bed wondering if I had done the right thing to be in this place.

New Creation

Our seminar group.

During the first full day of the Institute, we tried to get a sense of God’s vision for making all things new. Professor Wilfred Mlay helped us read through scripture and understand that reconciliation is God’s business; he has been making all things new, starting from the first page of scripture when he brought new creation out of chaos, and ending at Revelation, when the new heaven and the new earth will descend and God will come and himself dwell among his people. We heard stories from two amazing peace artisans, demonstrating how this new creation can be glimpsed even here and now. Bishop Tabane from South Sudan spoke of all he survived through decades of war, being called “mad” and “stubborn,” remaining with his people for the entire time of war – his whole religious career – and now remains to encourage a community of peace amongst divided South Sudanese. Sister Rosemary from Northern Uganda blessed us with her story about how her community, through a family-oriented vocational training center, has been able to transform the lives of thousands of young women who had been traumatized after being abducted by the LRA.

Liberty and I were able to begin to find people to help us in worship by bringing their gifts of music, reading scripture and prayer, and right from Day One in worship, things turned around. We began to experience the richness of the possibilities for worship when people from the region were brought together. A group of Tanzanians were willing to bring us a Swahili song the next day, and Mama Faith Mlay said that she was feeling led to pray the next day, so we asked her to lead our prayer of intercession the following evening.

Lament

We were inspired and encouraged as we remembered that reconciliation is God’s business and that things can be done to witness new creation. But still tremendous suffering and evil seem to reign in our region. One of the major challenges for Christians here is to honestly name those truths and lament over them. We were able to have a very contemplative, focused worship time early that morning, praying to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, God at his most vulnerable, but also God who is on the throne.

Prayer in the plenary session.

Dr. David Kasali from NEGST was charged with helping us understand how to lament—and the Bible is a rich training ground. He spoke on the first chapter of 1 Samuel, leading up to the lament of Hannah in the temple, stressing that before we bring our lament, we need to thoroughly understand the context. I have studied and preached on that passage several times myself, but I never had such a rich and deep view of the contextual problems Hannah was facing. The African social and political and religious context has much in common with the context of ancient Israel. Dr. Kasali was able to discern 10 different problems facing Hannah, both with a theological understanding, but also feeling a visceral commonality with her. It was an incredible teaching and left me mourning the fact that most of our western divinity schools miss out on so much that scripture has to offer because they do not have African biblical scholars on their faculties. Dr. Kasali’s treatment of 1 Samuel opened new doors into the scriptures, but also powerfully illuminated challenges in the region.

We heard from participants from Congo (DRC), South Sudan and Kenya trying to understand their particular contexts in this time and place. Dr. Kasali then asked Faith Mlay to lead us in a corporate prayer of lament for our region, and God had already prepared her for that assignment – it just came earlier in the day than we had planned. It was a powerful experience to be led by someone who is clearly comfortable walking in step with the Spirit and the prayer was not simply emotional, but a very deep time of identifying with those who are suffering and crying out on their behalf.

Later in the day, we had a meeting with all the Institute participants from Burundi. They had truly been struck by the idea of lament as a positive discipline, something they had never considered. Culturally, “men’s tears run from their eyes into their bellies,” i.e. grown men don’t cry. Theologically, the church teaches people to rejoice rather than mourn at the time of death for those that know the Lord. Politically, those who lost loved ones in 1972 and later crises were forbidden to mourn their dead, as it was considered treason. We all had the feeling that there is a great deal of lament in Burundi, bottled up and turning bitter in people’s stomachs. The discipline of open lament and naming what is wrong may be something that this country needs.

That evening, we had something of an adventure, as one of Burundi team members got more and more sick. I had noticed that he looked pretty ill in the morning, put him in contact with a doctor in our midst and urged him to use the malaria test kit I’d brought with me. It was positive, so I also had treatment to give him, but he was actually too sick to take it. By evening it was clear we needed to take him to a hospital. The one car/driver on campus hadn’t yet arrived back from errands. So as a last resort, we asked a high level Ugandan person on the leadership team to please be his chauffeur. When the patient got in the car, the driver said, “Hey, is that you??” Apparently the two of them knew each other fairly well, and the patient had even eaten in the driver’s house several times in the past. The driver had phone numbers for good doctors, and took the patient straight to a private clinic where he got swift and effective care, even at 10 pm. So God was really at work on Tuesday, doing things in his time. All day, Plan B or C turned out to be far and away a better Plan than the Plan A that I had been hoping for.

Pilgrimage

We rose early and boarded busses on Wednesday morning to drive to the shrines established for the Ugandan Martyrs—the saints carved in the chapel windows I had noticed earlier. Their story is remarkable. In 1886, less than 10 years after the first Anglican and Catholic missionaries arrived in Uganda, a new king came to power. He felt threatened by the new Christian religion, particularly since the pages and slaves in his palace were among those who were the most promising new converts. Apparently, these young men were truly inspired by Jesus, but also by their new identity as human beings with value; when they returned from worship and catechism to the royal court, they were once again treated as slaves. Over several months, tension rose; the king grew more and more uneasy as he heard them praying “Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name. YOUR KINGDOM COME…” Whose kingdom? What threat was this? The king finally demanded all those in his household to declare themselves: renounce Christianity or die. A large group of thirty young men, Protestants and Catholics together, decided that they could not chose loyalty to the king over loyalty to Christ.

Artistic rendering of the execution site at the
Anglican Martyr's Shrine

They were led on a long march to the execution site for commoners. Along the way, the executioners stopped several times to kill one of the young men in an exceptionally cruel way, hoping to scare the others into renouncing their faith. Limbs were hacked off, men were fed alive to dogs, others were burned from the feet to the head, but the group of young men continued to hold fast to their faith. Upon reaching the execution site, the men were sent out to collect the firewood with which they would be burned. Over several days, they were tortured. The chief executioner’s 14-year-old son was among these Christians, and he took the boy to his mother to see if she could convince him to escape and live. But he refused to renounce his faith by fleeing: “Mama, I’m going to heaven. Don’t try to stop me!” he said. Finally, the executioners gave up trying to break the men, and resolved to kill the 25 who still lived on June 3^rd. They were rolled up in reed mats and stacked on top of firewood as the radiuses of a large circle. The fire was started at the center, where their feet all came together – to give them time to reconsider. But rather than crying out in fear, the men continued to sing and encourage one another until they died. Later, even the executioners regretted that they had killed men of such courage. The king who had ordered their death was himself eventually baptized.

The testimony of these martyrs was a powerful catalyst for the growth of the Christian church from that time onward. The missionaries fled, but local leaders continued to teach and train younger people and the church flourished. Eventually, in 1967 the Ugandan martyrs were beatified and a lovely church was built in their honor in the midst of a large park. Every year, a million people come on pilgrimage to celebrate mass there on June 3 and remember the courage of those men who died for their faith. Their testimony continues to impact people who come by foot from as far as Tanzania and Congo. Our group visited the Anglican shrine as well, built at the site were the men were actually burned. It is a more humble establishment, but houses a seminary. We were blessed to share spontaneously in their morning worship service at the end of our visit.

Altar art at the Catholic Uganda
Martyr's Shrine

Personally, I am still grappling with the challenge of the martyrs, their commitment, their willingness to sacrifice, their endurance of horrific physical pain, their sense of unity, their legacy. How does one know the right moment for sacrifice? How much sacrifice? When we pray, “thy kingdom come,” we need to realize that other kinds will be threatened.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it can bear no fruit.” What a gift those men gave to Uganda and the Kingdom of God. We all deeply considered what it means to become a “new we,” finding unity as Christians and humans in spite of what divides us.

Part of our evening worship was led by the team of 10 from South Sudan. Since the South’s independence last July, life for Christians in the North has become increasingly difficult, and martyrdom is a very real and present possibility for them. It was good and sobering to realize that all the above questions apply right here and now in a personal way for Sudanese.

Leadership

The concept of servant leadership is very counter-cultural in Southern Africa, as we have discussed many times in this blog already. So it was appropriate to spend a day on this topic, and try to understand also what it would mean for us to be discerning as leaders, knowing what our nations need to do as we read the signs of the times. Christian leaders need to struggle daily to be both humble and effective, but when they are able to lead following Jesus’ example they have a powerful impact. Dr. Celestin Musekura helped us interact with one another to identify the opportunities and challenges in leadership.

Participants in our seminar group.

One aspect of the week I hadn’t yet mentioned is that most afternoons we were divided up into small groups to meet with a seminar leader on a particular topic. I chose to take the seminar on “Self-Care for Caregivers.” Our teacher was Violette Nyirarukundo, a Rwandese woman we have known since we arrived in 2008. She has been a valuable advisor to MCC, and is a trained Biblically based counselor. I selected that seminar partly just because I wanted to be around Violette and learn from her, and I will admit that it was simply refreshing to go in that room and sit in her calm, gentle – yet spunky – presence. She is a grandmother, full of wisdom, having lived through great trials and yet always laughing. I also felt it would be good to have some more insight into how to care for ourselves in the midst of draining work, and how to help our partners cope as they pour themselves out on behalf of others.

Spirituality

One of the challenges of coping with all these burdens of lament, pilgrimage and leadership is developing spirituality for the long haul. How do we not burn out along the way, or become disillusioned with our fellow travellers when they seem to fall short? We listened to some good teaching on this subject from Chris Rice and Faith Mlay and heard some even more powerful testimonies from people who have been walking in their callings with perseverance for years. One impressive woman is a Tanzanian who was born an albino. In her culture, most albinos are killed at a young age because of fear, hatred, or else for profit (the body parts of albinos have high value in traditional witchcraft). Somehow, she survived physically into her 20s but struggled with utter lack of care from her family and the reality of constant threat and isolation. She attempted to take her own life numerous times and didn’t succeed, but finally heard a clear assurance of God’s love for her. That carried her through school, Bible training and into ordained ministry as an evangelist in her church. She goes into communities and tells people, “bad things happened to people like me in the past, but I’ve forgiven you. So let me tell you about Jesus.”

We ended the day with a special worship service, including another community prayer time and then an opportunity for individual prayer and blessing. I asked the Kenyans to lead us musically to begin with, and they did a suburb job of helping us dance and sing and praise the Lord. By the end of the week, we had added several more very adaptable musicians to our team, and a rotating group of people kept stepping forward to play the chapel’s drums. The theme song for the week, “He Shall Reign,” was written by Tom Wuest, a fellow Regent grad. (See http://brasstrumpetpublishing.com/ for more on his work and to download songs). We had to Africanize the rhythm, include a French translation of the verses, and even change the chorus – at the urging of one of our speakers – to include both the future tense (He shall reign) and the present tense (Yes! He reigns) and remember the tension between already—not yet. I’m not sure Tom would quite have recognized the song by the end of the week, but it was certainly a celebratory closing as people danced out of the chapel…

…And then, I had to run, throw my stuff into a suitcase and jump into a taxi for the airport. It was a shame to leave so abruptly and not savor the end of a wonderful week with new and old friends over a celebration dinner. That was indeed one of the biggest blessings – the encouragement of being with so many motivated, exceptional people.

The return journey was not ideal: my flight left at midnight and I had the prospect of staying the night in the Kigali airport, waiting for an early morning connection to Bujumbura. But I did have the blessing of sharing the cab and the first leg of the journey with Violette, my seminar leader. I was thankful for more time with her, and things went smoothly. I even found a decent couch in Bourbon Coffee shop to lie down on for a few hours. Paul and the kids met me at the airport and it was awesome to see their smiling faces. I thoroughly enjoyed yoga after travelling all night. And that evening some friends invited us to come share ice cream with them. It was a good homecoming, and just enough time to catch a little breath with Paul before he left for Kigali today. More on his adventures next week!

Bonus photo: Moms serving kids at our Saturday ice cream social.

Preparing for a Week Without Mommy

In keeping with the animal themed header of past weeks, here is a rhinoceros beetle Oren is holding that I found floating in the pool while I was swimming last week.  (He is now a pet in our porch planter.)

We have enjoyed our first week with Grandma Jean.  In fact it seems to have flown by.  This is probably due more to the amount of preparatory work we had been doing for the current week than anything else.  Just to bring you up to date (dear reader) we have now entered what will prove to be two of the most challenging weeks of the year.  (I say that with caution as we are only in January!)  But it is definitely out of the ordinary as I will explain:

Last summer during our week retreat together as a couple in Vancouver, Rebecca and I were very intentional in considering ways to make our work and life here more manageable and life-giving.  We have found the cross-cultural work is generally more draining and one needs to be very thoughtful about when to engage and how and when one can rest.  Raising young children is another even more challenging factor. 

Among our more important decisions was to do less travel together.  This is a big change as we tended to do all of our visits upcountry and to Rwanda as a family.  The change is necessary for several reasons including  Oren now being in first grade where there is high expectation of consistent progress in learning at the school (and good attendance).  

We have been putting this into practice over the past 5 months, but it has only entailed small ventures out of Bujumbura to visit partners.   In these two weeks, however, Rebecca is going out of town to Uganda to lead worship at a large regional conference called the Great Lakes Initiative.  She will be back Saturday night and I will leave Sunday morning for a week in Rwanda and upcountry to facilitate a mission team's visit to one of our partners.

This is a big challenge for us as we prefer to do parenting and work in partnership, so we are both being stretched.  

So the days preceding Rebecca's departure on Friday have been quite busy, moreso for her as she has had to do alot of extra work to prepare the actual worship services (music, prayers, etc) for the conference plenary sessions.

Our morning routine the past week was not much changed even with the addition of Jean who got up with us in the mornings, but as we headed off to drop the kids at school and to swim and work, Jean headed off to Hope Africa University.  She is a medical librarian and had made connections there before coming to help build capacity of the library staff while she was there.  I think it has been a very interesting and challenging experience for her to work here.  We have enjoyed hearing about her experiences.  I think the big shock is that the medical school and library have virtually non-existent internet access which makes research very difficult for med students and doctors.  She had hoped to connect the computers to a large medical database available worldwide, but I think she has felt that even getting a half dozen computers usable at all for internet access may be a major accomplishment.

Nonetheless, from what we umderstand her input has been greatly appreciated by staff there as she has also helped them make connections to other organizations like WHO.

We had several social events with other parents last week as well.  Danika and her kids came over Wednesday after school for lunch for a playdate.  That is not the best time of day for David and Oren and they both behaved dreadfully much of the time.  I think, though, as a younger parent it gave her some comfort to see other slightly more experienced parents struggling with some of the same issues she is grappling with as we all attempt to raise our kids to be thoughtful, polite, individuals, in this unusual setting.

I think the highlight of the week though was Thursday evening when Rebecca and I were given a date night by Grandma Jean who offered to stay home with the kids so we could go out.  We went to our favorite 'date' restaurant here called Botanika.  It is located in the center of town but when you enter the inner courtyard and restaurant it really feels like you are completely transported out of Bujumbura, to somewhere in Soho, New York City.  (but alot cheaper!)  It feels like times together as a couple are few, far between and precious.

(Actually we talked to Danika about arranging a date night exchange with her and Scott on a monthly basis, hopefully that will be able to work out in the months ahead.)

Friday was a busy day as Rebecca was leaving by plane.  She was supposed to leave in the afternoon but got a call the night before to tell her her flight had been moved up to midday.  We went to work and I took her to the airport before picking up the kids.  In the afternoon we had several people arrive who were going to be going to the conference by bus or later flights on the weekend.  Yolanda and Jodi came down and stayed the night at our house, and our SALTer Janelle came over as well to visit with Yolanda.  With Grandma Jean we had a very full house with the kids sleeping with me in our room.  

A large crew came over for Sat. morning yoga and then I took Jodi, Felix, and Yolanda to the airport and bus stop respectively.  Jodi had planned to fly but she discovered, when she got to the airport that her plane had also left early only no one had told her.  She made a mad rush to the bus stop with the other conference interpreter and they managed to make it onto two buses headed to Kigali where they hoped to join the second leg of the flight.  (They did succeed.)

Saturday continued to be eventful even after the morning activities.  The main activity though, was completely unscripted.  Yolanda went to the post office Friday to pick up mail, we were surprised to find that all of our Christmas cards and parcels finally arrived.  (It seems like Christmas never ends here!)  It was nice to get all of the beautiful cards from friends (albeit late), and there were about 4 parcels of pre-Christmas items, a chocolate filled Advent Calendar, some ornaments, and a gingerbread house set of cookie cutters as well as candy canes and M and Ms for decorating a gingerbread house. 

Oren was very excited about the gingerbread house kit and set his heart on making another gingerbread house on Saturday.  With a little convincing I agreed to go along with the project and by late afternoon we had built a second gingerbread house within 30 days of our last creation.  (I don't usually do more than one of these per year.)

Other activities over the weekend included helping Grandma Jean plant some flowers in our yard and Sunday after church we took Jean to our swimming pool where Oren wowed her with his jumps off the 3 meter platform.  Sunday evening we invited our Danish friends to eat the gingerbread house with us.  Naja and Aviaja were able to come over and we devoured the roof together.

That pretty much covers the past week except for one "Africa Wins Again" story worth telling (purely for humor.)

The incident happened on Wednesday evening where I am now putting my adult ballet class.  There was recently a change in keys for the room I teach in, and I am often locked out with no one around to open the door when class begins.  This week however, one of the other teachers who takes my class managed to get an original for the lock of her own and offered to make me a copy.  I was really happy because not having to worry about getting in to class every time I teach is one less anxiety.  

I got to the class 10 minutes early and she came 5 minutes later with 2 copies of the original, freshly minted.  We tried them both and were sad to find that neither worked.  She apologized and said she would take the key back the next day.  She pulled the original out of the purse to open the door only to find it also did not work at all.  On closer inspection she found that in fact, during copying the hardware store owner had somehow confused the keys and had made a copy of some key that was not hers and had returned the wrong original and wrong copies to her.  So we were locked out again that evening.  I have to say, as much as one tries to anticipate what will go wrong here, you will always be surprised by something unexpected.

Sometimes surprises are good.  We have had an unbelievable amount of electricity in the past 3 weeks.  I don't think we have had one power failure.  We almost don't know what to do with all that cold refrigerator space since we are so used to using all our left overs and stocking nothing.  I almost feel guilty running the fan all night.

What is interesting to me is that neither I nor anyone else I know really knows why there is good electricity now.  Just like we never really understood the cause of the very low amount of electricity delivery, or the sugar shortage.  We speculate, we share rumors, but there is no source of reliable information.  Living here, I have become aware that it is possible to live without concerning oneself much with the question 'why'.  I don't think many Burundians are much interested in that as so few have any power to changes their circumstances.  One learns to accept negative consequences and enjoy fully changes for the better, no matter how temporary.  

I don't have much confidence that this good electricity stint will last, it will become bad again, but I am enjoying it.  I am starting to live more in the reality of the present which is where people seem to live here, neither looking backward nor forward.

I do fail when it comes to death though.  At least twice monthly one or more of my professional Burundian colleagues is off to the funeral of a young or youngish person who has died or was killed.  I am struck by the fact that no one ever seems to know the cause of death and does not seem to concern themselves much with that question.  One friend lost a 25 year old nephew last week.

"He was fine in the morning then got sick at noon and was dead in the evening."  

I asked if doctors had determined a cause of death.  He said no, but maybe he was poisoned.  Burundians blame many unexplained deaths on poisonings by jealous neighbors but I have no idea whether these suspicions are plausible or not.  I know that the 4 women who died in childbirth in the hospital for 'unknown' reasons were probably not poisoned by a jealous neighbor.  

I admit that I am appalled by the lack of curiosity here.  When I tell colleague that in my country if a young person died in or out of a hospital for 'unknown' reasons, suspicious or not, there would be an investigation and autopsy to determine the exact cause of death in every case.  (Even for an elderly person who dies in a hospital.!)  My colleague shrugs and seems to be asking what all the 'to do' is about knowing the exact reason for something that cannot be changed.

I do, however, look forward to a time when healthcare in this country would be good enough that knowing a cause of death could be used to prevent a similar death in the future, particularly in a hospital. 

For now, I am trying to be less obsessed with trying to ferret out every reason for every inconvenience I experience here, and feeling grateful and less entitled about amenities we take for granted at home. 

If you are praying people, we could use spiritual support the rest of this week for Rebecca and next week for me.  This week has started well enough with me getting the kids ready and off to school for two days now, but there are still three to go then it is Rebecca's turn.

Grandma Jean's Fourth Visit part 1

The family reading Tintin Au Congo, brought by Grandma Jean for a Christmas present.  Disclaimer: I love Tintin adventures but I do not recommend reading this particular Tintin in Africa or even bringing it here.  Not only is it racist, but he also kills an elephant for its tusks and blows up a passive rhino with a stick of dynamite.  (It probably does give a fairly accurate picture of how Europeans of the era saw Africans though!)



I think time must accelerate as one grows older or else these blog posts are getting closer together because the days are growing shorter.  It seems like I was just writing about our awesome vacation when FLASH another week goes by.

We had actually returned last Monday, several days before school started again but we planned to take Tuesday and Wednesday off to settle back into our home and ease back into work.  We were also preparing for our special visitor, Grandma Jean!  This is Rebecca's mom who has now made her 4th trip to see us here in Burundi.

This will actually be a combination work and family visit as she will be with us for most of the month of January.  While all of us are in town, she will be helping to build capacity at the medical library of Hope Africa University, located in Bujumbura.  But in the next 3 weeks both Rebecca and I will have to take trips separately.  Rebecca will be going to Uganda next week to lead worship at a regional conference, then I will be going upcountry the following week to assist a mission team that is visiting the Hope School for the Batwa.

Jean will stay in Buja with me while Rebecca is in Uganda, but will accompany me the following week to Rwanda to pick up the team and then go to Burasira to spend the week at the school with me while Rebecca stays with the kids.  The reason Jean will come with me is that she will help organize the books sent by MCC to the Hope School during the week the mission team is there.

That is the 'why' of her visit, but the 'how' began on Wednesday night with her arrival on Brussels Air from Brussels. The flight was scheduled to arrive at 8pm and although that is a bit late on a school night (actually the night before the first day back) we took the kids because they were too excited to stay home.  We were not the only ones out to meet the flight.  This is a twice per week flight directly from Europe and on this particular night, many of the kids, teachers and families who go to school here were coming back after the holidays.

The flight was on time and we were allowed to enter the airport and wait by the exit from customs.  (With 200 hundred others).  The kids amused themselves by sitting and playing on the dirty tiled floor (with some other kids who were also awaiting family members.)

Jean finally emerged about 45 minutes after the flight arrived with her 3 bags intact.  In the interim I was amused to see almost all the faculty of the Ecole Belge returning including both directors and Oren's teacher.  I guess they did lesson plans on the plane since school was beginning in the morning.

The kids were thrilled to see Grandma Jean when she emerged and hugged her.  We went to the car together and drove home.  There was much anticipation about Grandma Jean opening her suitcases since it was no secret that she was bringing a trove of presents from the cousins and other family in the US.  Despite the late hour we did open some gifts that night.

Actually when we opened the suitcase we found that a container of Equal (artificial sweetener) had popped open (cabin pressure? TSA?)  and it was kind of like her suitcase was full of snow in which the toys were hidden.  (Something Oren would have loved!)

The biggest surprise was a robot dinosaur (#1 on Oren's Christmas list request.) named Cruncher.  Oren had asked for one for Christmas, and we told him that was probably impossible. But our resourceful sister-in-law Gwendolyn hunted down this incredible creature on the internet and sent him on the plane.

Although we did not get the batteries until the next day, it was quite impressive.  With batteries it is even more impressive in that it takes advantage some of the latest advances in sensor technology to do some interesting and hilarious things without a remote control.  He moves around, roars, talks, snickers, dances, can catch food and chomp it up, learns tricks, responds to petting, can act as a motion and sound sensitive watchdog, even 'farts' when you pull his tail.  He also cries like a puppy if you pick him us or knock him over (and yells "I've fallen and I can't get up".  It should provide hours of amusement for the us....er I mean the kids :-)

Jean also brought plenty of chocolate from the US and an overnight in Belgium (home of Godiva chocolates).  Most of the chocolate is gone as of this writing.

We did eventually get to bed on Wednesday night and got up for school on Thursday morning.  The kids did not really seem to mind going back and went without any fuss.  It was good to start back with only two days before the weekend though.

The weekend was enjoyable and we did some touristy things with Grandma Jean during the day.  Saturday we went to Musee Vivante which is the local zoo.  It features some animals from the region including a variety of poisonous snakes, crocodiles, a chimp, leopard and other various and sundry things.  What is always interesting about a third world zoo is the amount of close up interaction you can have with the animals.  No one will stop you, for instance, if you want to jump into the pen with the crocodile and touch it, or pull its tail.  There is also the option of buying a guinea pig for about $8 to feed to one of the animals.

I know it is humane society nightmare, but I confess a certain desire to interact with the animals.  The chimp whose partner recently died is lonely.  When we walked up to the cage (no retaining wall) she reached out and touched David and Oren.  We shook hands then she took my arm and started grooming it.  It was easy to tell she was quite depressed.  What was a bit unnerving was that when I tried to pull away, she held my arm gently but very firmly in a way that made me realize I would not be able to get free until she released me.  I did not panic but let her groom and distracted her a bit with a set of keys in my other hand.  She eventually let go.

The leopard was behind a kind of thick chicken wire and when he put his back against it, one could scratch his back and ears which he seemed to like.  Guides will offer to let you handle the python and other non poisonous snakes in the reptile house.   David had a green banana tree snake draped around his neck much to the horror of some Burundian onlookers.  But he loved it.

All in all it was an interesting experience that is hard to match at the more civilized humane zoos in the 'developed' world.

Saturday night Grandma Jean agreed to watch the kids while Rebecca and I went out and had some time with friends--Tanja and Stephen who are German and working with the Anglican church.  It was great to have some adult conversation.  We got home close to midnight.

Sunday promised to be an interesting day as I had accepted an invitation to go to the opening of a small Mennonite church in rural Bujumbura about 10k out of the city.  I have to admit that I do not really like to attend these events as I am invited in an official capacity and feel a bit like some kind of a big white seated statue whose purpose is to be just that.

I also do not like the fact that these are often very drawn out events that extend well beyond the time of a normal church service, even here.  I did ask the pastor who invited me to please arrange to have me arrive about the time the actual service begins rather than when they 'say' it begins.

He assured me that the church service began at 9am.  I met him at my office about then in a taxi (Rebecca, Jean, and the kids went to our church.)  and we headed to the church down some very difficult roads and arrived about 9:30.  We were of course the first ones there.  About 10 minutes later the musicians arrived to begin set up.  Long story short, we got underway about 11:00 am.  The church was the size of a large bedroom and about 100 people were crammed in there with more folks on the outside. I would say about 80 percent of the attendees were in one of the 4 choirs that each sang a long set, some twice, during the course of he service.

The service ended about 2pm and after sharing a fanta and dropping the pastor at his home, I got back home about 3:15 pm.  It was a very long day.

There was an odd parallel I felt to the experience of having the chimp hold my arm in a gentle but unremovable grasp the day before.  That is how these experiences often feel to me.  There is a desire to keep me as long as possible and while everything is done in a very hospitable way, it is clear that leaving before they are ready to have you go is not an option.

I generally had a good attitude though and watched with interest at the way they did evangelism.  Basically sticking a huge loudspeaker outside the church in a tree and having it blast throughout the commune.  Actually the music was not bad.  By the end of the service there were about 100 people gathered around outside.  The fact that there was a mzungu in attendance made the event even that much more interesting.

When I got home our family went out and enjoyed some time on the beach.  It was good to see our friends Scott and Danika there with their 2 boys, back from Christmas vacation in Canada.

This week we are back into a fairly normal routine with the addition that Jean is going to work as well at Hope Africa University.  The first day went well for all of us.

Just a short note about the weather.  We are in the season they call the little dry season.  It is about a month at the beginning of the year.  It is not like the longer dry season in that the heat and humidity are more extreme.  There are also regular severe thunderstorms and torrential downpours that are short but very violent.

We had two in a row last week, one brought hail that did a lot of property damage in the popular quarters and actually drove several centimeters of water onto our porch and into some of the rooms of our house. I will look forward to the end of this season and the return of the more normal and temperate rainy season this spring.

Bonus Photo:  Ladies' night out.  This is what Rebecca was doing while I was writing the blog this evening.  In the pic is Jeanette (S.Africa), Jean (USA), Naja (Denmark), Rebecca, and Tanja (Germany) at Geny's Cafe in Bujumbura.

Paradise Thy Name is Kigoma

A zebra photographed by Oren when it showed up in our backyard at the cottage at Jakobsen's beach Kigoma, Tanzania. No zoom lens needed.


I fear this entry may sound more like a travel brochure than a blog post, but I assure you, no one is paying me for what I am writing.  I am just offering my humble opinions.

I am prefacing this post in this way because we just got home from an amazing vacation in Tanzania where we spent New Year's Eve.  We actually left Burundi on Tuesday Dec. 27th and returned on January 2nd.  We left in the morning on Tuesday, shortly after our housesitters arrived, (some friends of a neighbor who were visiting Buja.)  It was interesting talking to them as we left.  They live in Kigali and flew down to Bujumbura.  When we asked why they did not drive (since they needed a car) they bristled and said that they heard that Burundi was far too politically insecure to drive a car through.  I think they were shocked to hear that we make the trip back and forth to Kigali every month.  I think generally people in Rwanda, especially expats, have a lot of misinformation about the dangers of Burundi which seem to be exaggerated considerably by Rwandese.

Once they were settled in (and oriented to our dogs) we got into our very packed car (full of groceries and other things we would cook for the week, as well as beach wear and other toys) and headed out the gate.  We met our Danish friends Naja and Thomas on our road in their World Relief LandCruiser, also fully loaded with their two kids and an equal amount of food and vacation accessories.  They were going with us to our vacation spot, which was very good since we had never driven there before and had heard that finding it can be a bit of a trick.

We headed South along the Lake toward the town called Nyanza Lac before heading east into Tanzania.  The road is OK on the Burundi side except for a 25 kilometer stretch of dirt road right before the Tanzanian border.  There is also a bit of a trap here for the inexperienced.  At the beginning of the dirt road in the town Mabanda is where one does all the customs and immigration paperwork and gets passports stamped.  At the end of the 25 kilometers is the border policeman who checks the passports to make sure they are stamped.  But finding the office in Mabanda is a bit tricky and there is NO indication anywhere that indicates this is the process.  Thomas and Naja told us they got caught by this the first time they went to Kigoma.

The border on the Tanzania side was not very complicated and on both sides it is evident that this is a very remote crossing point.  From the border the drive to Kigoma is another hour or so (4 hours of driving all together not counting borders) on a new road.  The Tanzanian countryside here looks a lot like Burundi with rolling hills and mountains.

When we got to Kigoma town we changed some money and bought a few supplies then headed to the Jakobsen Guest House.  This is actually quite an exclusive place.  The Jakobsen's are missionaries who have lived in Tanzanian for many decades and took advantage of a brief opportunity in the eighties when Ex-pats were allowed to buy land in the country.  They basically bought an area of land that forms a large Peninsula falling into Lake Tanganyika.  At this point the Lake is enormous and one can barely see the mountain ranges of Congo on the other side.  The Jacobsen's built a guesthouse as well as a cottage on the land and make it available to missionaries and others who wish to book it.  There are only a few spaces available at a time which means that when you are here, you virtually have the place to yourself.

The cottage has no electricity but it does have a fridge that runs on kerosene, a gas stove, and 3 solar panels that charge batteries for electric lights and an outlet for cell phones, etc. (There is no internet or cell service in this place though.)

The entire place feels like one is on Gillligan's Island.  There are several beautiful secluded beaches, as well as a high plain of savannah above.  There are fantastic boulders and cliffs everywhere and the place has some interesting wild life including monitor lizards, monkeys, zebras, bush bucks as well as innumerable tropical fish.

The cottage is located above the lake and has a very nice verandah that overlooks the lake.  We basically shared the cottage with Naja and Thomas' family.  There were 2 bedrooms in the cottage and a small annex behind that had another bedroom.  They slept in the annex and we did all of our meals together.

There was no restaurant so we cooked all of our own meals.  There was however, some house staff, a young woman who came and did all or our dishes and shopping for fresh stuff (like fish) when we wanted it.

There was something about the beach and the cabin that reminded me a great deal of summers I had spent in Martha's Vineyard, Massachussetts, as far as its pristine quietness, lush forests, and beaches surrounded by low cliffs.  What was most surprising though was the water in the Lake.  When we arrived there was a chop and one could even body surf, but much of the day it was quite still, and much to my surprise CRYSTAL CLEAR!  I have never seen a body of water this clear since a childhood trip to a Greek Island in the Mediterranean Sea.  But this water was so clear it was like swimming in a pool.

In fact, it was perfect for snorkeling and this proved to be fascinating when one went out below the rocky cliffs.  It was the fresh water equivalent of a coral reef, completely teeming with gorgeous tropical fish.  These weren't quite as colorful as marine fish, but they were close.  Some were stripped and others spotted, some with neon blue spots, others with yellow.  I know Lake Tanganyika is known for its variety of tropical fish (particularly cichlids).  I really enjoyed snorkeling there around the boulders and although there are supposedly no crocodiles, hippos or sharks here there was definitely a sublime feeling of terror when I looked down over some of the boulders and saw the bottom drop away 50 feet or more.  (like the drop-off in Finding Nemo.)  It just kind of turns an inky indigo as one peers down.  I did swim down in some areas about 20 feet to the bottom, but the best fish viewing was around the rocks closer to the surface.  I could see, though how this could be the second deepest lake in the entire world.

All of us enjoyed snorkeling and even Oren went out with me one afternoon with his life jacket.  The kids did enjoy jumping off the lower boulders that stuck into the water and swam around them.  Elias and Aviajah are Naja and Thomas' children, Elias is Oren's age, and Aviajah is just more than a year older.  The three played very well together even though the only language they share is French.  Oren just seemed to be so comfortable communicating with them in French, and I was quite impressed.

David would play with them from time to time, but did seem to enjoy spending much of his time watching monkeys, frogs, crabs and other animals on the beach.  He also loved to kick around what I would call the lagoon formed by the rocky cliffs around the sandy beach.  (He still needs his life jacket to do that.)

The parents generally snorkeled, swam laps across the lagoon or played with kids on the rocks.  Sometimes sitting on the sand to sunbathe or read a book.

At meals we would go up to the cottage and prepare things we had brought.  We did have some things made in advance (like pasta sauce) that we served.  We also bought some things that are available locally (like Icecream) that are far less expensive here than in Burundi.

When one was tired of the beach there was the option of going up onto the savannah on the plateau above the cottage.  This was a very interesting area that looked like a game park.  I enjoyed hiking here nearly everyday.  There was the option of bouldering as well, which Oren loved to do with me.  The best part was the spectacular panoramic views one had at almost every part of this plateau as it looked over the whole peninsula.  We went up several times to look for wildlife, particularly zebras.  We did see some bush buck but the zebras alluded us most of the week.

In fact on one disheartening day we spent several hours looking for them as a family only to find, when we got back to the cabin that Naja and Thomas' family saw them in another part of the plain.  Later that afternoon though, when we had just finished our nap at the cottage, Rebecca looked out her window and 3 zebra were grazing in our back yard.  We went out and watched them to the delight of the children, and Oren went quite near to them and snapped a photo of one head on.  (No he did not use a zoom lens here.)

New Years Eve was enjoyable, especially dinner.  We had asked the house staff girl (Salome) to buy us a fish and she got us a giant whole sangala.  Seeing it whole I would describe it as the biggest bass I have ever seen.  It looked like it weighed about 12 pounds.  She cleaned it for us then we went down to the beach and built a fire and grilled it on the fire.  We brought it back up for dinner and I have to say it was the best fish I think I have ever had anywhere.  We feasted that evening.  We did not put the kids to bed but our kids fell asleep well before midnight but Elias and Aviajah did make it to join us in the Danish tradition of jumping (from a chair) into the New Year.  It was a funny evening complete with some South African chardonnay bought in Tanzania.

Since it was rainy season we did have a day or two when it rained up until about midday.  It was really not a problem as the kids had plenty of activities in the house, including some movies on a computer.  But the main indoor pastime was a 750 piece puzzle of a leopard that we did over the course of several days.  It looked very hard, but thanks to a grid of letters on the back of it, we were able to do it in sections and complete it before going back to Bujumbura.  The real bonus was that it was not missing any pieces!  Eventhough it was a used puzzle left to us by some friends.  (Thanks Charles and Val Carr)

I did not write about this vacation chronologically because the days seemed to blend into each other.  I do regret one thing, and that is that the children were not able to sleep in.  They were still up at 6am every morning to do things.  So we did not catch up on much sleep there.

The other thing I would say by way of caution is that in the clear depths it was easy to see snails on the rocks when we swam.  This is a red flag for Bilharzia (shistosomiasis)  To be safe we stopped at the pharmacy on the way out and bought each of us the right dose of Praziquantel.  (We all took it tonight.)

I don't know if there is much bilharzia here, but we decided not to take the risk of letting it go untreated.

We headed back to Bujumbura on Monday.  We decided to take a different route back through Burundi, passing through the provinces of Makamba and Rutana.  It is a pleasant part of the country with better roads, although a longer trip in terms of distance.

Thomas looking down the lagoon.
Notice how clear the water is.

We arrived back in the late afternoon and unpacked.  We found our house had been left in decent condition by our guests and the kids were very happy to be back to see the dogs (David at least.)

We have one last day before school starts and Oren already spent an hour or two doing some homework he was given over the break.  (Practicing his cursive letters and some vocabulary.)

They are excited because tomorrow we have one last special surprise for the end of Christmas:  The arrival of Grandma Jean tomorrow!  More next week.

Gingerbread Houses and Dancing in the Rain

The family gathered around the gingerbread house we built from scratch.



I am realizing that this is going to be the last post of 2011.  I am also realizing that if I do not get it up tonight I won't even be posting this in 2011 as we are preparing this evening to go on a one week vacation to a mission house in Kigoma, Tanzania.  It is supposed to be a very reclusive cabin by the beach that is fairly rustic (no electricity and no internet). So I am going to put up a concise story of the week's events as it is getting late and there is much to do.

I will say that much of the week seemed to be dedicated to Christmas related activities.  The kids did have school Monday through Wednesday, Oren did karate on Tuesday and then he and I went out Christmas shopping for some sidewalk chalk for David.  (That is his favorite thing ever these days, he has used up about 3 boxes.)

Wednesday I taught my last ballet class and while we did work Thursday as well, we split the day since the kids were out of school.  Friday was given over to preparing for our Christmas contradance party.   I think these bimonthly parties are essential to get Rebecca and I to clean and reorganize the house.  Particularly to get all the stuff that accumulates on surfaces back to its proper places.

Jodi was with us for part of the week but headed for a retreat upcountry on Thursday, but Yolanda arrived into town so we had her as a guest for Friday and part of Saturday.

The Christmas party was one of our best to date.  We cleared out the living room once again and prepared several dances for the group to do.  We had a very large number of people, most of them missionary friends, but among the newcomers was Oren's teacher from last year Mme. Crystelle and her daughter Pauline (4th grader).  There were alot of kids and it was a good mix of francophones and anglophones so no one felt left out. Pauline really liked the dancing and she asked us to repeat "Cotton-Eyed Joe" about 4 more times at the end of the evening.

 We ended the main set of dances before dinner with the Virginia Reel (Strip the Willow).  But I must add that through most of that time we had one of the worst downpours I have ever seen here.  Our backyard had about a foot of water in it and the rain pounding on the roof competed with the sound of the music indoors. A few people, who hoped to come late, were actually prevented from getting to us by the rain. Fortunately we stayed relatively dry indoors although some of the guests did have to help us bail and squeegee off the porch a few times.

Dinner was a potluck and the offerings were exquisite, featuring dishes as far-ranging as Mexican and Indian.  After dinner we did a bit more dancing and finished by singing Silent Night together in the languages of all represented there.  English, French, Danish, Dutch, Kirundi.

When the 45 or so guests left, Rebecca and I took several hours to clean the house up that night and got to bed close to midnight.  But it was good to leave the house in good order.

David and Oren woke up at the crack of dawn as usual.  They were excited that Saturday was going to be a day for the family at home.  We had planned to follow in the tradition of Rebecca's family and do baking on Chistmas Eve day.  The project that Oren was really looking forward to was a gingerbread house.  We try to do one every year and we have been able to have someone bring out a kit just before Christmas to help us make it.

This year however, no one was coming at the right time so we did not have any pre-cut gingerbread pieces and ready-made icing and selection of decorative candies.  So we had to 'kick it old school' Burundian style.  We were able to get the ingredients for gingerbread easily enough, but Christmas candies such as candy-canes, or any peppermint for that matter, does not seem to exist here.  I ended up buying several rolls of fruity menthos that were more pastel-ly than I would have liked.  I found some green candies that were spearmint and looked like gum drops.  Oren made little bushes around the house with them.  Unfortunately I think they were either breath mints or something for smokers to help them quit smoking because they tasted terrible, like a super strong cough drop.  But they did look nice.

I made the royal icing with powered sugar Rebecca bought in the Asian Quarter.  It is necessary for mortaring and decorating the house with snow.  We also had some other icing that was green and red.

Oren and I started work on the house by cutting a pattern while Rebecca made the gingerbread dough.  We cut out pieces on wax paper and cooked it right on the wax paper.  The gingerbread came out fine although it took 3 cookie sheets to cook all of the pieces.

We assembled it with the icing and it held together well.  I tribute this partially to my ingenious idea of using 2 craft sticks as rafters so the roof could rest on something while the icing was drying.  When it was fairly hard we decorated it.  Actually Oren did pretty much all of the decorating.  It was a very good job in my opinion.  We finished by noon.  We had a great sense of accomplishment.

Rebecca continued making several other kinds of cookies to take to a party we were going to on Christmas day.  Since we had no staff on Saturday, the clean up was enormous.  We don't have a dishwasher and we had about 3 loads of dishes to do after this was all done.  (Rebecca did them. but I did the same amount today, Monday).

The kids were ready for bed fairly early Christmas eve, but we let them open one toy that evening.  We also skyped both of our families and had some great video conversations as the network was working great that night.  This is the first time in many, many, years that I have not been at a Christmas Eve service.  But since Christmas was on a Sunday, our church was not having one.

This makes some sense here as Christmas day is seen as a big Holiday and would be the more important time of worship rather than Christmas Eve (as we see it in the West.)  In fact, Christmas is seen as a day to try to schedule special celebrations.  There were an enormous amount of Christenings, Baptisms, and Weddings this past weekend.  (I can imagine this is a hard day for pastors, especially because all Protestant Baptisms in Burundi are total immersion in Lake Tanganyika and nothing else is acceptable.)

It is a striking contrast to my own sense of Christmas day, which tends to be more of a private family time.  Here it is really a festival day and we even had a Birthday cake and juice at church after the service on Sunday while the children played games together.  (Rebecca brought the parachute for her Sunday School class.)

The kids were very excited and woke us up about 5:45.  We were going to wait to open gifts after church, but they could not wait.  Oren exclaimed many times "Look at all the Presents!"  What was pleasing to me was to see that he was referring to a stack of about a dozen small gifts for all four of us.  It really looked quite modest compared to what I remember in my childhood.  But he saw it as quite a lot.

Among the favorite things were 2 remote control cars I bought at the Chinese version of K-mart (T-2000) for about $10 each.  They worked fairly well until Noel our younger dog caught David's and chewed off a wheel.  (By the way, it was Noel's Birthday --1 year on Christmas.)  She is now much bigger than her mother --Bella.

Sunday afternoon, after church, we went to yet another party.  This one at our friend's Astrid and Travis.  They have recently moved into a house vacated by our friends Thomas and Naja.  It is a great house and we saw many of the people that had been at our party as well as friends from church.

Travis and Astrid had made up several very fun games for kids and adults to play.  The best was probably one where you had to try and get dressed on the trampoline while someone was bouncing you around.

We had another pot luck then a White-Elephant gift exchange.  It was one of the more unusual ones I have been to as someone had snuck in some currency into some of the gifts, there was a $100 and a $50 bill.  (The kids really went for the money which was kind of funny.)  I think a little girl ended up with the $100.

We left late in the evening and fell into bed.  I can't believe I am up late again but we have to get packing as we want to leave by 8am for our vacation in Tanzania.  I think we are almost done though which is good since I am falling asleep at the computer.  (sorry no proof reading)