Vacation Countdown and Parched in the Dry Season

Grandma Jean teaching Oren how to make banana bread. He loves to cook, almost as much as he loves eating!



If I did a poll to determine how many people, in preparing for a two week vacation, ended up being stressed to the point of thinking a vacation isn’t really worth the bother at all, I wonder what I would find? We are in the last two days of preparation for our trip to Kenya, and the ‘to do’ list before leaving is quite daunting. Among the most difficult things is trying to find host families for our three “SALTers”

(SALT is an acronym—sharing and learning together, for an MCC program that invites young singles out of college, to work for a year in a country with MCC.) One of the interesting perks is living with a local host family which allows for a very in depth cultural experience.

It is a great program in theory, but here in Burundi, where everyone, due to the years of war and trauma, all have houses full of orphans and poor relatives, it is hard to find someone with a room and means to host someone for 11 months. The good news is that we have finally been able to identify 3 very interested prospective families, but we now only have one day to work out all the logistics with them. When we get back from vacations, the SALTers will be upon us.

The challenge of a vacation though, is to know when to say, with integrity: “I have done all I possibly can, I will need to trust God with the rest.” I am beginning to think that the most important function of a vacation is to remind us that we are not as irreplaceable as our pride might lead us to believe.

That said: It was a pretty busy week of work and travel. But we did have a chance to do some special things that we enjoy as well.


I have mentioned in an earlier blog that we are in the dry season now, and that means about 3 months without any rain. I would say the worst of it is the amount of dirt and dust on everyone and everything, but I have found something more difficult: water shortages. We have found that the water is cut off everyday for 4-6 hours, beginning about 8am. This has made it very difficult for our staff to clean, wash dishes, or do laundry. We do try to fill buckets in the afternoon and evening and get our showers done before 8 am, but it is rough. Add to that the fact that we do not have power from midnight to 7 am, and now no water in the day, and you can get a sense that life is ‘inconvenienced’ to put it mildly.

We do not have any immediate plans to change the situation in the near future, but if it gets any worse, we are thinking about proposing to the landlord that we use a month of rent to build a water tower.

Grandma Jean has been here this week as well, and in the future, I might advise people to visit us during the rainy seasons. It is not the best side of Burundi that is presented in this season.

We spent the first half of the week in Bujumbura doing work while Oren was at summer school and Jean looked after David. Much of the work was trying to find host families, but we also took care of several bureaucratic matters like paying phone bills and getting car documents so we could travel. I am happy to say that Rebecca has successfully been able to negotiate the bureaucracy in both of these milieus. Her secret? She straps David onto her chest in the front pack and walks into the office. It is really hard for even the most jaded civil service bureaucrat to ignore a mzungu woman with a cooing (or screaming) baby.

We did as much as we could through Wednesday, then on Thursday morning we headed up to Rwanda to check up on our service workers Ruth and Krystan, and our partners. Ruth and Krystan had just come back from orientation in the US and were glad to be back to work again. We enjoyed seeing them and had dinner with them on the first night of our arrival.

I was happy to find that even with Jean in tow, we had no trouble at the border with visas, and passed through without incident. Part of the reason for that is that we go through so often that we actually do know all the border guards on both sides by name. Several of them even have pictures of David on their cell phones!

We stayed at the Africa New Life Guest House, much to Oren’s delight. He loves “Miss Cindy and Jerry-monster” the proprietors and anyone who happens to be there is expected to be a playmate. On this trip, there were about a dozen youth from a church in Arizona that had come for 10 days of work with a local church. They were happy to play with Oren, and, as you can see, Oren engaged one young man extensively in playing his version of cribbage. (Which involves drawing cards then leap-frogging pegs over each other down the board.)

Although I have a nice picture of me with the kids at the hammock in the guest-house, it gives more an impression of relaxation than I actually experienced there. We had a lot of work to do I a short amount of time.

We did, as I said, have the opportunity for several meals out, and this group picture is from our visit to the Rwandan Khanna Kazanna. I am happy to say that both the Kigali and the Bujumbura branches have pucca Indian food! It was a great meal, and we were joined by an old friend of Jean’s who happened to be currently working in Kigali named Shirley Randall. (They were in Bangladesh together for many years, and sang in the same choir.)

We spent Friday and Saturday working and shopping, then headed back to Bujumbura after a 7am church service on Sunday. (It was led by our partner Pastor David Bucura.) We were on the road by 8:30 am and got home in the early afternoon.

At this point, though we are fretting about how to get everything we need to get done and back for 2 weeks in one short day. Please pray that the preparation for vacation does not cause us a nervous breakdown.

I am planning to write blog entries from Kenya in the next 2 weeks, but we will be in some rustic places and a game reserve where I might not have internet, so don’t be surprised if I miss a week or two.