Grandpa Henry's Arrival

David enjoying a precious box of Cheerios he found in Grandpa’s suitcase. Also note that he received his first haircut this week!


I am aware that while I began doing this blog for personal reasons, and committed to doing it weekly as a spiritual discipline (of sorts), I have now found that there are many who are awaiting to hear the news of this next installment, especially because they know this is a particularly interesting week.

Well you need not be in suspense any longer. Grandpa Henry arrived today safe and sound after spending a week at a conference in neighboring Uganda. We went to the airport at 8:30 am, and our timing was such that he was walking out the door of the terminal as we pulled up. This was just as well, as security remains extremely tight and the closest we are allowed to be to the terminal building is by our car in the parking lot.

Dad was very, very tired, having not slept the entire night before. We were on our way to church so we took him with us, but only stayed for about half of the service before returning home to let him sleep. (He was introduced and brought greetings from Valley Baptist Church to our church.) Many remembered him from his previous visit here in March.

Oren and David were very happy to see him and were thrilled about all of the ‘goodies” he brought. (Many have been stashed away by us for Christmas.)


This was the culmination of quite a busy week though, and I want to try to note some of the highlights. Apologies for the brevity of each day as I recount, but again, I am waiting until late Sunday evening which means I want to finish it quickly.

On Monday, we began our weekly routine well with both Rebecca and I going swimming before work while Grammy watched David. Work went fairly routinely--we are very focused on helping our partners think strategically about ways they might be involved in sensitizing people for a non-violent election.

After school, however, four of Oren’s friends came home with him to play at his house. (Two sisters and a brother as well as Timmy.) I was in charge of refereeing the group until my Kirundi lesson at 3:30. It was not too bad, but it was a challenge keeping all five engaged at the same time.

Speaking of Kirundi, I have reached new levels of frustration with trying to remember all of the vocabulary. One problem is that often they have many words for relationships that we express in a single word. For example: the word father is ‘Data’, if it is my father, ‘So’ if it is your father, and ‘Se’ if it is his father. The same is true for mother, but the words are Mata, Nyoko, and Nyina. The word is different based on whether the subject is 1st 2nd or 3rd person.

There is really no single word for brother or sister. But there is a word for a boy’s older brother, or a girl’s older sister: ‘mukuru’ and the younger sibling of the same sex is ‘murumu. A boy’s sister or a girl’s brother is a completely different word though. Birth order seems to be much more important than gender.

I suspected that the different ways of expressing these relationships that we use the same word for in English was due to the role played by older siblings in relationship to younger. When I asked Zachee, he confirmed by suspicion and told me that there is an expectation that older siblings play a parental role (especially with regard to financial responsibility) for younger ones.

I would have had, for example, as the oldest brother, some or all the responsibility of paying for schooling (or college ) of my two younger brothers if I was Burundian.

As a westerner, it is really hard to get a good grasp on the economy of an extended family structure. I admit that I like the idea of the nuclear family, in which parents are the primary providers of financial support for children, and older children are not expected to have parental roles over younger ones (especially financial). I am trying to imagine, as a young Burundian, trying to get married and start my own family, how challenging it would be to realize that I already had 4-6 children (in terms of younger siblings), that I am expected to take care of. This does not include, of course, financial obligations to my parents either.

I suppose it is a cultural bias, but the idea of a family system in which a child is not normally financially responsible for his/her parents and siblings sounds quite liberating.

Enough about Kirundi---but as I have said before, knowing the language can tell one a lot about social relations in a culture. I only wish I was getting better at using it conversationally.

Tuesday I spent preparing for Wednesday. I was invited to do a lecture on transformational leadership as part of a conference organized by one of our partners, Harvest for Christ. Fortunately my Dad sent me some material to draw together a lecture, especially some things from the book “The Fifth Discipline” by P.M. Senge.

I felt I did a good talk tailored to the Burundian context and I hope it might have been inspiring to the young leaders who were there. Most of them were heading one of their own NGOs. I was worried that I would have trouble filling an hour and a half, but in fact I went over to almost 2 hours. This was not so great for Yolanda (SALTer) who was also presenting right after me on how to do strategic planning.

From what I saw she was a really good teacher and kept their interest even though some of the material is a bit dry and even hard to translate cross-culturally.

Thursday I taught ballet as usual in the evening, and I am realizing more and more the necessity of having a teachers assistant. I don’t know if I am losing my touch, or if I am forgetting how unruly a group of 25 little girls can be.

I did miss out on a fun outing/play date for Oren, Rebecca, Grandmother, and his friend Zack Johnson. They went to Cercle Hippique. I have talked about this place before, but it is one of these vestiges of the colonial era. An old European style riding club. While it is very run down, it still has very impressive majestic old stables and riding grounds as well as a nice restaurant where you can get something to drink.

Oren, Rebecca, and Grammy met Zack his brother Micah and Mother Joy there. They enjoyed playing and David was positively fascinated with the horses, which he had seen on a Baby Einstein video, but never in real life.

Oren admired the horses then went up to one of the groomsmen and told him that he wanted to ride one. Later, as Rebecca and the kids were about to leave, two of the men led a saddled horse up to Oren and asked if he wanted to mount. He accepted without hesitation and apparently had an expression of immense pride swelling up when they put him on the horse and gave him a very smart-looking helmet to wear!

He looked like a diminutive heir-apparent of the British Monarchy with his shy grin and two accompanying horse groomsmen.

Friday was a busy workday, divided between multiple meetings and visiting potential houses for new workers that are coming to join in a couple weeks. We have not found what we are looking for at this point.

We treated ourselves to an episode of “The #1 Ladies Detective Agency” that night as my mom had brought it with her from the US. (Gift from Grandma Jean). Since we do not have television here it is nice to watch. (Not to confuse anyone, there is TV here, cable and satellite with anything you could want, but we choose not to have it.)

Saturday was a great day! It was our turn to host the bi-weekly potluck that we do with our Greman, Danish, and American missionary friends. We had decided to have a folk dance as part of it. (…in the tradition of the former tenants of the house, Val and Charles Carr.)

We moved all the furniture out of the living room and put it on the verandah. This turns the spacious living room into a veritable ballroom. Rebecca and I rehearsed some dances to teach. We had invited about 30 people over, 15 adults and 15 kids. It was a very big event.

I am happy to say it went really well, and we are hoping to do it again. We had quite a mix of age groups from young children to young adults (SALTers) and several families, including Astrud and Travis, Thomas and Naja, and Zachee and Bridget. There were some other from the women’s Bible study that Rebecca attends as well.

Between the trampoline, dvds, folk dancing, etc. I think we managed to have something for everyone. People really did like the dancing and we made dancing the “Virginia Reel” a prerequisite for anyone wanting to eat dinner.

That is about all I can say right now. I will mention that electricity has been better now that the rainy season has refilled some of the rivers and we are getting more hydro-electric. Many say that our power problems are over. But, the electricity just went off again here about 10 minutes ago, so I am glad we have our solar battery well charged.

Next week…DSL, we hope…