Farewell to a Faithful Friend and Coworker

Oren and David cultivating Jodi's garden with Rebecca and Jodi.

Another  late Sunday night blog entry but I really want to finish this before morning because I am heading to Congo tomorrow and I want to post something for this past week before writing about the next one.

I suppose I should begin with the sad news.  Many of us have lost an old friend, a trusted companion, a faithful coworker.  This week I stood by helplessly while my trusty Mac book suddenly and unexpectedly suffered what I can only call a massive stroke and died.  I cannot just say it was a computer.  It was truly an extension of my memory and an archive of many years of work in my life, not to mention contacts, family photos, and thousands of pages of writings from grad school to the present.  Not that much of this isn’t backed up, but none of it is convenient, in fact some is on the other side of the world.  So there is a real sense of loss here. 

It happened, as I said, very suddenly.  I was turning on an iTunes movie for David and it suddenly froze.  When I restarted it, a white screen came up with a ? on it.  I did all the procedures I could by way of first aid, but to no avail.  It appears that the entire OS is corrupted.  I would have remained mystified by the cause, but I talked later this week to Robyn who used the same Chinese power strip my computer was plugged into.  She said hers was acting haywire and she unplugged it.  So now I have both the loss and the guilt that I probably fried my own computer. 

So this was a sad week and I hope that some data might be recoverable from what might be left of the hard drive, but I won’t know that until we get home to the US for 4 weeks this summer. (mid-July to mid-August.)

This happened on Monday evening.  Fortunately it was not indicative of how the rest of the week would go.  In fact, if anything, it did give me pause to consider the things I am grateful for.  Our family is in good health right now and I have been aware of how this job has been such a great opportunity for Rebecca and I to share both work and parenting, AND for us to share our work with our children.

This happens especially when we go on field visits.  This week we decided to combine two trips into one by going to Kigali on Wednesday, spending 2 days there, then heading home through Burasira to visit Jodi. 

The visits were all very good.  We headed out to Kigali in the afternoon and arrived about 7:30 pm.  We had forgotten that it now gets dark around here as early as 6pm, so the last hour or so was slow going.  (People walk along the edge of the road and they are almost impossible to see.)  We did have a good visit with Ruth and Krystan though.  We just missed the SALTers by a day who had come up for a visit the day before to see some of MCC Rwanda’s projects.  They also got to enjoy visiting with Ruth and Krystan as well. 

We came here with a load of baby supplies as Ruth and Krystan are expecting.  (It is not a secret anymore.)  They are, at this point planning to go to Kenya for the delivery of the baby then return to Rwanda.  (I do not remember the date.)  In a way, this should eliminate the complications arising from the timing of the baby corresponding to the Rwandese Presidential election.

We also visited our partner Friends Peace House and discussed the upcoming election.  Generally people are quiet and afraid. That seems to be one of the main contrasts right now between Rwanda and Burundi.  Whereas Burundi has 44 political parties vying for power, Rwanda effectively has one.    In Burundi we are seeing daily political rallies as large groups of partisans sing and shout their loyalty to their party, in Rwanda it is pretty quiet. But in both cases I do sense that fear, not excited anticipation is the real motivator of activity or lack thereof in these two countries.

I have come to understand the anxiety that accompanies an election in these Sub-Saharan African countries.  I mentioned last week that most political parties are former militia groups.  But also, voting is often either a matter of coercion or bribery.  People vote in order not be killed or because they have been paid to do so.  (Often beer is a good form of bribery.)  In fact, one student intimated to me, that the large political marches for different parties that I see, are often made up of the same people who have been offered some form of reward for participating. 

All this to say that beloved as we hold our western ideals of democracy, we are naïve to think that exporting them leads to pluralistic societies where all voices are heard.  Often, I think, it simply legitimizes a tyrant in the eyes of the international community. 

But perhaps I am being too cynical.  At any rate, MCC is doing its small part to make sure that the voting process is transparent when it happens.  In fact Ruth and Krystan were in the process of writing a grant to the Canadian embassy to help get funding for some election monitoring training for the Friends Church.

It was a good visit and Ruth and Krystan seemed to be doing very well.  Oren and David were, of course, thrilled to be at the guest house where we usually stay, and even liked shopping at the big mall with the Nakumat supermarket, which is the closet thing to an American supermarket we have in these parts.  We stocked up on items we can’t get easily in Burundi and left Rwanda on Friday morning with our loaded with supplies for us and Jodi as well.

The drive to Burasira was surprisingly smooth.  One  of the terrible dirt roads we take coming from the north to get to her house had been graded recently and we got there in good time with relatively little back pain.

Oren and David were again thrilled to visit her house, especially since it is right next to the side of the seminary where they keep livestock.  It was hard to restrain David from running out the gate every hour to see the cows, rabbits, and pigs in the nearby stables.

We also caught frogs and other smaller animals to play with.  (The frogs are often in the house in the morning and one has to be careful when walking around barefoot in the morning not to step on then.)

Two things that are great passions of Rebecca’s that are being inherited by the children are the love of gardening and bird watching.  Oren and David spent hours digging in the garden, weeding, filling the compost pile, pulling carrots and doing other garden activities while they were there.  They were covered with mud most ot the time.  The only problem with that being that Jodi’s house has no hot water, just icy cold for bathing.  And the climate upcounty is considerably cooler than Bujumbura.

On Saturdy night we had dinner with the priests as we have not had occasion to do so for quite a while.  It was very nice to see them and they were delighted to see how much the kids had grown.  Oren was quite polite and greeted them all in French and shook hands as is the proper Burundian custom.

We headed back down to Bujumbura Sunday morning and got home around 2.  We met Yolanda and Robyn who were housesitting for us and debriefed us on their Rwanda trip and the field visits they did.  They had had a great time and had bought some local pottery, baskets, and fabric, much of it from groups that were doing income generating activities through our partners.

In the afternoon we went to a birthday party for Zack Johnson, one of Oren’s friends.  The kids had a lot of fun and the party had a superhero (Batman) theme.  Among the activities was a decorate-your-own cape contest, (which they wore for the rest of the party) as well as a piñata, scavenger hunt, and Batman birthday cake. 

Jesse Johnson’s family has been in Burundi for about 4 genereations so he grew up here,  He speaks fluent Kirundi and is a great resource for cultural information about the country and its people.  I always enjoy the chance to visit them.

We got back to our house bathed the kids and put them to bed.  David was far too hyper to go to sleep.  He is really an extremely enegetic little guy who would happily spend the whole day jumping on the trampoline and running around in the yard well into the night if we would let him.  (Oren usually konks out about 8:30).  But the nice thing to see is that they can play together now and seem to enjoy doing so.  This was helpful when we were trying to talk with Jodi or Ruth and Krystan during our field visits.

It is late and I need to get to bed.  Monday morning I head off to Congo (Bukavu) with Zachee after dropping Oren off at school.  I regret that this visit falls right on the heels of our last trip as my back is a serious mess.  I never would have guessed that the greatest work hazard of a missionary is a slipped disc and severe back pain, but driving landcruisers over terrible roads is really taking its toll.  I will be glad to get back to Buj for a swim on Wednesday.

In Memorium

Paul's Macbook 2007-2010, 

RIP