Lying Low and a Trip to Kigali

Sunday evening:  Paul and kids enjoying a movie after a very long drive home from Kigali. 

This is one of those weeks where last Monday seems like last year.  I don’t know why my memory seems so hazy about the week’s beginning.  Perhaps because so much has happened in a few days, or maybe because we have just returned to Bujumbura from a long exhausting ride from Rwanda.

But I will do my best to sum up and maybe with the aid of Rebecca, Don, and Rosaura, I will not leave out anything important.  

As those of you know who have read the last week or so, we are currently hosting Don and Rosaura and their 3 year old daughter Gabriella from Poughkeepsie, NY visiting from our home church.  We have continued to enjoy sharing Burundi and seeing it fresh through their eyes--that is, by people who are new to both the country and even the continent of Africa.  

We have continued to keep them busy and during the first part of the week Rosaura was asked to do another tour of the campuses she visited last week to give her talk on a Christian perspective on environmental stewardship.  She did comment to us that she is used to speaking to a group about once a month and here she has already given about 9 lectures over 10 days.  (and next week promises to be even fuller.)

The lectures had been going on without a hitch until Tuesday evening.  I finished teaching my final ballet class that afternoon (we ended with a little showing for the parents which the kids loved.) and I was planning to accompany Don and Rosaura to an evening lecture on the campus in Kiriri, the upper part of the City.

As  was leaving the ballet class, a nervous mother passed me and said “Don’t go to Kiriri, the police are arriving there and there has been fighting.  They are arresting the leader of the FNL." (opposition political party)  I was surprised by what she said and began to drive home when Zenon called me and told me that the lecture at the campus had been cancelled because of an attempted arrest of the leader of the FNL in Kiriri.

I drove home to tell Don and Rosaura about the cancellation, then Rebecca and I began listening to the radio to figure out what was going on.  (We also called Zachee.)  From what we could piece together, a large group of police had gone to the leader of the FNL’s house to arrest him, but he had alluded them.  In the meantime, his followers had gathered there to blocade them, there had been fighting and shooting and several fatalities.  The official press releases however did not seem to be confirming any of this.  (Don and I were driving to prayer Wednesday morning, however, and saw the police blockade in Kiriri as can be seen in the photo below.)

This is, for Rebecca and I, another indication of the growing instability, especially in Bujumbura, surrounding the Presidential election.  The most unsettling part of this has been a nightly barrage of grenade attacks.  3-5 per night at seemingly random nightclubs and other meeting places.  Several people have been killed.  The strange thing is, no one is taking credit, and the motive is very unclear except to create instability.  But who that benefits is debatable.  Some say the opposition, and some say the ruling party.  Anyway, the official crackdown on the FNL is ostensibly related to these grenade attacks.

We have received advisories from the US Embassy to not go out to restaurants at night, and we are taking that advice.  My own opinion is that these attacks are aimed at being disruptive, but I do not believe ANYTHING will gain traction to pull the population into war again.  I get the sense that people are sick of war and are just waiting for these elections to be over.  There seems to be little question that the ruling party will win, and I do sense that the President is a popular man.

But coming back to hosting guests in this country, it does put us in the uncomfortable position of trying to assure Don and Rosaura that everything is alright, while admitting that we need to take precautions--like not going out to restaurants at night.  For us this is still within the range of normal (remember all the Homeland Security alert level warnings of yore in the US?) but it is not ‘normal’ in the way that we would necessarily consider an ‘acceptable risk’ in our own culture back home.

We also have the responsibility of letting the MCC team know what precautions to take, we spent much of the week fielding calls from our SALTers and other volunteers about what they should be doing or avoiding.

So we are balancing assurance with caution here and wishing that it was a more secure time for a visit, but on the other hand, I believe God will use this time and experience that he is subjecting our visitors to, to develop them spiritually as well as us.   They will have some stories to share about life here in difficult times without a doubt.

Despite the insecurity at night, the days here are perfectly normal and no one acts as if anything out of the ordinary is happening.  Kids are all in school, I continue to go swimming and to work, traffic is as bad as ever, etc.

That said, we have not missed the opportunity to entertain our guests, and have done many things around town during the day, and at home.  Gabriella, for instance, enjoyed cooking with Marceline and learned how to make tortillas.  We also watched a couple movies as two couples after putting the kids to bed at night.  The kids have also really enjoyed playing together.

---Break----
I need to interrupt the flow here to report on another unusual event.  I got a call on Wednesday morning from one of Brandon’s housemates saying she needed to talk to me.  I met her that evening with Brandon where she told both of us, to our surprise, that her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and would be moving to Bujumbura immediately and needed Brandon’s room for the rest of time he was to be here.  So the next morning Brandon packed his bags and moved over to our house with us.  He has one month left in his term so we will not look for another live in, and he will probably house sit for Nathan and Lara Horst while they are on vacation in the next several weeks.

In a way, Brandon’s arrival was fortuitously good as it meant we had a housesitter while we were in Rwanda.  We had had plans to drive up to Rwanda this weekend and did not feel that anything about the security situation here necessitated changing them.  Our plan was to leave Friday after school.  The main reason we were going was to help Ruth and Krystan get ready to leave for Kenya on Sunday where they will have their baby.  We got to Kigali Friday evening without incident.

Actually there was one small matter of us still waiting for Oren to get his resident visa.  All the rest of our family has had ours for weeks, but they lost Oren’s dosier somewhere in their Orwellian filing system.  (Don’t get me started on French bureaucracy and filing again.)  Suffice it to say that although we are one family and always apply together for visas, they have four separate portfolios, one for each of us, that are not even filed alphabetically.  (Maybe by visa #)  Anyway, everytime we need to renew it is an arduous process of waiting and wondering if we will get all 4, they invariably are never finished at the same time and someone’s folder is always lost or left on the desk of some supervisor waiting for a signature while he is on an extended vacation and has locked his office.

OK enough about that.  Zachee managed to get the passport out of immigration about 10 minutes before we left town.  Otherwise I would have had to go alone.

Making the trip up to  Kigali with 2 families which include 3 small children is about as hard as it sounds.  Fortunately they were about as well behaved as they could be.  We made a couple stops and they really enjoyed running around at the border.

In Kigali, we were sorry to find that the Africa New Life Guesthouse where we usually stay was booked up.  So we stayed at a place closer to Ruth and Krystan called Amani.  It was not bad, not very western, but there was an attempt to have hot water.

We all went out together with Ruth and Krystan on Friday night to the starbucks like coffee house called Café Bourbon.  It is crazy to see people out everywhere (in Kigali and Bujumbura) watching the World Cup, bars and restaurants are all packed during gametime and there are large screen TVs set up everywhere.

We got back to the guest house late and got the kids to bed.  The next day we had a nice breakfast at the guesthouse then went into town to do banking and shopping.  Again it was interesting to see this all through Don and Rosaura’s eyes as we have become so used to this routine.

We had dinner with Ruth and Krystan again on Saturday.  This time we went to a new Indian restaurant.  Long story short, the food was excellent and the kids were reasonably well behaved.  We got back to the guesthouse worn out and ready for bed and looking forward to being back home Sunday.

We did say goodbye to Ruth and Krystan one more time and said a prayer with them before heading out of town.  On the way out we took Don and Rosaura to the Nyamatta Genoside memorial.  A very disturbing sight, but probably worth seeing once in one’s lifetime.  It is not necessary to go twice.

We continued on to Bujumbura, but mada a brief stop along the way to meet Jodi who came to a nearby town on our route to get some supplies from us.

We will see her again in about 2 weeks.

The next week promises to be busy with both Rebecca and I preaching and D and R leading a 3 day Bible study.  Please pray for our work and continued security in the country.  The Presidential election is next Monday.

One thing I will say about having friends visit, it gives us a chance to share our life with them, but it also reminds me how much I miss the communities I left in the Hudson River Valley, shout out to PUMC, small group, KAIROS and Vassar dance dept.  Looking forward to visiting briefly this summer.