Rebecca's Missions of Mercy

Jal and Oren at Ubuntu (a restaurant by the lake) following the resident tortoise around.


I am finding that this blog actually has some utility and is not just a chronicle of our time here in Burundi.  This past week I was contacted by someone who arrived in town recently with her family.  Her husband has a 2 year assignment here.  She wanted to get information about how to connect with other families and what to do with young children here.  She had done some research on the internet on Burundi and this blog popped up.  Rebecca and I were very happy to give her and her children a brief orientation to Burundi and introduce her to some of our friends.  She and her kids even went to church with us this morning.

I know I have been admonished by friends about making this post a public forum, and the potential dangers of making it searchable on the internet.  But I think if we spend too much time trying to prevent bad things from happening, we may also prevent any good things from happening.

The other good thing about this week was it was one that did not involve any travel for us.  This is probably the last week before November that will not involve travel and it was good to enjoy what we pretend is our routine--take both kids to school at 8am, swim, work until noon, pick the kids up and have lunch.  Having David in school has been a real novelty for us and a very necessary change in routine.  For the last year and a half we have not really had any time to be in the office together.  We are always tag teaming to get the work done.  But now we can spend the morning together in the office, which means we do not have to work so late at night in order to have time to make decisions together. We have also enjoyed going to the swimming pool at the same time in the morning and doing our laps together.

We have been orienting our new program assistant Felix, who we are very happy with.  Zachee, fortunately, has been able to help him with this as much of his work, particularly generating the monthly financial reports, is not well understood by us.

Rebecca piping in here: Perhaps Paul mentioned that our cook Marcelline was sick last week, probably with typhoid, and her brother was also hospitalized with something serious. On Monday, she still was very weak, so I went to visit her. I found her taking care of her brother at the clinic at her church. She was in so much pain that she couldn't even stand up straight. We sat outside the room on the floor talking for a while, looking out into the courtyard around which these hospital rooms are built. Thinking about other things seemed to help her feel better. She's been attending night courses to try and finish her secondary school degree and she had good news about that: she finished this year 4th in a class of 60 people. This is a very interesting school We didn't know when we sent her there, but apparently her classmates include the mayor of Bujumbura and one of the top people in the national tax office. It's phenomenal that many of the nation's leaders are people who never finished high school -- probably because the war interrupted their possibilities for pursuing education. Marcelline has another year to go before getting her diploma.


I drove Marcelline home to pick up some things, and was stunned once again by the stark contrast between where she lives and where she works (our house). She shares the small 4 room house her father built with at least 6 siblings, 1 niece and 3 other children she's picked up along the way. It's very dark in the house, and very noisy in the neighborhood. It seemed to be a place where it would be hard to rest and become healthy again if one became sick. And yet, the family is made of up well-educated people. While I waited, they offered me a plate of rice with fried bananas and little dried salted fish in tomato sauce. I had such a dilemma, because I was fasting that day (and I knew people in the household had had typhoid...) but I felt like it was impossible to refuse this hospitality. Marcelline's sister had cooked the food and also insisted that I try a piece of lake fish fillet, hot and fried -- it was delicious! 


Marcelline is under thirty and unmarried, but her parents have died and she's the oldest child, and that makes her responsible for everyone in her family. What's remarkable is that she has a twin sister, who just happened to pop out a few minutes after her, but Marcelline is still the absolute responsible one. It's amazing, because you can even see it in their builds. Marcelline is a healthy weight and her twin sister is terribly thin and slight. Even though Marcelline was still sick and in lots of pain, she needed to be the one to return to the clinic in order to be the one to advocate for her little brother when the doctor came by. Now on the weekend, her brother is back home, but not walking yet. Marcelline did come to work on Friday.


Paul has mentioned quite a few dilemmas that face us as we are asked to help with people's urgent needs. Here's a new one: a man we are in relationship with asked us if we would help him send his young wife back to secondary school to try to finish her diploma. That is a request that we would like to take seriously and honor. We really believe that an educated woman and mother can make a huge difference in the life of her family. But here's the problem. This young lady of 18 is already a mother, and her child is only three months old.  There's a real danger that this infant will end up being weaned far too early, something that does not bode well for her long term health--even her survival. (Actually the request was for school fees and money to buy milk to give the child so she can be fed while the mother is at school.) So many young children get seriously ill here already and nursing for a full year or more is the best protection a parent can offer.  On the other hand, a better educated mother could be a very good thing for the longterm health of the child and future children.  


So what to do?  Do we tell our friend that we'll help with his wife's education next year when the child is a year old and after it is weaned? And what are the chances that the young lady won't have a second child on the way by that time? Maybe the mother would never get to finish her education if she waited.  This may be the only time.  In retrospect, a little family planning advice before the wedding might have been the best gift we could have given their future family, but it's too late for that now, and there is so much pressure here in Burundi for couples to have children immediately after marriage that it probably would have fallen on deaf ears.  

The low point of the week hit on Thursday. Though it was far less serious than the illnesses of the people I'd been to see Monday, both Paul and I felt really sick and weak by the afternoon. Unfortunately (!) both of our kids were energetic and needed lots of attention, we had not had a cook for a week to do food shopping, and even our day cleaner had needed to spend the day doing government paperwork, so the house was a mess. There should be a law preventing both parents from getting sick at the same time! Somehow we made it through, convincing the kids that 7 pm was a good time to go to bed. 


Today, I taught Sunday School again (3rd week) and it was an interesting group of English-speakers, including 5 Ethiopian kids, 3 Burundians,  2 Americans, and 1 Kenyan. We considered the story of how Jesus stooped to wash his disciples' feet. As an Anabaptist, I've heard and thought about the story countless times, but it's amazing and wonderful to tell it to children, who may be hearing it for the first time. I asked the kids who they thought Jesus was like: the president or their house cleaner? Obviously, everyone felt that Jesus was much more like the president! But who could imagine the president washing any of our feet? This is what I love about Jesus: servant leadership was not just a theory to him. He physically, actually stooped down and loved his friends to the uttermost. Here in a country where we do have servants do the dirty work, it's good to constantly be challenged not to take privilege for granted, to look out for the ways we're called to serve, not just in theory, but in reality. 

Paul back again:  I am awake again at 3am now.  Unfortunately it is because the week of illness has not really ended.  By the time Rebecca and I got over our stomach flu, David began to get sick with a respiratory and sinus infection.  He has fever for the second night in a row and is sleeping fitfully.  I have been up with him for the last hour now.  We are keeping a weary eye out for malaria or typhoid symptoms, but it seems to be more of a flu virus at this time.  He did just start school this past week so we are anticipating a month or two of such illnesses that will be shared between his classmates.

Mark Sprunger, our Area Director and the Horsts at Ubuntu.

The week was not all bad, despite the illness.  We did gather with our missionary friends on Saturday and had a very nice potluck, and on Friday we paid a visit to Cercle Hippique to see the horses.

Sunday afternoon was really the beginning of the adventures of the coming week as we picked up Mark Sprunger, our area director for Central West Africa.  We will be taking him on a whirlwind tour of Burundi and northern Rwanda before leaving him off in Goma, Congo.  So we will be on the road from Wednesday through Sunday this week.  Pray for good health, no breakdowns and well-behaved children on field visits in remote places where they may have to tolerate being 'the center of attention' for large groups of gaping adults and children.