A VIP Visit

Oren and David displaying bread loaves they made this Thursday as an activity that Oren suggested for holiday relaxation.

There is a change in the air and I don’t like it.  I actually noticed it this past week on a trip upcountry.  I was on a 3 day field visit and it did not rain once.  People are looking at the sky nervously as the arrival of the dry season one month early will spell disaster for the harvest of the first planting season of the year.  The air is very still in Bujumbura, and although it remains free of dust, I feel like I am adept, after 6 years of living here, at recognizing a change in weather.

The reason for being upcountry this past week was to accompany MCC’s executive directors from the US and Canada on a three day visit to our programs.  Ron Byler (MCC USA) and Don Peters (MCC Canada) were in the region for meetings in Nairobi this week, but came about 10 days early to see programming in Eastern DRC and Rwanda/Burundi.  While it is a great honor to host them, it was also a great responsibility and required no small amount of coordinated planning with our partners to allow them to see memorable things in a short time.

They arrived last Sunday by taxi from Bukavu in DRC.  The trip is under 3 hours and they got here in the evening.  We had arranged for them to stay at our house and were happy to host them at Chez Mosley, the Mennonite Guesthouse in Bujumbura. 

At almost any other time in the past several years, this would have been perfectly appointed with constantly working electricity (because of our back-up system) and 24 hour internet.   But as it happened, our gardener plugged in a high wattage lawn mower during our absence in South Africa and fried our inverter.  We could not get it repaired quickly.  And on the day of their arrival a power surge somehow fried our router, so we had none of these amenities on the day they arrived.

Fortunately Mennonites at all levels are not complainers about living simply, so when they arrived to a dark, internet free house, they made the best of it without complaint.

On Monday morning I left Rebecca and the kids in Bujumbura and headed upcountry with them to see some of our programs.  We started by traveling toward the Hope School in Mutaho.  Our plan was to arrive in the late afternoon and stay the night at the Grande Seminaire de Burasira nearby and visiting the school in the morning. 

One of our other partners, the equivalent of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship was also at the seminary for a 4-day seminar.  So I was able to introduce Ron and Don to them as well as have them meet Matt Allen, our SALT volunteer who works with them. 

They were a large group, over 100 and we had dinner with them.  After dinner, I had been asked to give a talk (prior to our arrival).  I did a teaching on ‘the ministry of reconcilliation’ from 2 Corinthians 5,  It went well and Ron and Don appreciated seeing me speak in that capacity.

For them, as representatives of Mennonite Churches in the US and Canada, they were interested in seeing ways in which MCC made its identity as a Christian NGO known in its programming.  Seeing me speak to a group of Christian University students gave a good example of that.

We spent the night reasonably comfortably in the monk-ish rooms of the guesthouse, then headed up to Hope School the next morning after breakfast of a roll and some milk-less tea to dunk it into.  (no butter, jelly, etc.)

The school had prepared us a rousing welcome complete with the traditional drum corps and some batwa dances.  They made a huge impression on our directors.  We then visited every classroom and greeted the students and ended with a meeting of administrators and teachers.

Innocent, our partner presented the school well and as a former principle, Don Peters was very interested to find out about the administration of the school.

In the early afternoon we continued on to Gitega, the town where we have three partners.  We got there in time for dinner and met Melody and Sata, our two services workers who work with MiPAREC and UCPD respectively.  Don and Ron were interested in meeting our service workers to find out why people join MCC and get a sense of who they were.  Both women made an excellent impression on them and represented well their motivations for working with MCC. 

We had visited MiPAREC in the afternoon that same day and after spending the night at a guesthouse in Gitega, we met our UCPD partner and followed them by car out to Bukirasazi where they do their programming.  We saw the vocational training program we support, where students learn sewing, masonry, and carpentry.  More impressive though was a visit to a carpentry workshop set up by graduates from a previous year who were now in business for themselves—impact!

The day was a long one though, and after leaving them we continued South to Rutana province where we met our service worker Jennifer Price and Help Channel, our food security partner.  They met us at an intersection on the road about an hour from Gitega.  They escorted us to a demonstration farm and several other food security and watershed management projects.  Over lunch with them we talked about how they present themselves as a Christian organization without proselytizing. Don and Ron appreciated the fact that the Help Channel founders had come out of the same campus christian movement MCC still supports.

After a late afternoon lunch we headed back to Bujumbura.  We got home about 6 pm, I was pretty much spent and went to bed without dinner.  Actually I had done my best to disguise the fact that I had been suffering from diarrhea for the past two days and felt pretty bad most of the last day of our trip.  It was good to get home to get some Flagyl and oral rehydration solution.

Don and Ron left the next day (Thursday) and I think our program made a very good impression on them, projects and staff. 

That day happened to be International workers day, so the kids had a school holiday. We celebrated by making bread, spending a few hours at the pool with the high diving boards, visiting the horses at Cercle Hippique and finishing off at Oren's favorite Indian restaurant. Friday felt very strange to be back to school!

Saturday was a return to normalcy with yoga, the Stoner-Ebys have started coming, and we had a nice brunch with them afterward.  In the afternoon Rebecca and I took the kids to the zoo where they can easily pass 2 to 3 hours.  We are so used to being there that we will even open the cage of the banana snakes and get one out on our own to play with. 

We had a very nice dinner with JJ and Courtney Ivaska, our friends from World Relief.  Our kids played surprisingly well together and we were able to have some nice adult time which was a treat.

The weekend marked the end of two of the hardest weeks of the year for me.  I knew it was coming after our South Africa vacation, but I was dreading it a bit.  In fact, with the South Africa trip it has been a full month since I have been in any kind of regular routine.

The hard part of the past two weeks was that the week prior to Ron and Don’s visit I had been in Rwanda.  It was the first visit there since before Lent and there were many, many issues to deal with.   We have a particularly complex conservation agriculture and savings groups project we are running through a consortium of partners and there is no end of crises that can happen in the management of this project.  A visit was long overdue and our service worker Matt Gates was really needing some input from us. 

I spent 3 straight days in a dozen meetings, did about 5 straight hours of banking, checked in on the status of our registration in the country.  On top of all of that, I had brought the Stoner-Ebys for a visit there for their first visit to Kigali.  They have a long-term goal of relocating the country office there and they were anxious to see the City and the place their kids will eventually go to school.  They had a good visit, but I had to send them out on their own with a taxi on several occasions.

There were also other visitors including our Area Directors Mark and Angela Sprunger, and Suzanne Lind, the MCC Congo Rep. who was picking up Ron and Don from the airport when they first arrived and headed off to Goma with her.

I felt like I had been conducting a symphony by Mahler by the time I was done with everything.  There was so much detail and so many timings that had to be worked out.

The best news from Kigali is that the registration process in pretty much at an end and we may now legally apply for visas for staff of our independently registered INGO.  That was no small accomplishment.

I can’t believe I have had enough ummphh this Sunday to get this posted.  I don’t mean to be losing steam at the end, but things are really getting hard now.  I don’t want to look forward to the end, but I am looking forward to a less intense schedule. 

I am starting to look at job postings in the Baltimore area that can capitalize on my experience.  Will keep everyone posted as things evolve.  –forgive the lack of proofreading.

Bonus Photo: Some members of our small group and the family of Phillip, a friend who just accepted a job in Juba with World Concern.  They leave Bujumbura next week.  We follow them a few months later out of Burundi.