Rwanda Roadtrip

Travel
I left my room before the sun rose on August 28. The night before I had packed just one backpack of clothes and things needed for our road trip. We met at 5am to get on the van and head out for our study tour. It was a long journey, 18 hours in the car. We filled a van and a coaster. On the way up I got to ride with a lot of the honors college students. Which was super fun. They are so great! As a result I learned some Luganda.

Oli otya- How are you?
Gyendi- I'm fine.
Weebale- Thank you.

 Me at the equator line, standing in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere at the same time.

At the border of Uganda and Rwanda, we got stopped for close to 2 hours. Usually the drivers buy insurance at the border, but the two insurance places were no longer. So we had to get that straightened out. It was closer to the end of our journey and we'd been on the road for a long time so we were anxious to get going again and reach our destination. As we were standing around I got out my uke and the waiting turned into a group of us singing praise. Singing and smiles replaced boredom and complaints. People walking by stopped for a minute to listen, as well as some children. I got to play for the kids as well and there smiles were priceless.

 The border between Uganda and Rwanda.

Going into Rwanda I expected there to be a haunting feeling. We had watched movies and talked about the genocide in the days leading up to the trip. Some horrible things happened, and I was preparing to see it on people's faces and feel it in the air. However, had I not known about the genocide, I would have had no clue. There was no physical evidence on the surface. People had smiles. Children ran around playing. And it as absolutely gorgeous! The landscape was very hilly and it much of Rwanda is agriculture. So there were rolling hills with plants everywhere.


Service

Friday night we went to a diocese and stayed there. Saturday morning we got up and after breakfast participated in a community work day. Every Saturday neighbors come together and work for a few hours each morning. We worked on the ground where we were staying. They were putting flooring in a building that will be offices for the church. At first I worked in an assembly passing jerrycans of water up from the water tank to the piles of cement/dirt. Towards the end I got moved inside where I watched the men mix a pile of dirt and a pile of cement using shovels. They then added water and started scooping the mixture into buckets which I then carried across the building and dumped on the floor. Two guys with trowels spread it out and used a plank of wood to smooth it out. I got super messy but it was pretty fun work actually. And not bad doing it as a large group. We finished the floor after about 3 hours.

While we were working a group of children started forming outside the gate. After the work was finished Caleb, one of the Honors College Students, took me and my friend Kimberly over to see them. They had been waiting for a half an hour to talk to one of us. They were all compassion kids and knew that there sponsors were mazungus (white) and were wondering if one of us was them. It was so special! We live in America where we are the sponsors and I get to see how much people love their sponsor children, but the sponsor children love their sponsors so much also. And it was beautiful!

After lunch we divided into three groups for the next morning's church services which we were supposed to lead. We prepared songs to sing for worship and we nominated Caleb to be our preacher. Little did we know that nothing would go as planned. :)

My group was given the farthest church out. We drove for about 2 hours and were pretty close to the border, almost into Tanzania. It was a rural church but there were lots of people. One week every month the congregations from different churches in the area meet together. There must have been at least 300 people in there. The kids sat on the floor right up front and never left. About 7 different choirs sang for us. We performed our few songs, and I say performed because hardly anyone spoke English. Then Caleb preached about Matthew 5:16.
 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father, which is in Heaven." He talked about how we, as Christ's followers are the Light of the World.
This comes is important later because I thought back to it as I was seeing and learning things about Rwanda.

Before we left the fed us lunch. All the food in Rwanda was delicious by the way. I knew you were wondering. We had noodles, meat, chapati even. Mmmm. If you came to my Kenya presentation, you would know all about chapati! <3

As we were driving to church I caught a glimpse of a prison and had a thought that stuck with me throughout the trip. I thought of the many people still in prison as a result of the genocide in 1994. How crazy would it be to do prison ministry to those people. It was just an intriguing thought at first, but by the end of the trip, after the few days of learning about the genocide, I seriously think it would be an amazing opportunity.

As we did debrief that night, we compared and contrasted the churches to our home churches. There were many differences, but many similarities as well. I just thought it was awesome that even a language barrier couldn't stop us. We were all there united with one purpose: to worship Christ. People of every tongue, tribe, and nation literally being the body. I bet the devil hated it!

Rwandan Life
We went to check out some local micro finance groups in a church nearby. They had started up a few different groups to get people on their feet. They talked about how donations can build reliance. We got a chance to listen to one of the groups individually and I got a group that pools their money and gives out loans. Each month they pay to be part of the savings group and they give out loans to help people do things. It was cool what they used their money for though. They only used loans to buy something that would make more money. They said every member of the group owns a cow and/or a goat. Then they gave individual testimonies of what they have done with the money.
One lady bought a sewing machine and started fashion design as well as making her own clothes. Many other people shared what they did with their loans. They also showed us a project they had built with the money. They have a gas converter. Using manure they can convert it into gas which can be used in the house for a cook stove.

Our mindset is to give money. Which in itself is not a bad thing. But in cases like this, it destroys the pride of these people who have done all the work themselves. After we saw the groups we had a speaker back  at the diocese who spoke about the different groups and how he started the savings groups. He was a previous honors college student here at UCU. I really liked one thing he said.
"We spend money we don't have on things we don't need to impress people we don't know."

He read a verse from Acts about the early church and how the believers shared everything with each other and there was no one poor among them. The groups we saw that day were perfect examples of this and it was really cool to see the connection between what they were doing and the early church. That is how the church is supposed to be.

We left the diocese after hearing about the different groups and drove to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Before we went to our guest house, we stopped at Inema Art Gallery. There were many beautiful paintings and some cool art outside. After looking around inside, the drums started playing outside and the local children started teaching us the Rwandan dance. Then they performed for us.






I couldn't help but think of the art as a parallel to Rwanda. They took something the world had written off and turned it into something beautiful. There were wrecked boda bodas (motorcycle taxi), metal pieces, old wood that had been turned into pieces of art. When people think Rwanda, they think genocide. But God is restoring. He is taking the country and making something beautiful out of it.

Genocide

This day was the heavy day. We did all the intense genocide stuff. The first place we went was Kigali Genocide Memorial Center. We first saw the mass grave there which had 250,000 people buried in 14 different graves. Then we walked through the museum that detailed the history and events leading up to the genocide. It's crazy to think of how the genocide all started from a distinction between two groups of people. One group believed they were superior to the other. Then the government brainwashed the people into dehumanizing and eventually, murdering the other group of people. It really just showed me that the way we treat others, in words and actions, have a big impact.

The craziest parts of the museum were the wall of pictures and the children's room. After reading all the history and stuff, I walked around the corner and there was a whole room of pictures hanging. There were so many pictures. I just kept seeing my family and friend's faces on the pictures.

Then upstairs in the children's room there were huge pictures of different children and a little bio about them. It showed their name, their favorite food, their best friend, and their cause of death. The ages ranged from 17 down to a 9 month old. That was one of the hardest things to me. Hearing about all the babies and children that were killed.

I was angered while reading about the troops that were in Rwanda and could have stopped the genocide but did not. They had enough people there to help, but instead those people were used to evacuate all the people who were citizens of another country. The world watched while 800,000 people lost their lives in just about 100 days.  It is so easy to generalize that number but a quote from the museum really put it into perspective.
It went something like this:
"800,000 people were not killed. 800,000 people were murdered. One after another after another." Each person was an individual with their own stories, their own families. The number is so big, it's hard to even comprehend.

From there we went to the church at Nyamata. This was a church that many people had sought refuge in. 11,000 people had been hiding in the church. They believed no one would dare commit murder in a church. The guide there showed us the gate where it had been pried open. We saw the bullet holes in the ceiling. A grenade had been thrown in the church and then the killers had gone in and ransacked the place, and made sure that everyone was dead. They still had all of the victims clothes piled up inside. There were bloodstains on the altar cloth as well as on the wall they slammed the children against to kill them. The people who work there are still finding bones.

 

The church at Nyamata, genocide memorial.

We then walked outside to the mass graves there. One of them was open and we started walking down into it. I thought it was all just coffins because that was what I could see. As I rounded the corner though, my heart started pounding very fast. There was a very small aisle that was surrounded on both sides by shelves of skulls and bones. It was such a close proximity that it made it real and tangible. Some of the skulls had cracks from machetes or bullet holes. There was even  a small skull. That was one of the hardest places for me.

Reconciliation

The next day was all about reconciliation. We learned about a group called CARSA and their efforts to reconcile. So many of the perpetrators of the genocide are still roaming free and Rwanda now has the duty of reconciling its people and continuing on, working towards a united country. CARSA brings together victims and perpetrators who were involved with that victim specifically and get them to work together. We joined a group working on a house. We were an assembly line transporting buckets of dirt and rocks down a hill to the house. After 2 hours of that, we sat and listened to testimonies of the people we had been working with.

The owner of the house was a man who lost his father, mother, wife, and 10 children during the genocide. His neighbor was involved in one of those murders. They now live next to each other. The old man called his neighbor his FRIEND. I can't even imagine that kind of forgiveness and reconciliation. It reminded me of the relationship of God and us. We were the perpetrators. Doing evil things. Things that just broke God's heart. But somehow, when we ask for forgiveness, God reaches out to us, brings us back to Him, and calls us FRIEND. Pretty crazy!

That night I got to walk around town and explore Kigali with some of the honors college students and another USP student. Bethany was the other USP student, who was also my roommate that night. Goodman, Emma, Gilbert, and Caleb were the other honors college students. We had fun looking around as well. We went to Amahoro Stadium and took some pictures.
It was really fun having all of the honors college students along because we got to have conversations and debriefs, seeing from a different world view.

Debrief

The next morning we drove back across the border and into Uganda. We drove for a while and then got into a boat and rode out to an island where we stayed for the last night. There we swam and went off a rope swing, talked, played music around a campfire, and played games. The next morning we did a long debrief. We did small group discussion, large group discussion, and creative expression. It was really cool to hear from everyone's point of view and more things to take away from it.

           

Honors college students(L to R): Emma, Irene, Charity, Edna, and Caleb.

 Alex, Brigitte, and I on the boat ride out to Bushara Island.

I just really love that even though horrible things have happened in Rwanda, God is making it into something beautiful. They are going to have an awesome testimony of how they have been able to reconcile and forgive through Jesus. They can be that light to the world, letting people see their good deeds and praising their Father in heaven. Similarly, we have the same opportunity. God makes all things beautiful in His time. He can make beauty from the ashes. Just as He transformed Rwanda, He transforms each of us, once we make ourselves open to Him.

Home

It is SO NICE to be home. UCU feels like home now. It's familiar in this culture where everything is different. The campus if full of students ready to start classes tomorrow. I am excited as well. And ready to make some more friends. :)




 Right: Gilbert and I at the place we ate lunch after working with the CARSA group.

Beneath: Goodman and I eating dinner the last night of the trip.