The morning air of Kigali, so clean and pungently sweet, filled our lungs. We breathed it in deeply, knowing we’d be on our way soon to a different place. The air complements the colors of this place; bright blues and greens, deep, rich browns and glowing yellows. Bursting from hand-painted signs and billboards and the fashions on the urban streets, the colors of Kigali do not shout “Look at me!”, they proclaim “We are alive!” Today was to be a day of contrasts and incredibly felt experiences.
“We are a relational people”, Jean-Pierre, our guide, says. After the numbingly sorrowful Genocide Memorial, it is the power and faith in these relations, through His grace and power that is driving forth the unbelievable transformations of this country. Kigali, this Pan-African cosmopolitan city that gets under your skin, teems with variety. Dutch businessmen at Bourbon café; young Belgian families; a British aid worker; young Westerners whose reason for being here are unknown, perhaps even to themselves. I want to ask, “What is your purpose in this purpose driven land?”
After spending last evening at Heaven, enjoying a great dinner with Emanuel, our interpreter, we awoke this morning to a day to be filled with preparations and planning. Our small team was to travel to Gicumbi, the Northern Province an hours drive north of the capital. Our first order of business: a supply trip to Kigali city center. Urban haggling is always an adventure and this was no exception. We procured a large set of plastic jugs for our training this coming week. With seemingly half the district following us and assisting in our endeavor to acquire what we needed, we managed to find ourselves in an underground metal shop, hunting for a small piece of sheet metal for my SODIS training. It was like something out of a Dickens novel, with smoke and steam mixing with sparks and heat from metal cutters and saw blades, and with young boys in ragged clothes, open smiles and much laughter running through the space. After much ‘negotiations’ by myself, Brian and the team, we managed to buy our needed metal sheet and black paint. Gorilla trekking permits were soon bought, lunch was eaten and we were soon riding off to the North.
The road to Gicumbi weaved in and out of every increasingly towering mountains, slotted with green rice paddies and farmland. The district and town was the regional heart of what our team is in Rwanda for. The meeting with the ICC Pastors (Inter Church Council) was immediate and profound. Here was the beginning of what our mission was to be. Meeting with these humble and passionate men of God was inspiring and beautiful. Pastor Emanuel showed us the way to humbly relate to what our time with the Community Trainers was to be like. With a wonderful, simple supper of potatoes, rice, bananas and stew meat, the evening came to an end. Proclamations were made of love, mutual support and complete agreement in the wonder and beauty of God’s ability to transform lives, through people who live half a world away from one another. Half a world away, yet still … neighbors, brothers and sisters.
Peter
p.s.: Johnny Berry snores. Loudly. And yet we cannot possibly love this servant-hearted man any more.
