I am exhausted.  But in a “I-have-worked-really-hard-and-deserve-this-rest” kind of way.  The last 5 months have been demanding physically & emotionally.  However, the last 2 months was one of the best short-term outreaches I’ve ever been a part of.  I don’t want to romanticize too much: there were moments of frustration, a couple times where I wanted to slap someone (but refrained), and times when I just wanted to go home, BUT, in many ways trip was what I’ve always hoped/imagined short-term outreaches could be like!

My two co-leaders were incredible.  Besides the fact that I genuinely like them, they are capable in many ways that I am not.  They saw some things from a different perspective, but they listened; said what they thought, and we worked together to find solutions.  It was especially amazing to hear Moise say that he now has confidence in his leadership ability.  Unbeknownst to him, Mike and I set this as one of our goals 5 months ago.   I could go on and on, but in short, this was the kind of teamwork I dream about.

Our team was awesome.  They acted with integrity and cultural sensitivity.  They served with heart and creativity.  They cared for people, especially outside of scheduled ministry times.  Something I aspire to is to build up/genuinely serve the ministries we work with and to help them have a better reputation in their community; our team made that easy on this trip.

I’ve had the chance to travel to some pretty amazing places, but I am still somewhat in awe that I was able to go to South Sudan!  The landscape was so beautiful.  In both South Sudan and Uganda, we had some unbelievably amazing ministry opportunities:

• Hiking up to a remote village and building a rain-water collection tank (=drinking water that doesn’t look like unstrained tea)
• helping a very elderly widow with her garden so she can eat this year
• clearing the yard (=digging out stumps) to prepare a building for renovations
• teaching for 2 weeks in a village school
• encouraging and sending fabric to a vocational school (The only one of its kind in a very large area.  They were learning to sew with paper because there was no fabric.)
• visiting patients at a remote village clinic
• speaking to people with AIDS/HIV – encouraging them that its not shameful; they are valuable
• preaching in churches
• building a fence to keep monitor lizards and snakes from eating the fish in the fish pond (so that people can eat them when they are full size. yum.)
• counselling & praying for families in distress; visiting people at home
• constructing a “prayer garden” (leveling ground; working with cement and  bricks)
• painting water towers
• conducting several youth meetings
• visiting/helping an elderly disabled man (not sure if he had tetanus or leprosy, but  one leg was entirely dried up and the other one was getting there).  We cleaned house, washed laundry, landscaped, visited, and left some money for medical testing/treatment and some things like a new bed.
• holding/changing/feeding babies at Amecet.  Amecet is a shelter for children/infants who need a home for up to 6 months because of a crisis (a parent dying, family doesn’t want to feed baby because it has AIDS and they believe it will just die anyway, and many other situations).  This ministry is amazing, they are well integrated into the community and work with the hospital, police, and social services.  It started with the hope of helping children with AIDS who are probably going to die, die with dignity.  Since it began they have helped over 500 children: over 400 of them who probably would not have survived, have because of this ministry.  It was amazing.  This would be an incredible ministry to see replicated in other locations.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and doesn’t take into account all of the small, meaningful moments.  But I think it gives a pretty good picture.

I’ll be posting a little more regularly again!  I am really thankful for some downtime this week, and looking forward to what is coming up next.

Hello!  I (Amanda) am back in the land of communication & technology!  Before we get into anything too serious, I wanted to share these lessons with you.  (Some of it is a little tongue in cheek, be prepared.)

1.) All snakes are poisonous.

I tried to disagree with this, after all, “I know cause my dad’s a biologist.” (Um, technically he’s retired, so maybe my tense is wrong on that?) However, I have to concede that when you are many hours from medical treatment, its probably best to just assume that the snake is poisonous and kill it.

2.) If the water you are washing with is dirty, just keep adding more soap.(for example, if you are washing dishes, clothes, etc.)

Sometimes its a little hard for me to swallow that putting my plate in there will make it cleaner, no matter how much soap I use.  But in places where water is often short…

3.) If a black person and a white person have a baby together, the baby will be white.

I wasn’t even sure where to start with this conversation, because I quickly realized that she was starting from a VERY different place than me.  It also included “Who will own the baby?”  (The answer there possibly being the woman’s parents, if a proper dowry hasn’t been paid.) This was from a teacher.  Speaking of babies…

4.) Once she has breasts, any woman can breastfeed at any time.

This was from one of our team members.  My favorite part was listening to one of our 19-year-old male team members try to correct this belief.  I did my best to back him up,  but even in the end I am not sure if we were convincing.

5.) Big companies are the antichrist taking over the world – especially soft drink companies because you can often find 3 sixes in the bar code on bottles.

Tough one.  Not a huge fan of big companies, and I don’t think pop is good for you. (Although “evil” might be a bit far, even for me.)  But the logic that led you to this conclusion!!??  It came out of nowhere as we were drinking Cokes… but it did lead to a great conversation about the bible and culture.

6.) At night, mosquito nets also protect you from rats, bats, and frogs.

True story.  Now, I know what you are thinking: “nets aren’t rat proof!”  I can attest that they DO keep the rats from running over you at night (and frogs that come into your room at night seem to only hop through the maze outside the nets.)   We didn’t have issues with bats, but we met a team that told us that their mosquito nets kept the bats out.

And with that, I’ll leave you with a picture of South Sudan.  I only sorted through several hundred pictures, I’m sure there will be better ones once I have gone through the 1000’s.  But just to show you a bit of how beautiful it was there.

Being in Africa is hard for Mike and I because we love Canada so much.  Its part of our hope that even though we are here in Africa, we would be able to continue to interact with people in Canada.  We hope that as people learn more, that they will want to get involved in some way: with what we are doing, with their own projects and passions, and/or even that they will be inspired to live differently right where they are.

Before we came to Rwanda in the fall, we were visiting my home, Crowsnest Pass.  We had several visits with Maeve and her mom.

Maeve!

Maeve had been looking at a World Vision catalogue, and was heartbroken.  She was deeply impacted by the way poverty is causing people to suffer around the world.  She felt like she needed to DO something.

Her mom responded in such a beautiful way: she didn’t push her aside and falsely reassure her, but encouraged her that maybe they could find a way to get involved.  This was when we were visiting Crowsnest, and we agreed to keep in touch.

As Christmas approached, Maeve decided she wanted to give up her Christmas money to help other kids, so she asked us if we knew of a school with some needs.  Sure enough, one of the classrooms needed a new mat (the floor is concrete), and the school is always in need of more paper.

So: Maeve sent us her Christmas money, and it was enough for a new mat for the classroom, and 2 boxes (=8 reams) of paper.  It was a blessing for the school and a great encouragement for us.  It is awesome and humbling to be able to be a bridge for a potential activist-in-the-making.

the mat, the class, holding some reams of paper. (they were smiling bigger a second before, but my camera was a little slow)

   And so continues the first Kigali, Rwanda DTS (Discipleship Training School) of 2013. We have 14 students, all told, with a good international blend. Including staff, this school represents the countries of Rwanda,  Canada, Germany, Holland, Burundi, and the United States.

One thing I (Michael) have really enjoyed about DTS is the opportunity for team building exercises that require teamwork, communication, and persistence. I never used to like these occasions and understood their usefulness even less; being put into potentially awkward circumstances with a contrived puzzle wasn’t my idea of a good time. However, after being able to learn from some great team building teachers, learning how to observe more capably, (and maybe even growing up a little bit), I’ve come to see these times as helpful for understanding how I relate to others and vice versa.

That said, we have had two separate opportunities for team building. We led one ourselves in the first week to kind of break the ice among all the new arrivals.Our first game was about communication and trust. There was an obstacle course on the lawn and the teams had to each walk through it while blindfolded with only their teammates’ voices/noises to direct them.

Our second day of team building was held the second-last week of lectures and was led by Racheal Komant, who is an insightful teacher and leader! She gave us her afternoon and focused on teaching us about how to achieve real unity as a team. She led us through four games in which the goals and solutions were open ended enough to draw out many differing responses from the students. For example, while travelling from the classroom to the game site, all 20 of us had to keep a beachball in the air the entire time. Then, halfway to our destination, Racheal began keeping count of hits before the ball touched the ground. This created more of an air of competition and actually caused us to try harder with varying degrees of success. Upon reaching our destination Racheal led us in a dialogue about the definition of success. Some found ourselves successful in having fun, beating our previous beachball-in-the-air record, communicating while walking/beachball tossing… while others felt we hadn’t succeeded; failing to keep the ball in the air the whole time, not beating our record more thoroughly, and even some poor attitudes shown in body posture/comments mid-exercise. Even though we hadn’t expected to have even started the course yet, we had learned a lot about ourselves as a group.

A second exercise was having a group of four all grab, with both hands,  one rope tied into a circle. With eyes closed, they had to form this rope into a square and place it on the floor as a square. It required much communication and proved to reveal which of us were perfectionists, which were organizers/directors, and which were relaxed, having fun, and okay with an adequate square. The conflict, we found, was when those personalities were mixed up together in one group with the relaxed and the perfectionists having to come to some sort of resolution!

I appreciated the questions and conclusions the students arrived at during the discussions following these exercises. They seemed to appreciate many of the reasons for conflict that arise in any community and how they can respond in a healthy way. I certainly enjoyed our team building times and being able to play together while learning these lessons was a lot of fun!

 I (Michael) have been thinking a lot lately about providence and sustenance. The availability of solutions and resources that are right in front of me for a long time before I ever even notice them.

We met a couple from Canada by the name of Dale and Linda Bolton. They began and work with Organics 4 Orphans which is focused on bringing community through organic gardening, education, and medicinal/nutritional training. They have been working in Kenya with a local, green thumb wielding, young man named Boaz. They train people up to train others in simple, small scale, high production gardening as well as head up community projects such as teaching the undernourished/impoverished how to grow  gardens with minimal input and maximum yield.

They recently stayed at the YWAM base here in Kigali to spend some time with our directors, inquiring about bringing their ministry to Rwanda. Since they stayed just down the hall from us I had many opportunities to hear about their work, ask lots of questions, and even glean tons of information from them. Because sustainable agriculture has been something God has been stirring up in me (and because I really like food from beginning of production to end!!) they were an incredible encouragement to me and what I may be able to do here in Rwanda.

In part because of Dale and Boaz’s enthusiasm, I have set up a small kitchen scraps collection just outside of the kitchen where we prepare meals. I have collected enough organic matter at the end of each week that I have been able to play in the dirt and dig some compost trenches. It’s not something I’ve done before but it seems the results are, at the very least, not harmful. We’ll see in these next months how the garden does and if nothing else burying the scraps can cut our garbage pile (and therefore cost) by a third to half! And if all works well, we should have free fertilizer for the gardens to grow even more nutritious and abundant food!

PS – What got me thinking was a plant Dale pointed out called ‘Moringa’ which has so much nutrient, mineral, and vitamin value that health stores would charge big bucks for it in Canada. And it turns out that we have at least six of these trees growing right on the property!

We were feeling a little more hopeful after I got a text last week saying they needed about $30 more to process our visas (to pay for the bridging visas we received last time, and they would transfer the $300 we payed last time for our actual work permit).  Its felt a little last minute considering I’m planning to leave the country in 2 days , but:

It has been a crazy rollercoaster waiting for these; we almost gave up, and it has been underlying stressor for over 3 months,  but today we celebrate this!

We have been staffing this Discipleship Training School for the last 3 months.   The second part of the DTS is a 2 month, cross-cultural outreach.  As we have discussed leading the team, we have made a difficult decision – as the only female staff (and the 2 of us as the only staff from a Western culture), we have agreed that it is important for me to help lead the team.  However, Mike has no desire to go.

our DTS team

As we have prayed and planned, we have decided to take the team to 2 locations in Uganda (Soroti & Arua) and to help a friend who has begun a work in South Sudan.  We are really excited about the possibilities presented in all of these locations.  I am even more excited about seeing this team in action.

So, Mike and I have decided that I will go with the team for the entire time, and he will visit us for a week or 2 in the middle, both to encourage the team and to hang out with his wife.  This will be by far the longest we have spent apart, but we are hoping that it will be good for the team, for us individually as well as for our relationship.

(We have held off on this a bit, waiting until we have visas in hand… it is looking hopeful but it might be very last minute before we have them in hand.  Also we will be continuing to give updates/descriptions of the DTS while we are on outreach, but it may not be exactly in chronological order.)

One of the foundational values of YWAM is “Practice Dependance on God for Finances.”  To a large degree it can still be summed up as “generosity.”  (Once, a team of us had an assignment to create a song explaining the foundational values, and one of the memorable lines, including 2 values, was “hospitality, here’s my coat, generousity, take my goat” – but I digress.)

Sometimes, I think it would be much simpler to work with an organization that raised support for us and paid us a regular wage.  However, I think the generosity that is fostered in this environment as people chose to give to each other is so beautiful.  One member of a team passing through left a book for one of our students that has deeply impacted her.  A DTS in Switzerland was praying for our school and decided to send us a package – and one particular student wanted to send money to one of our students. (These people have never even met!)  Someone anonymously left me a pair of beaded sandals.  (I had been looking for a pair that was not-so-gaudy, and big enough: these are perfect.)

Some of our students have been unable to pay all of their school fees or don’t have the money to pay for the visas we need for outreach.  This morning we had a time of sharing needs and of prayerfully giving.  There was about $2000 in total needed.  (Its not a lot, but in a room full of people who have very little, its a huge amount.)  In less than an hour, that amount was cut in half!  It amazes me, humbles me, and continually reassures me that this is a community that I want to be a part of.

Post Script: I finished writing this, reviewing it with Mike, and was walking out the door for supper, when someone stopped me because they had a gift: a new dress.  Crazy and amazing.

Still no word on our visas.  It is very strange to just be here, feeling like we are in limbo, and any day we could get the word that we have a couple days to pack up, pass on our responsibilities, and go home.  But we have decided to try as best we can to live as if we will be staying. One of our goals for our time here this year is to help develop staff for this base.  In particular, we have a great staff team for this Discipleship Training School, but none of us are planning to be involved in DTS after this year.  We would like to see some new staff raised up to continue running this school.  As a DTS staff team, part of our job is to encourage students to pursue their calling after they leave the school in June.  As we have been staffing this DTS over the last few months, we have observed that we have a quality group of students, and many of them feel called to long-term missions.  Several of the students have also expressed a desire to staff with YWAM at some point. So with this in mind, we have decided to offer an internship from the end of June until December for former DTS students (particularly from this school) who are interested in staffing a DTS themselves with continued mentorship.  Moise has agreed to lead the next school, and Mike and I will be indirectly involved through mentoring the new staff. This is really exciting because it will be an active and structured step in training staff (even if some of them may not stay her in Kigali long term).  It is also exciting because it is a chance to continue training some of the students we are training now.  It is difficult in YWAM to be always starting new relationships and seeing people you care about leave, but this will be a chance to continue to encourage some of them as they step into leadership themselves. A few students have already expressed excitement at the prospect of being involved in the internship.  It helps us to keep our focus here each day when we have this to look forward to.