A Week of Days in the Life

Tuesday

We went to a village about 40 minutes outside of Kigali. There was a church building with wobbly benches that could hold about 50 people at capacity. Kids were excited about the white people that arrived in a van and ran up to say hi. We played with them for a while and then got them to come inside when we started playing music. There were about 25 people, mostly kids and a few mothers. After a few songs, we had a teammate, Katie, share a few minutes about what God's been doing in her life. Then Luke spoke for about 15 minutes (30 with translation) about how God loves them. Then the pastor gave an altar call for salvation. Everyone came forward. Many of the little kids may not have completely understood what was going on, and many of them may already have some sort of relationship with Jesus. But it was still a great thing for the kingdom. They came forward, and we prayed for them for a while. Pastor Sylvan was extremely happy about the event. This was only his second week of church planting out here.

Our team had spread out and sat down so that kids could next to us. There was one kid that chose me; he sat down next to me and put my arm around him. We went forward at the altar call cause I suggested it and he was all for walking while holding my hand. I kept asking him his name but he was extremely shy and wouldn't tell me. I asked a mom what his name was, and it was Karri. Very close to “Cory.” Neat.



Wednesday

Our Rwandan teammate/coordinator is the leader of a ministry called Vida. Today was a meeting in a room about the size of a normal bedroom. There were 12 Rwandans, all between 16-22. We did the same pattern of songs, testimony, and quick sermon. Then we asked for prayer requests. A few mentioned headaches, a couple mentioned stomach aches. One girl mentioned bad dreams, involving seeing dead bodies. The genocide was 15 years ago. So a lot of young adults have lost relatives, and others were participants in the genocide, because a lot of the killing was done by youth in the Interahamwe. (Forgiveness is just as much meant for them as it is for me; to believe anything else is not the gospel). Coming into this outreach, I wanted to make sure we were providing for physical needs of a third-world country, but the emotional and spiritual needs are so strong here. Our teammate Jacinta asked anyone who wanted to make a first time decision for Christ to stand in one part of the room, and anyone who wanted to repent and rededicate to stand in another part of the room. Two girls were in the first-time corner, and four people were in the rededicate corner. We prayed for everyone for a while.

I was ecstatic about working with this age group because when people get saved when they're little kids, it's kind of like they have to get saved again anyway when they get older. I've also heard about low retention rates of converts; going from converts to disciples loses a lot of people. But I think they'll keep coming to this ministry and so it's actually sustainable.



Thursday

We taught art and music at the Christ Gospel Church. There were maybe 17 people at the art workshop; it taught the color wheel and its applications and the value scale. There were maybe 20 people for the music workshop, which split into a group for piano and a group for guitar. Both groups learned chords to play worship songs. I assisted the art workshop for most of it and then went and helped the guitar group.



Friday

I co-taught guitar today to 9 Rwandan beginners at church today. They're learned chords to play worship songs. Yesterday, they started to learn their first chords. Today, I had them working on switching between chords. We had 3 guitars that were circulating around the group for the two hours of class. I would kneel in front of each student and wrestle with his or her fingers to get them into place, because frets are really hard for them to reach in the beginning. It all went really well, but it was exhausting. It's a steep 15-20 minute walk to the church from our house, with a guitar in its case. I'll be teaching every Tuesday and Thursday morning.

This afternoon, I taught English to 12 Rwandans for two hours. It was our first lesson so we went through the alphabet and worked on pronouncing the sounds that don't exist in Kinyarwanda. It was really helpful to know so much Kinyarwanda but I knew what they'd need to work on. They can do “a” as in “bat” fine; they can mostly do “e” as in “bet” ok, but “i” as in “bit” is really hard them. And the English “r” is almost impossible. Even before the DTS, I've spent hours and hours reading about linguistics for fun, and I put a lot of that to use when I was describing what to do with their tongues to make certain sounds. They were really happy with the class. I'll be teaching every Wednesday and Friday afternoon.

At the end of class, we asked the people who didn't own a Bible to raise their hands. There were four respondents, including the two new believers, so we handed out four Kinyarwandan Bibles. One of the girls, when she got her Bible, gasped with excitement. I found it really moving that she was so happy to get a Bible. We asked for prayer requests and two of them prayed that they would get to go back to school. I asked Elijah about it later, and he explained that secondary school in Rwanda is six years (as is primary school) and that the drop-out rate is pretty high for various personal reasons and it's a huge barrier for high school dropouts to opportunities like a decent job.