Mutara

Our team joined a Rwandan pastor named Pastor Claude to plant a church in the small town of Mutara. Pastor Claude has planted 4 churches in his career. This was going to be his fifth, and we all crammed into a bus to take us there on Wednesday morning.

We stopped at a small town on the way. I gave a sermon in Kinyarwanda on John 11. We had Elijah translating into English for my team (and to make sure I was saying what I thought I was saying). Then we performed the You're Everything skit. As always, the church attendance was almost entirely little kids and breast-feeding mothers.

After another hour of driving, we arrived at what would be our house for the rest of the week. It had no running water or bathroom. The out-house smelled awful. The only furniture in the house was our foam mattresses. They were like normal mattresses, except they were 5 times skinnier than normal mattresses. Mine was so lumpy that I chose to sleep on the concrete floor the first night. That turned out to be a poor decision. I slept on the mattress on the other nights, and it wasn't so bad.

After the first night, we showed up the next morning to work on the site of the future church. We used machetes to take out the thorn bushes that were growing all over the future field next to the house of Pastor Claude's mom. After the field was made, we went into the woods and cut down about 40 small trees with machetes and dragged them back to the field. We dug 2-foot holes in the ground with machetes and hoes. We made a grid of these holes and dropped the trees into them to serve as the poles for a tent for the church. We nailed on other trees to serve as the cross members and tent supports. We tied tarps over the cross members and had a covering. I gave a short testimony and Elijah preached a message. The Pastor then gave an altar call for salvation and about 100% of the audience came forward and repeated the sinner's prayer. The audience was mostly little kids. There were a few adults too. One of them was an old lady whose really old husband-like live-in boyfriend came out to get her out of the church and she said to leave her alone; if he resists her, she'll beat him up and kick him out of her house. The pastor separated them and talked to them. He was drunk and just needed to calm down. The pastor also encouraged her as a new convert to not be violent.

Also, we rented a film-reel projector and screen and played the JESUS film for a crowd of maybe 80, mostly kids. The sound wasn't working so one of the church guys narrated the film on the microphone. We played the first half of the film on Saturday night. One of the guys helping us stayed behind to play the second half on Sunday night. We left on Sunday afternoon after the church service. Luke preached the sermon that morning, and that Pastor again had an altar call. Again, all the 20 or so kids came forward. They may have been doing this for the second time, but they were happy for Jesus nonetheless.

There were a lot of health issues that we saw. Some of the kids had an umbilical hernia, where the umbilical cord isn't cut correctly so instead of a belly button, it just looks like they have just a giant tumor. A lot of kids have skin issues, like scabs on their chins. One kid was missing an eye. Another had an eye problem where the whites of her eyes were solid pink, but it was different from pink eye. One kid had elaphantitus on his fingers. I'm mainly able to give so much description to these issues because our nurse teammate pointed these out. She also asked why so many of the kids have tear-shaped scars under both their eyes. Elijah explained that there is a witchcraft operation where they take a red-hot poker and stick it underneath their eyes. With a growing church in the area, hopefully witchcraft will decrease.