Week 6 Update

On Wednesday, I'm having each of my English students give 5 minute speeches to the rest of the class. I'll have candy for them. I'm excited about it.

On Sunday, our guitar and piano students are going to be performing worship songs for our base church in Remera (Christ Gospel Church). Our team is also performing our drama at the service. We're going to have one or two people speak. I don't think I'll give a sermon, but I'm going to make sure I at least share a few words of encouragement, because they've been very good to us. It's going to be our last Sunday before we leave for Uganda.

We went to the U-17 African championship game on Saturday. The soccer stadium is only a 10-minute bus ride from the bus stop closest to our house. It's hard to believe that every player was under 17-years-old because the level of skill was high enough that it felt like watching a world cup game. Rwanda had made it to the final game, and they were playing Burkina Faso. It was a great game. They kept showing us muzungus (white people) on the big screen, and one of our Rwandan friends said he saw us on TV. It's too bad Rwanda lost, 1-2. President Paul Kagame was there too. He doesn't smile at all ever. I talked to a pastor that said he grew up in the same village as Paul Kagame, and apparently Paul Kagame has always been a very serious person. He is known for being a workaholic.

We helped plant a church in Busanza, and Luke was basically co-pastoring it with the Rwandan pastor, Pastor Sylvan. The Busanza church services happen on the same nights I teach English (we all take a bus to the same town and then we split up with a few of us walking to Vida for English and the rest going to help out at the church), so I wasn't very involved in the church, but he fills in the team when we do debriefing each night. On Sunday, he heard feedback from the members. One woman said something along the lines of, “I had never felt beautiful in my life, but when you showed the photographs of space from the NASA satellite and talked about how much God loves us, I realize that God loves me. At first, I had put you on a higher level because you were a muzungu, but now I realize my value, and we're all on the same level. And even the people that sit on the street begging are loved by God.” I may be combining together testimonies from more than one person, but the point is the same. Luke was tearing up when he was hearing things like that. Also, we bought them Bibles. They were clutching their Bibles as they walked to church. There were three adults in the church when we started. There were 45 this last Sunday. Also, when we first showed up, Luke said that even the adults looked dirty and unkempt, but that now, it seems like they're caring more about life and how they look and are putting effort into the way they look for church. Also, eight people got baptized last Sunday.

This week, our leader broke down in tears at a team meeting for the third time. The first time was when we said we all disagreed with the no-Internet rule and asked her to reconsider, and she felt attacked. The second time was when she was talking about a sense of team disunity and how hurt she was when she feels negative vibes from people. This last and third time was when she was telling us she was repenting from not leading from a position of love and how she wasn't handling everyone well. I think that last meeting did a lot of good in getting us to talk about what we can do to have greater unity. Our team has a blast, but sometimes we can be shallow, and a couple people have felt left out. So we addressed that, and we all feel much better now.

I think our leader is pretty happy with me. At the beginning of the trip, she kind of admit being intimidated by me, which is totally fair, because it just kind of works out that most our team decisions kind of have to run through me cause they need me to decide if we can afford it and then they need me to hand the money to them. But I am extremely selective when it comes to picking my battles, and I'm as careful as I can be to make sure Mikaela feels respected. And I try to give her affirmation at good opportunities. I don't think I'm sexist, but all my male leaders/supervisors have done an outstanding job, but I'm still afraid to believe 1Timothy 2:12-15.