Finally.... The Village

Ok… my butt hurts. I don’t know whether it is from sitting in a truck for 5 hours today or if it is all the walking we did! I should have been doing a stair climber at home to try to prepare for this!

There is nothing like being in the countryside of Rwanda. The people of the villages come rushing out of their homes just to catch a glimpse of us. Every where we go there are smiles and laughter. The kids seem to enjoy waving and using their newly learned language to communicate. They are astonished by the children here. Mike told me in the car today, “Mom, I feel like a scum bag compared to these people.” I asked him what he meant and he said, “I have so much in comparison to them… and they work so hard.” That pretty much set the tone for the day. With each mile we journeyed away from the city, it became apparent that the struggle to survive became more and more difficult. Amber said to me, “I am a lazy bum compared to these people!”

We traveled first for 2 ½ hours into Gatumba with our truck and parked at a primary school. What a reception! We met the pastors wife from last year and then the children starting pouring out of their classrooms. They were especially interested in Hope’s hair. They gathered around her and started chattering about it. Her hair was up in a pony tail and so I pulled it out of the rubberband. They gasped! WOW! Now, I have to tell you before we left home I had someone cut off 8 inches! But they were mesmerized with the color and length of it. I put it in my hand and said they could touch it and they all slid their fingers through it gently. Hope loved the attention!

All of the school children began to sing a song to Hope and I and we clapped with them. The children’s voices raised in a circle around us made us feel so welcomed and joyful. But then they said it was Hope’s turn to sing a song! OH! She was so embarrassed! There had to be 100 children listening and so Amber and I sang, Jesus loves you with her. They all clapped and enjoyed it.

Mike is well loved by all the African children. He is literally like a mountain goat! He can run ahead of all of them… I was amazed at his stamina. All of the children walking with us would point ahead and say, “Michael!” He was always first leading the group.

And Nathan was hilarious! He watched the Muzee (the eldermen of the village) pull branches off the trees and peel the leaves off for whips to discipline children following us (they were supposed to stay in school!). He began to fear for them so he picked up a switch as well and began to point with it so the children would be warned that the Muzee was coming!

Of course it took us 1 ½ hours walking up and down the most rocky terrain you can imagine to get to our widows home. She welcomed us when we arrived and we met several of our sponsored families there as well. They were all so happy to see us.

Constance had just given birth to a baby one week ago. A baby girl. We talked to her about staying pure, etc. But what amazed me most was that little child’s eyes. She was so tiny. But her eyes were like a deep dark pool. She drank in everything around her. She was too thin for my taste… and her hands were so small. I believe she couldn’t have weighed more than 6 lbs. But something hit me; here is a child that does not know what war looks like. She knows wealth and prosperity and peace because that is the current state of her family. But will she know God?

It blows my mind that there is no place we can hide from God. Certainly today I realized how far we can go physically… our ministry goes to the “farthest ends of the earth”. But that little baby is in God’s sight. He knew about her before she was even conceived and found a family in America who would care for her. He went through great lengths to see that she was loved and nurtured.

How far has he gone for me? Where could I hide from Him? And what did those little eyes say to me today? If that little girl can be born on the other side of the world, on a mountain far from any place a car can travel on, in a home as small as half my basement, then He knows me and cares for me too!