Heaven!

Today was another busy day.  We traveled by van 2 and a half hours south to one of the Universities to meet 17 students who go to school there studying things like Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Pharmacy, Bioteach, etc.  We arrived to find a couple of guys cutting the grass by machete!

We took a brief tour of the campus and then went to lunch.  We tried one place, but they did not have enough food for our group and we ended up going to another buffet.
It was great getting to talk to the students.  I sat next to Collins, studying Biotech, who is an exceptional student and a really cool guy.  The Rwandans tend to be a shy and reserved group and he is one of the few that will speak up and actively pursue leadership roles.  He is one of the two student representatives for the students and wants to get his Masters at the University of Western Cape in Capetown which is the finest University in Africa.  He asked me some questions regarding my presentation on Saturday and is one of several students that asked me to email the PoPowerPoint We got in a great conversation regarding jobs and internships and the working world.  This guy has an amazing future!  Collins and Jean Darke picutred on the left.

I happened to bring a Kindle with me and Justin wanted to film a video with Jean Darke (the girl who got an Internship working on the Kindle).  She had no idea what is was and he got some good video of her playing with it.  He also got a video of students with coke bottles in an effort to gain some support from the Coca Cola Foundation.  Justin is really great at taking pictures and videos with the students to thank individuals who have supported them and to promote what These Numbers is doing.

After lunch, we bid farewell to most of these students as we will not be seeing them again.  We headed to the market with Collins and another student Jackie who had traveled with us.  I got some great Rwandan goods including a Peace basket; the peace basket is made together by someone who committed violence along with a victim to promote reconciliation.  The one that I got represented friendship and had a few smaller ones inside of it.  We then headed to this cool ice cream shop where the slogan was "ice cream, coffee, and dreams".

We traveled the long trek back to Kigali and went straight to this really nice restaurant called "Heaven" which has really amazing food.  I have eaten so well this week!  This restaurant also has a really cool story as it was started by an American husband and wife who came to Rwanda to promote healthcare and peace.  The wife also had a foodie background so they created this really nice restaurant that mostly foreigners eat at because of the price.  However, the staff is University students that they help support and who they train how to work at a fine restaurant.  Service is generally not very good in Rwanda and we have had our orders messed up several times, but the service is excellent her and they are doing a cool thing with these students.  They also sell Rwandan art.  Rwandans are funny as they don't like to try any new food at all.  This is especially true of a staff person, Jackie, who doesn't like Mzunga (white person) food and that is all this restaurant has.  She ended up ordering a bowl of ice cream for her dinner!

Hope

Today we traveled an hour west of Kigali to a Congolese refugee camp and it was another powerful day.  A little history here.  When the current President Paul Kagame overran the Hutu in 1994, around a million Hutu fled to the neighboring Congo where they feared retaliation (that never came).  Congo is also made up of Tutsis and Hutu and the Hutu went into the Congo and continued to kill Tutsis.  The Congo was already a pretty unstable place because of the mineral wealth and this made things even worse so many Tutsis fled to Rwanda to live in refugee camps where they are allowed to stay but don't receive much help from the government.  These camps which were met to be temporary have been around for nearly 20 years.  The people live on 24 cents a day sent to them on cell phones by the UN.  They have now built houses out of mud in very rocky terrain and use the UN tents as roofs.  The camp we visited has 14,000 refugees.

These Numbers has several Congolese students who have defied the odds and can enter University through their program.  Two of these students scored among the top 30 in the country (one number 2!) and would have been eligible for a government scholarship to go to select Colleges in the U.S., but they were denied because they were Congolese.  One of these, Jean Paul, has actually been resettled with his family to the U.S. in Portland where he has started attending College.

There is an Adventist group that provides education in the camp through what would be our equivalent of 10th grade.  However, to attend University you must sit for your A Levels which would be the equivalent of our last two years of high school and you must score high enough on the placement test.  Some of the extremely bright students can win scholarships to schools in nearby communities.  However most of the students have no opportunity to pursue college.  Amazingly enough, they decided to start their own A Levels school called Hope school in 2009.  They started with 40 kids a year and are now up to 290!  They found volunteer teachers from their community to teach them.  Alice, pictured here, is in University with These Numbers, turned down a paying job to come back and voluntarily teach.  She is studying Electrical Engineering and teaches math and science at the school.  The guys pictured next to her run the school.  It is such an amazing and inspiring story!

Keep in mind that this community has no electricity or running water and large families live in very cramped houses.  I am inspired by how hard these kids work and how maintain hope in such tough circumstances.  The dream of the community is to be able to return to Congo some day.  The University students hope to take the skills they learn to bring things like electricity, roads, water, and other services when they return to Congo.  Unfortunately, the situation in Congo is still not very good.

We visited the three students houses and met their families.  Kalami's family cooked us a spectacular feast that was incredibly delicious.  We had a very large family cramped into the house, but had an amazing time with them and we even shared with them about snow.

Claude's story is so incredibly remarkable.  He is the youngest of 5 children of his mother and father.  His mother died and his father went back to the Congo to start a family with a new wife.  Both he and his new wife died.  The 5 siblings made an incredibly dangerous trip to the Congo to retrieve their 7 half brothers and sisters to bring them back simply because they were their siblings.  The oldest child became the head of the household and had to care for 12 kids.  They are truly a remarkable family and the whole experience truly moved me.  I finished the day by having a great conversation with Tina about the history of Rwanda and the future of These Numbers.  I am in awe of truly amazing things that are being done here.

Surprising a Rwandan with the Internship of a lifetime

Following the museum, we traveled to a student's house in a poor neighborhood without running water.  We were quite a hit for all of the kids in the neighborhood.  We met her mother and sisters and came with a very big surprise.  She is a very bright Computer Engineering student who we were surprising with an Internship in San Jose, California with Amazon Lab 126 to work on the Amazon Kindle.  Going to America has been a dream of hers and it was very emotional for both her and her mother.  It was also quite the emotional swing for us after coming from the genocide museum.  Her mother celebrated with us and served us all biscuits (cookies), tea, and juice.  It was such a cool moment to be a part of.  Photos below.  I have an amazing video but it is too long to upload here.

A pretty intense visit to the genocide museum

What a crazy emotional day today was.

We went off to a Rwandan church which consisted of some lively reggae style worship and probably an hour sermon.  It was an english language service so were able to follow the service pretty well.  He preached on a passage in 1 Chronicles about Jebez asking for more territorty that I have never heard preached on.  All in all it was a pretty good sermon about overcoming challenges when listening to God, about trusting that God will give you what you need when you are out of your comfort zone, and about how God can work in different ways than we anticipate.

After the service, we headed to the Hotel Des Mille Collines for lunch that is the hotel where Hotel Rwanda took place.  It was pretty crazy to be in the actual place.  It is one of the two nicest hotels in Rwanda and we had quite the buffet feast.  It was hard to imagine what it might have been like and the hotel doesn't really acknowledge what took place there and a lot of Rwandans believe the guy featured in the movie to be a liar.

We then headed for a very emotional trip to a genocide memorial museum.  We took the two student leaders, Collins and Jessica, with us.  The genocide was largely Tutsis being slaughtered by Hotus.  Many of the students in TNHF come from Tutsi families that had fled to countries like Uganda, The Congo, Burundi, and Kenya prior to the genocide in 1994.  They were born in those countries and the families returned to Rwanda a few years later with a Tutsi leader who ended the genocide when his military forces came in from Uganda.  Still most of the students have had family that were killed in the genocide, but Collins was very forthright with us about the conflict.

The genocide museum was at times very hard and emotional to walk through.  We learned some of the history leading up to it with the German and Belgian colonization and the Belgians dividing the people into two groups before giving way to Independence in 1959.  The Hotus came to power and there was killing in 1962 and along the way leading up to 1994 when the Hotu leader's plane was shot down setting off the massive genocide where somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were slaughtered in 3 months.  Most of this killing was done at the hands of machetes or clubs and at times the museum was very graphic with the images of bodies piled upon bodies.  Friends and neighbors would kill each other and families would turn on each other.  It was utterly horrific.

There was a section dedicated to children who were slaughtered and horrible things were done to babies and very young children (a 4 year old stabbed in the head in the eyes) and others bludgeoned to death or burned to death or torn up with a machete.  Following that, we entered rooms that actual skulls from people who died (some with large holes in them) and also containers with bones piled on bones.  It was very hard to look at and it just boggles my mind how people can do those types of things to others.  We finished by walking around several actual mass graves including an open one.  IT was all a very intense experience.

The coolest running group!

Because I am still on a completely different time zone, I was up quite early this morning and decided to go for a run at 6:30.  I ran out a mile or so and passed a few joggers and lots of walkers and can say that Rwandans will not be mistaken for Kenyans anytime soon.  As I was coming back towards the hotel, a very large group of joggers were coming towards me and chanting.  I thought they must have been police or military or something.  I stood to the side to let them pass and then a few of them started motioning to me and one of them said "Come Join!".  And I said "Why not?" not really considering that I had no money or no phone and no idea where I would end up.

 There were probably 150 - 200 of them made up of 1 woman and the rest men and me the mzungo (white person) and most of them were in some sort of running garb.  They were taking up a large chunk of a main highway and going at a fairly slow pace.  There were two guys with whistles leading the whole thing.  The group was chanting, doing call and responses, clapping, and hollering; it was so much fun!  We wound all around crazy backroads, passed the headquarters for Living Water International, and up some steep hills where the chanting grew lounder.  One guy even fist bumped me.  They ended up back at the stadium where they were trying to go in to use the gym.  I talked to one of them and found out they were some sort of student group.  I found my way back to the hotel just soaking up what an amazing experience it was.

Meeting the team and the students!

Somewhere amid my wearied 29 hour trip, I wondered if it was all worth it; it was probably somewhere during the sleepless portion of my long flight that I had hoped to sleep through.  Eventually I rolled into Rwanda about 12:30 pm, got my temperature checked for Ebola, and was greeted by our entire team.  It only took a few hours of hanging out with them to realize the answer was an emphatic yes!  There is Yung, who I met in Ethiopia, and we were sandwiched around a Rwandan student on the flight that we peppered with questions.  There is another American Andy who is here to take pictures and videos and who I give a hard time about how Portland he is.  There is an American, Tina, that runs TNHF in Rwanda and lives here.  There is the vibrant personality of Beata that runs the program in South Africa.  There is Justin: the man, the myth, the legend.  And finally there are two Rwandan ladies working for TNHF: Scovia and Jackie.

My first impression of Rwanda is that it is remarkably clean and well kept.  The government ensures this with stiff fines for things like speeding, walking on the grass, and trash.  On one Saturday every month (it happened this morning), the entire country stops everything from 9 - 11 to clean their
neighborhood.  The food is made up of mostly starches and the Rwandan ladies try eat chicken, rice, and chips (french fries) as much as they can -- seriously.  We dined last night at a beautiful Italian restaurant with around 100 different types of pizza.

This morning, two of the Rwandan students, met us for breakfast: Fred and Arnold.  I ended up hanging out with the two of them after breakfast for quite some time.  They were both studying Computer Science so I talked with them quite a bit about my experience in the field.  We talked of many other things like their background, soccer, church, etc.

In the afternoon, we headed to a large school run by New Horizon Church out of Portland.  Most of the 47 University students who are in the Rwandan program met us for training.  They are a pretty reserved and soft spoken bunch.  Justin shared about a program TNHF is doing called Impact Circles where they have a bio on the web site and people around the world can help sponsor and connect with them around a shared field of study (e.g. Civil Engineering) or a shared interest or something else.  Check them out!  http://www.thesenumbers.org/meet-our-students. Beata shared about what is happening with TNHF in South Africa as well as female empowerment and her own experiences overcoming failure.  Fred got up and led an ice breaker where both teams did a rock, paper, scissors variation with arrows, rabbits, and walls.  He then broke down the leadership lessons in the game such as teamwork.

I concluded the training with a session on writing CV's (resume) and on how to interview.  The students were remarkably engaged by the session.  I got Fred to come up to the front demonstrating a problem solving question: "How many tennis balls can you put into a van?".  I wasn't sure that he had seen a tennis ball yet so I asked him and lo and behold he pulled one out of his bag in a very comical moment!  They had been very reluctant to ask questions or speak up earlier in the day, but when I got to questions, there were a lot of questions.  Even after the session, several of the students came up to me to ask me questions or talk about my field of study.  These are remarkable students and most of them are near the top of their class and they are studying things like Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine, Biotechnology, Business, and much more!

And to end the day, several of the boys were eager to geth back to our hotel to watch the Barcelona / Real Madrid soccer game.  Several of the boys were supporting Real and enjoyed giving Justin and me a hard time as we were going for Barca and Barca lost 3-1.

I've caught a little bit of our agenda for the week and a lot of amazing things to come!

In transit

I've been thinking about being in transit.  Yesterday I found out that a good friend Jack passed away and today that the father of one my my long time friends growing up passed away -- the second time a father of a friend growing up has passed as well as two of my former coaches and another good friend my age.  It is a reminder of how fleeting this life is and how quickly things can change; a reminder to cherish the moments that you have with those you love because it can be gone in an instant.  I've been really interested in this documentary project this guy, Yogi Roth, is doing about walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage with his dad who has prostrate cancer.  He told himself that he never wanted to have regrets about not asking his dad something.  He set out on this walk and is now looking to bring that experience to others as well in this documentary (http://www.lifeinawalk.com/).  It is something I grapple with as I think about my relationship with my own dad.

After a red-eye to D.C., I had a four hour layover.  I was walking about the terminal to get some exercise and some blood flowing.  I stumbled upon the terminal chapel and went inside for a bit.  A terminal chapel is something to behold as there are artifacts there from several faiths.  This one had a cross and Bible front and center and an area on the side with rugs for those of Islamic faith as well as lots of literature that you could take with you depending on your faith or curiosity.  A weary traveler was sleeping on the chairs to gain rest and an airline employee walked in, knelt down, and made a Catholic cross in prayer.  There was also a guest book where those in transit could record their gratitude.

It got me to thinking about the life of truckers.  I've heard stories of the cramped gas station chapels and I've seen the Gideon's Bible in the crusty roach motels.  There is this whole underbelly out there of people in transit whether it is a trucker, someone in shipping, or in the airline industry.  It is far from a glamorous lifestyle and is often left to those who might be considered rough around the edges.  And yet, scattered through these places are little chapels and Bibles and other things to meet those who are wandering and perhaps searching.  I think of what stories must come out of a little roadside chapel in Las Vegas or at an ubiquitous Route 66 diner -- of how God is meeting people in the depths and in the margins.