La maison spéciale

The whole experience with my new house has been a bit of a disaster. On the very first day I came to look at it, I almost walked away crying. The walls had holes in them; the plumbing was a disaster; there wasn't a kitchen; the whole place smelled; the layout was strange; and so on and so forth. The list of things that were broken and/or horrible about the house could have been a mile long. Yet a friend of mine convinced me to give it a chance, and for some reason I did.

A group of workers and shop owners descended on the house and the work began almost immediately. The walls were repaired and painted (the colors weren't completely different than the ones I picked); the broken windows were replaced and given new screens; a sink was built to create a kitchen, and shortly thereafter a refrigerator and stove arrived; gardeners cut back the weeds and plants that had overtaken the yard. Slowly, as all of this happened, I began to see the house's potential. When things settled just a bit, I ordered furniture and shopped for pots and pans and dishes and sheets and pillows and towels and mosquito nets and everything else you could ever imagine needing for a house. Finally, I decided things might not be so bad.

Yet even now, after living in the house for two months, although the house is completely livable, things still aren't exactly settled. For example, when I realized there was a leak somewhere in the plumbing of the house, someone came to the house, dug up all the pipes in the yard, and then replaced them, but, in the process, he switched the hot and cold connections to the house so that now even the toilets run on hot water. The house also has a cockroach problem, even after being bombed with pesticides, and, on occasion, a mouse appears. For the last three weekends, the water has been cut off for no apparent reason, and, on a fairly regular basis, the electricity goes out as well. At this point it's just amusing.

It's gotten to the point that whenever something ridiculous happens, I just look at my domestique, shrug my shoulders and say something like "beaucoup de problèmes" or "un autre problème" ("many problems" or "another problem"). A couple days ago, the kitchen sink quit working even though the rest of the water in the house worked. This time she looked at me with a half smile and just said "la maison spéciale" and it was the perfect description of this place - "the special house".

Call to prayer

My house in Kigali isn't far from one of the mosques in the city, so I frequently hear the call to prayer. Five times each day, the call is broadcast from a loudspeaker at the top of the highest point of the mosque to summon Muslims in the area to pray. Although I can't understand the words of the call, nor do I respond in prayer to Allah, I really do think it's a beautiful tradition.

Witegereza

This billboard is by far the most common in Kigali; it can be seen on almost every road around the city. The title, "witegereza" means "don't wait" and the message below urges parents not to wait to talk to their children about HIV/AIDS.

National Prayer Breakfast

I just finished reading the keynote speech from this year's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The speech was given by Ward Brehm, a Minnesotan businessman and philanthropist who was recently appointed chairman of the African Development Foundation, a United States government agency with a mission to help African community-based organizations and small businesses achieve sustainable economic growth. Although I found his overall speech less moving than the one given by Bono in 2006, I thought I would share a couple exerts:

"On a more recent visit [to Africa], I took a long walk with a warrior-turned-pastor friend named Lodinyo deep into the unknown wilderness along the northern Rift Valley that divides northwest Kenya with Uganda…I fasted for five days on this walk to experience real hunger, but had brought along power bars in the case of, as Lodinyo put it, an “emergency”. At the end of the walk, I collapsed in a borrowed sleeping hut, and when I awoke 12 hours later, I saw a little boy peeking through the door. While he was initially terrified, curiosity eventually got the best of him, and I noticed he was concentrating more on my stash of power bars than he was on me. He succeeded in snatching the bars and immediately ran away. “Kids are the same everywhere,” I thought, until I stepped outside the hut, and found a little boy kneeling over his two-year old sister with a terribly distended stomach, feeding her tiny pieces of protein."

"Solzhenitsyn said that disaster is defined by two things: magnitude and distance. So a small disaster close to home or a huge disaster faraway results in what he describes as “bearable disasters of bearable proportions.” We’ve become too good at “bearing.” Our hearts should be broken by the things that break the heart of God. Specifically in Africa, there are many faraway disasters of epic proportions. 1994. In Rwanda, a country the size of Maryland, the political genocide claimed 9,000 lives per day for 90 days. That’s two World Trade Center disasters per day for 3 months. Today. Darfur, Sudan. 1.5 million homeless, with thousands terrorized raped and killed. AIDS is killing 4,400 per day in Africa, and even more are dying from curable malaria. Epic disasters of epic proportions far from home for most of us."

"Do you remember when Jesus was talking to His disciples, and asked them when He was hungry, why they didn’t give Him any food, and when He was naked, why they didn’t give Him any clothes? And the disciples said something like, “Lord, we never did any of those things to You.” I always thought like most folks that Jesus replied “Whenever you did this to the least of these, you did this on to Me.” Except He didn’t say that. What He said was, “Whenever you did this to one of the least of these, you did this on to Me.” How often do we forget the word “one.” It changes the meaning of what Jesus said completely. In our quest to be helpful, we can rob the poor of their dignity. In order to be of any help to the poor, we need to understand them, we need to know them and we need to love them. They are not a group. The poor is not a species. They are identical to us in their hopes and dreams. They love their families and long for a better life. The only difference is that they are poor. And people don’t suffer and die in groups. It’s one at a time. And each one of those deaths leaves an identical wake of agony to what you and I and our families would experience."

A garden

Since I moved into my house, the front half of the yard has been covered with six or seven giant mounds of dirt. I'm sure this would seem strange, until you consider the tremendous rains that pour down on Kigali almost every afternoon and realize that a garden planted on flat ground would be washed away immediately. So instead, gardens are made in mounds.
Tired of staring at these mounds of dirt, I finally went to town today to the store that sells seeds. After yet another long conversation of broken French and English, I came home with seeds to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, celery, green peppers, spinach, cabbage and onions. Though I still lack confidence in my ability to grow much of anything, the seeds have been planted and there's a slight chance that one day I'll have mounds of vegetables instead of dirt.