Rwandan hospitality at its finest!
We arrived this evening in Kigali to be met at the airport
by Fr. Philbert Kalisa four staff people from REACH – Fr. Fidele, Alphonsine
(the office manager), and Theo (the business manager). They brought our group of sixteen missionary-pilgrims
to the Center for Unity and Peace (CUP), which will be our home for the next
week. And a center for unity and peace
it is!
After getting us all situated in our rooms (all private en
suite accommodations), we went to the restaurant here on the premises for a
buffet dinner that had been lovingly prepared for us. We also toasted one of our group, Hilary
Treat, whose birthday it is today! Having
traveled for nearly 24 hours. From Boston, to Newark, to Brussels, to Kigali, we
are tired. Some had a night cap at the
bar, and others went straight to bed.
It is good to be back
in a place that now feels like one of my homes, to take in the evening view of
the lights of Kigali on the hillside below and to feel the cool evening breeze
in this lovely spot on the outskirts of the city. And it’s wonderful to be sharing it with
fifteen other people this time!
We will have a busy week ahead of us, and I hope to be
sharing much more of it here. But now it’s
time to rest. This won’t get posted
until tomorrow morning when Philbert has the wireless internet set up for us
and gives us the password.
And just to show how “at home” I am becoming in this city
now, I have to tell a story from our arrival at the airport. We were in line to go through the immigration
desk after getting off the plane and walking across the tarmac into the
terminal. Our group was gathering in the
two or three lines of people when I heard a voice a few feet away saying, “Is
that Jeff Gill?” I recognized the voice,
and I turned to look and there was Lauren Servin, a young American woman I had
met, not in Rwanda, but in Sudan in 2008.
She had just flown in from Juba, South Sudan, where she is now
working. I had not seen her since the
three days I spent in Sudan in 2008 when I visited the newly opened secondary
school for girls in Yei. Lauren was then
working for NESEI, and has since completed a Master’s degree at NYU before
returning to work in the new country of South Sudan. I remember Lauren for her hard-working,
gentle but strong command of the chaotic environment of Yei, as she drove us
around those three days. I was impressed
that a young woman in her then early twenties had come to a place like this,
was learning both the local language and the local Arabic, and managing to help
open a school in a place where there had never been a school for girls. We had fun catching up in our brief airport
visit this evening. Lauren tells me that things are terrible in
South Sudan – something I have sensed from the news reports we get, but did not
want to hear from people actually working there. We discovered another mutual friend in
Abraham Ding Akoi, who is now the Finance Minister of the new South Sudan. She has come to Rwanda for a conference and
commented on how wonderful it was to be in a country for a few days where
things actually work!
I’m grateful for people like Lauren who believe enough in
the impossible to be in a place like South Sudan to help make it happen. And Philbert, who against all odds returned
to Rwanda after the genocide sixteen years ago to develop a ministry like
REACH. We’ll be learning all about how
to make the impossible happen this week.
Stay tuned!
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