The Power of a Home Visit

OUR FIRST HELLO

Almost every day of our trip we traveled in to the villages and areas of the city to visit the children and women we sponsor. I'm pretty sure there aren't words that can capture the feeling of this experience, but maybe between my feeble description and the pictures we all shared you can get a glimpse of the wonder.
I'm so grateful that Africa New Life makes this a priority for the trip because it took me out of the realm of being just a distant observer. When you cross the threshold in to a person's home, especially in a culture so full of hospitality and respect, you immediately feel like you are part of their lives, of their experience.
We're so good at antiseptic standoffishness here in the states. We don't like to get our hands dirty or actually feel the pain of anothers experience. It's so much easier for us to just sit home, take selfies, post our endless, meaningless opines about whatever the media feeds us, and maybe send a check and pray, but probably not in most cases.
Sidenote: Today is national selfie day. Really? Do we actually need such a thing?
Oops, there's that soapbox again, sorry.
Another wonderful thing we learned to do was to join together during the visit and take notes and pictures for the person meeting their sponsored child so they could be in the moment and still have memories and reminders of their time together. It kind of amazed me how spastic and tongue-tied I got as I sat with sweet Ella and her family, trying to connect through our interpreter and glean a picture of their life, their hearts, their needs. I had 2 wonderful friends taking pictures, one taking notes and another recording video! I had no idea all of that was going on, but now I have hundreds of bits of those moments to go over and over and it's pretty fantastic! We also had time on the bus with the coordinator in charge of our child to ask questions and get information that wasn't on the sponsor card. At ANL each coordinator oversees and personally visits about 350 kids, which is pretty amazing since we learned that other sponsor organizations have thousands of kids for each coordinator to try to oversee. Things I never knew! The more I learn about ANL, the more excited I am to partner with them and advocate for families with them.

But before I get to all of that, we have to go back again to remembering.
Because immediately before I got to meet sweet Ella we visited a second genocide memorial that was visceral and raw and far less museum-like than the first one. This is the contrast of Rwanda. First the grief and the remembering, then the healing and the joy of living. This particular day embodied all of that. I was more than a little apprehensive this day since our visit schedule changed and instead of meeting Ella on the happy day that we got to tour the sweet day care and women's tailoring center (more on that day in a later post!), I was meeting her today, after our visit to the Nyamata Memorial in Bugesera.
Bugesera. The town full of tsetse flies where so many of the Tutsis were sent during the precursor to the actual genocide in the hopes that they would just die there. Where they were easy to find and eliminate in churches where they thought they could find refuge. The memorial is in such a church. We stood at the entrance hearing the history and seeing the spray of bullet holes in the tin roof and standing on the broken bricks from the hand grenades that were thrown into the church as people huddled, trusting it was a safe place. We stepped inside to see rows and rows and rows of wood benches piled high with the clothes of the victims. Tattered, bloodied, baby sweaters and nondescript shirts, shoes, and skirts piled in every corner. There were stains still on the walls where the blood ran deep and children were swung by their feet into the wall to kill them.
It's all too much, isn't it?
It was. We walked downstairs in to the crypt where coffins were filled with bones, piled floor to ceiling into every corner and one coffin on display of a woman they remember in great detail as a symbol of how women were sacrificed during the genocide, but I cannot bring myself to recount the story of her suffering and her torture. I just can't.
We walked outside to see the how large an area the underground tombs covered. Ten thousand people were killed in 2 days in this town. Their bones were brought here over the years, lovingly retrieved and washed and entombed. There are flowers on the glass roof of the tombs and in the church, this is an active memorial. And next door? A school. Alive with the sounds of children playing and learning and laughing. And living.

My post in my journal that day, quickly summing up the experience:
Late breakfast, cold shower, and out the door to Bugesera. First stop the Nyamata Memorial. But there are no words. There just are not. Only questions. How do You not just wipe us out, Lord when this is what we do to one another? I was struck by the anonymity of piles of bones all together in one casket. Immediately came...God knows EVERY ONE. Silence. Except for the sounds of the children playing in the school next door. Life. Joy. Overcoming the darkness with light. Rwanda.
Then on to the school...we picked up our people and I got to be the first home visit today.
And that is how it was on this trip. No neat little segues in to the next thing. From death to life. From sadness to joy. From overwhelming grief to hope just as large. My heart was wrung out more times than I could count.

SWEET MOMENTS IN PRAYER

Let me tell you what I learned about sweet Ella and her family. They used to live in Kigali but her dad lost his job so they sold their home and moved out to the 'suburbs' where they could farm and afford a better home. It was the nicest house we saw on any of our visits.
Dad lost his job.

This is Jean de la Croix, or Cross,
Ella's dad. Please pray for him.
For salvation, for healing, for deliverance
and for a job. Thanks!

Because functioning is hard after you survive a genocide. I have no details of his experience and I probably couldn't handle it if I did, but I saw his eyes, I held his hand and I heard him share his hope for his children that they would be "good people who don't hurt, but serve, others" and his prayer request; "to find a job and be a father that provides for his children." He showed up. He was there. I don't know what condition he was in or how much of their money he spent at a bar, but he made sure he was there. And his face when I gave him the gloves Jim got for him? Forever burned in my memory even though I have pictures AND video of that precious moment. Dad said he couldn't express his appreciation for us sponsoring Ella in English and mom said we were the answer to her prayer for Ella to go to school. We get to. Be the answer. To her prayer. The power of that is not lost on me right now. We get to.
And Ella? She loves to read so we brought her books and an English Bible since all the children in Rwandan schools are taught English, even if they are too shy to speak it in front of us! She loves Social Studies and dreams, like so many children in Rwanda, of being a doctor. She loves to jump rope and her smile exploded when I showed her the colorful skirts and dress we brought for her.
Another journal entry: It is an awe inspiring experience to embrace this child in her best dress covered in butterflies, to feel her small frame, her bones even. To sit in her home, welcomed, honored. To look in her eyes, in her mama's eyes, the pain in her papa's eyes. She was so sweet, so shy...but she loved her new clothes and her new Bible. I, on the other hand, was a mess. Kind of a teary, snotty mess. But it was glorious. Such a sweetness in that house, we all felt it. How my prayers will change now that I have held her in my arms.
Now that I have seen...I am responsible. A song that was played for us...that I'm pretty sure we all downloaded afterward and have been playing on repeat since. The Story of Albertine You can search for the song as well.