It’s called “Land of a Thousand Hills” for a reason. Our home that month was at the bottom of one hill, church was at the top of another, and a few hundred were in between. I’m exaggerating, but it was a very long, very beautiful walk each time we went up to l’Eglise Apostolique. Check out the videos below for a more complete look! These are the people we met in the hills.
Pastor Robert (center) and family
This family called us their own from the day we arrived. They gave up their bedrooms so we could have a place to sleep. They made filling meals for us every day. They helped us find our way around Remera. They even let us help with dishes one day… and we almost broke all of them. And as you can hear in my podcast, they even gave us their names. We felt loved here.
Donat (center) with Andrew and Pastor Robert
A long-time friend of Pastor Robert, this sweet man spoke only Kinyarwanda and French. I got to play translator the three times we went to see him! He had a beautiful home just 10 minutes walking distance from our place. We ate dinner together, and talked about his life and his church. When he realized we’d be in Kigali for the whole month, he immediately offered his car and driver to take us to Lake Kivu the next week. Donat insisted that we had to see the most beautiful part of their country while we were there!
The next week, we met him at his house again, and drove the 2 hours across Rwanda to Volcanoes National Park and Lake Kivu. It was a beautiful, misty day. (We couldn’t go inside the park and gorilla forest… it would have cost $500 US per person!) But we took some awesome pictures, and laughed so much. It was a long, great day, thanks to Donat.
Pastor Kamanze
I never took his picture. Pastor Robert’s spiritual father worked at the main Apostolic Church in Remera, just up the hill from our house. We stopped to visit him a few times. Like Donat, Pastor Kamanze speaks only Kinyarwanda and French, so I got to play translator again.
At our last visit to his office, he offered us chapati and soda, and we talked. The conversation turned to his experience during the genocide in 1994. What he told us would have made my jaw drop in amazement, but I had to relay it in English to the others. I kicked myself later for not recording what he shared with us.
He had so much to say about the history of the country, and the complicated politics that fueled the genocide. But his personal story speaks more than a history lesson. Pastor Kamanze is a Tutsi, the minority tribe that was the target of the killing. During the violence, he was captured three separate times. His family was in hiding. Each time, he managed to have his Bible with him, and prayed diligently through his fear. And each time… the Hutu soldiers couldn’t bring themselves to kill him. They let him go. He said one passage got him through those times in prison. It was this:
But I will rescue you on that day, declares the LORD; you will not be given into the hands of those you fear. I will save you; you will not fall by the sword but will escape with your life, because you trust in me, declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 39:17-18)
So many people survived to tell about that time. And what they have done with their country is astounding. I consistently felt like I was in Europe, not Africa. The standard of living in Kigali is astonishingly high compared to other places we’ve seen in the past 2 months. Pastor Kamanze commented on the Church’s role in reconstruction. The pulpits were the first places people heard, “We cannot stay in 1994. We must give each other hope. We must move forward.” And they have.
I learned so much this month… about Love, about God, about myself, and most of all about hope. Murakoze, Rwanda.
-Katie
