Hello everyone!
I was just thinking, man I have been posting all of these great stories from Nepal but you all have no idea what is going on here in Rwanda!
So, here is a brief summary of our ministry this month in Rwanda, many more stories are sure to follow as well as several vlogs of children dancing and playing!
This month we are helping in a school for children around the ages of 3-5. I say around because there are some two-year-olds in the “baby class” and 7-year-olds in the big kid class.
We are a team of 6 so we have two people per classroom, I am with Nikki in the Baby Class. We get there and sometimes start the day with songs, but we have learned it is better not to get the kids all excited so we wait and have the teachers finish up their lessons first. During that time we grade the homework and write the new homework. We also write out their assignments because they write out all of their classwork since they don’t have a copy machine, or blank paper for that matter. After that the children line up and wash their hands then we get them their snacks out of their backpacks. We are slowly memorizing all of their snack containers and backpacks… and names! Halfway through getting the food out the children pray with their teacher with their “hands together and eyes closed!”
After snack is outside time. This is a time when sometimes the children are in a large circle and we lead songs, or they are all fighting over who holds our hands, or they are taking our hair out of their ponytails so they can do it, or they might just all be jumping on us.
After outside time we go back in and the children sometimes have work, sometimes they “sleep”, sometimes they sing songs with us, or sometimes we teach them new things, like baby shark, or even the hippopotamus song! It is a song from the camp I went to as a child and I am so happy to have it to teach the children!
After school we walk home, oh yeah and we walk to school, up a steep hill! The way home is nice because it is downhill, but also most of us are holding hands with at least one child. When we get home we say goodbye to the kids who live at the bottom of the hill and go inside to wash our hands and soon after that we eat lunch.
The afternoons vary from going to the church we are fixing up to checkers ministry! The church we are fixing up was closed when the government closed hundreds of churches last year if they were not meeting the code they wanted them to meet. So we are fixing the church up so it can be re-opened! We are painting and cleaning? It’s hard to clean while the work is being done.
The other ministry we do is checkers ministry, a ministry we kind of made up one day but it is awesome!! We were walking to pray for a man who had gotten into an accident. The truck he was driving was falling off a cliff and he jumped out of it, breaking his leg and foot in the process. Along the way we stopped by some men playing checkers to talk and they challenged us to play, I played the first game and I would like to say I won, but I know he let me win. We were at a standoff at the end. After the game we had gathered a crowd so Nikki shared the gospel and invited people to accept Christ and 4 people stepped forward but we know more than that prayed within their hearts, there were over 20 people standing all around us. We ended up going back and playing with them again too! We did end up praying for the man after that too and he was able to stand on his leg and said he believed his healing was being quickened!
One other ministry we did in the evening was church. We went to church when Moses, our host, was going to preach and we did the worship that night. Then that lead to us leading worship on Sundays during the first service and then we do children’s ministry during the second. Our Sundays are long, but we love them!
That sums up most of our ministries this month, we also play with the kids at our host home constantly. I cannot go to a meal without playing with the youngest child, the one in my recent Instagram post. He was a tough cookie for about a day and now he knows our names and always wants to tell us “food is ready!”
This month has been so refreshing, I loved how many opportunities Asia had to offer through our ministries constantly changing, but building relationships with a community brings my heart so much joy!
Now for the reason behind the title of this blog, one day our host was driving us down a hill quickly. We took a sharp turn at the bottom and Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride from Lelo and Stitch popped into my head and I realized Rwandan fits perfectly!So there you have it!
I hope you enjoyed this brief blog explaining our Rwandan Rollercoaster Ride!
