So far our time in
Rwanda has been a rather interesting experience. We arrived on Saturday
afternoon and were able to take some time to settle into our room, I don’t
think that this family has ever had white visitors before because they watch us
very closely in everything we do and barely give us enough space to move
around
.
Sunday morning we
woke up at 6am, thinking it was 7, because we failed to realize that there is a
time change from Kenya to Rwanda. So we sat around for a couple of hours before
we headed off to Church, which started at 9. Somewhere between waking up and
going to church our Pastor informed us, in his very broken English that two of
us were to preach that morning. Right away Aimee stepped up and said she would
preach, and then the remaining 5 of us played rock, paper, scissors to decide
who would be the other victim. The first round Keri and Cassie got out, so they
were safe, and then Tiffany got out so it was down to just me and Nikki.
At this point I
began to have a mild panic attack, tears were running down my face and I was
attempting to try to escape the room, but in my panic I couldn’t figure out how
to open the door so I just fell against the wall. It’s not that I’m terrified
of public speaking, I actually enjoy it, but at this moment I was totally
unprepared to talk and I am not good at doing anything without planning ahead.
We had only 15 minutes before it was time to leave for church and it still
hadn’t been decided if it was going to be me or Nikki speaking. So I semi
pulled myself together so that we could finish our final round of rock, paper,
scissors, I was extremely nervous when we yelled “shoot” and I saw that Nikki
played scissors, I looked at my own hand and I had played rock. “Yes” I began
to scream, thank the Lord I won and would not have to speak this Sunday
morning.
Walking up to the
church we could hear a loud drum and joyful singing and I began to get really
excited because it sounded like they were having a lot of fun inside. The
church ended up being really small and only having about 20 attendants. The
service lasted for about 3 hours, several songs were sung, including one that
we performed as a team, and then about 6 different people got up to share
something, Nikki and Aimee being two of them and they both did wonderful.
We had the rest of
the day free so we sat in the house because we still couldn’t fully figure out
everything that was going on due to our extreme language barrier.
That evening we
realized that we had not seen the Pastor since church. Eventually we learned
that he had left for Uganda and we didn’t know when he would be coming back….
