What does a typical day look like for month two in Rwanda?
6:30-8:00: Wake up; spend time with the Lord; prepare sermons for the day; get dressed.
8:00-8:45 (or so): Eat breakfast prepared by Pastor Fred’s wife, Mary. This consists of any of the following foods: eggs, chapati, mandazi (their version of a doughnut minus the hole in the center), pineapple, bananas, avocado, fresh baked rolls, and coffee and tea. We sometimes bring our peanut butter and Nutella out and put that on the chapati and rolls. We also have jelly, margarine, and honey. My team discovered Jempy, an almost identical replica of Nutella that is cheaper. I am not a huge fan of Nutella so I always go for the peanut butter.
8:45-9:15 (or so): Leave for Pastor Fred’s church to do morning ministry. We are usually gathered around the family room chatting or finishing up breakfast. One or two people will typically have their Bible out and Pastor will walk into the room and, in his characteristic nonchalant voice, say “Are we ready?” We will then pray as a group for the day and pile into his truck. The drive to church is about 20 minutes and two or three of us always jump into the truck bed. The weather is typically gorgeous so riding in the back of a truck is such a fun perk to the month.
9:30 (or so)-12:30 (or so): Two of us remain at the church to teach rudimentary English to a few of the men who attend Awakening Revival (name of the church). They are between the ages of 19 and 24 and are so sweet. The rest of us walk with Pastor through the village where his church is located, Gahanga. We meet farmers, house wives, frequenters of bars, and children and talk to them about Jesus. Most people in Gahanga attend a church on Sundays so we invite them to join us for our services during the week. Those who do not have a home church receive invitations to make Awakening Revival their home. I believe Africans view church attendance in a fairly simple way. They do not spend a ton of time visiting different churches looking for the “perfect” one; they simply attend the closest church since they have to walk.
12:30-3:30 (or so): Drive home from ministry where we typically find lunch already prepared and waiting on the table when we walk in the house. Lunch is usually some of the following items: white rice, potatoes, cabbage, beans, spinach, pineapple, chapati, beef stew, matoke (pronounced muh-toe-kay and is like a potato), African noodles (they look like spaghetti noodles but they taste so much better, I really don’t know how or why), guava or pineapple orange juice. Once we finish lunch our team has “Lean In Lunchtime” which is just our fancy way of saying devotionals. We spend about 20 minutes or so as a team going through a book of the bible. We are almost complete with Titus. We then have free time for anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours depending on what time Pastor wants to leave. Some take naps, some have quiet time, some watch a little tv, it all just depends on the mood.
3:30 (or so)-6:00: Drive back to church where we arrive to a few of the members having prayer time. Prayer time in Africa looks completely different than in America. They pray loudly and boldly. It’s like walking into a Holy Spirit service. Prayer occurs from 3:00-4:00 exactly then they switch to praise and worship. This lasts for exactly an hour and also looks different than what we are used to. I have yet to determine if they’re singing a particular song or if they just sing words and the keyboardist simply throws on any beat and plays any melody he wants to hear. I think the latter. Of course they’re singing in Kinyarwanda (local language) so I obviously have a hard time keeping up. The key word to remember here is ‘deafening.’ They have two giant speakers and they crank those suckers up. Microphone awareness is not really a thing. Some of those women get going and forget they have a mic shoved in their mouth when they could be heard a mile away without a mic. We have a resident singer on the team (Hannah) and I keep telling her to watch “Sister Act” and hook the praise team up with some lessons. All joking aside these people have a passion during worship I haven’t experienced since growing up in a Pentecostal church. It is not a performance, they are just worshipping and having fun. At exactly 5:00 Pastor walks up and essentially introduces our team to preach. Two of us preach each day during the week. The first couple of days we were happy if we preached a total of 30 minutes; now we are filling the entire hour. My personal goal is to preach 45-50 minutes before leaving for Ethiopia. Not surprisingly my favorite thing I have done on the race so far is preach. I mean I get to talk…for as long as I want…enough said. It turns out the Holy Spirit really likes when I use him to talk about God. At exactly 6:00 preaching is complete so you had better have wrapped your sermon by then…no extraneous speaking allowed. We greet everyone in church and leave around 6:15 to head home for the night.
6:30-7:30 (or so): Free time to do whatever we want. We usually change, hang out, sometimes do team time, watch a movie with Pastor’s two sons, and generally just wait for dinner. Dinner can show up as early as 7:30 or as late as 9:00 and consists of pretty much the same food from lunch except Mary will put out the leftover mandazi from breakfast as well as coffee and tea.
8:30 (or so)-10:00 (or so): Once we wrap up with dinner we have the rest of the night to either do team time or just hang out and chat. I am typically climbing into my tent by 9:30 because I wake up starting around 5:30 due to the sun, birds singing, and general sounds of the neighborhood coming alive. I will lay in bed until about 6:30 though.
Sundays look a little different because we split up and some people go to Pastor’s main church and the rest go to one of the satellite churches nearby. Two of us preach at each church. Church starts around 9:00 (I believe but we have never been there quite that early) and lasts until 12:30 on the dot. We then head home and have lunch and the rest of the day to do as we please.
Our off days are Saturday and Monday. We leisurely wake up, eat breakfast, perhaps get a workout in, and take off to the city where we plant ourselves in one of the several nice cafes and spend time catching up with our friends, families, and other squad mates. Most of our squad is located in Kigali this month so it has been incredible getting to see the other teams on off days. It feels like working during the week then hanging out with your friends on the weekends.
The house we live in has five bedrooms. Pastor and Mary have one. Their two sons (Prince 9, Joshua 8) share one. Their four daughters (Eva 23, Sharon 21, Natasha 18, Linda 16) share one. Alexa and Ashley share one with a queen-sized bed. Hannah, Debbie, and I share one with a king-sized bed. After about five nights of sleeping in a bed with two other people I decided I preferred my tent so each night I head out to the front yard and climb into my little personal oasis.
We have a separate building that houses a squatty potty, western toilet, and two rooms for bathing. There is a spigot we use to fill a bucket in one of the rooms and that is how we bathe. The water is not hot at all but bathing here is viewed more as a chore or necessity and less as a time to relax (I miss my baths so bad). The water gets shut off unexpectedly at times so we are forced to use water that is carted in from a nearby well in five gallon jugs. The power sometimes goes out but not nearly as frequently as it did in Uganda.
The family has welcomed us into their homes and now refers to us as their children. We had a birthday party for Mary on Sunday and my team all received Rwandan names. Mine is Uwase, meaning the Father’s daughter. Debbie says she plans to get hers tattooed on her forearm but we are trying to talk her out of it…sometimes we have to reign her in a little. During the party Mary started telling the team how much of a blessing we are and how much they love us and one of her daughters spoke up and said, “Hey what about your black kids? You only talk about your white kids.” It was hilarious. We have truly developed a bond with this family that is only going to make it harder to leave at the end of the month. We definitely feel like we have received so much more than we have given.
Well, that is our ministry for the month. The team is well. Everyone is healthy and well rested. Most of us are exercising. All in all it’s a great month!
