When it comes to Valentine’s Day, you can never have high expectations, it’s just too risky. And you can expect that being in Rwanda with six people you just met 5 months ago lowered the bar. However, because God blessed the women on this team with two amazing men, JD Russell and Jared Messenger, we got one unforgettable Valentine’s Day.
Monday morning, we woke up to Jared serving us breakfast and tea. At some point we all left the room long enough that when we came back into the living room, there was a pyramid of chocolate and note for us!
Well, the day proceeded on as a usual day off for us. After breakfast, we headed to the airport to get smoothies and use the free internet. We headed back to the house for lunch around noon and Amber had walked back into the girls’ bedroom to put her stuff down. We had all settled into the chairs in the living room when all of a sudden a rather loud expletive and an exclamation of “there’s more!” resounded from the back of the house. All of the girls jumped up and ran to our room to find a treasure chest of chocolate with another note!
The rest of the afternoon was spent eating excessive amounts of chocolate, lounging, and getting ready for our mysterious night on the town. Once 5:30pm rolled around, the time we were told to be ready by, a very good looking group of misfit missionaries were heading up the mountain towards a taxi. When we had gotten to downtown Kigali, the men weren’t completely sure where the place we were going was, so we hired a six year old street kid to give us a tour guide through the city to get us where we were going. Success! We made it to our destination. The front of the restaurant was nice but when we walked around to the back there were fire pits, outdoor couch seating, and, thanks to JD’s reservation, we had front row seats to the complimentary movie that was going to play after dinner; this place was nicer and way trendier than any place I ever went to in the States.
After eating our Valentine’s Day burritos, the movie started. It turns out the complimentary movie, unbeknownst to our men, was a bit… graphic. So we held out long enough to get the free chocolate cake that came with dinner, then bolted, praying those images wouldn’t forever be burned in our minds. Across the street from our restaurant was the Mille Collines (Hotel Rwanda), so being the true globe trotters we are, we wanted to walk through some history. So we went into the famous hotel, gave ourselves a self-guided tour, rubbed our bare feet on the first carpet we’ve seen in five months, and all used the beautiful, comfortable, decent smelling, American-style toilets, and for a moment, we all forgot that we were missionaries living in the third world for a year.
After we all got our fill of the normalcy we once knew, the men sat us down in the big comfy chairs in the atrium and pulled out a heart-shaped box of chocolates with yet another note! We sat for a few more minutes exchanging past Valentine’s Day stories before heading home for the night. All the way home and for awhile as we sat in the living room after getting home, the girls talked about how amazing our men are and how they went above and beyond and that there was nothing they could do to top it… then we went to our rooms for the night. HELLO KIT KATS! On each of our pillows were a Kit Kat (American candy is like gold) and a personalized note! Good Lord, these men are amazing!
My future husband has a lot to live up to now that I know how a good man treats a woman.
