Rwanda

Posted on 17 December 2012 by Lorna

Well power has been pretty unreliable recently, hence the late blog. We travelled to Rwanda this week to renew our visas and to see Kigali. This involved a journey which lasted 13 hours, including 11 hours on a bus! It was lovely to see some of the countryside of Uganda and Rwanda during both journeys, the journey home lasting 13 hours on the bus! Rwanda is absolutely beautiful! It is noticeably different from Uganda, mainly in the way that the land is farmed and the fact that it has a lot more hills. We passed lots of fields of tea in Rwanda and lots of matoke (a type of banana) farms in Uganda. In Rwanda we took the opportunity to visit the Rwandan Genocide Memorial Museum which was very well laid out but obviously quite harrowing. Our trip to Rwanda also provided our first opportunity to eat out and we very much enjoyed some variation from our usual of either rice or pasta with vegetable sauce. I have never been so grateful for a pizza or for chicken noodle soup! Rwanda has definitely come a very long way in the past 18 years since the genocide and we found Kigali very clean, quiet and well organised. We all felt that it seemed very western and quite European, and although it was nice I really missed the familiarity and general craziness of Kampala, let alone the people here, so I’m glad to now be home.

On Sunday the children lead the entire service at church and afterwards the Lord’s Trusted Warriors – KBC’s dance troop, held their first ever concert. Words really do not do justice to the quality of their performance and the hours and hours of rehearsal really paid off. The church was pretty much full and the concert was a huge success. We all really enjoyed it and are so proud of ‘The LT lot’ as we call them. There were lots of other acts as well and we were asked to sing so we performed a medley of songs including one in Luganda which went down very well!

Something that was definitely very exciting this week was that we received a very special package with a visitor to Uganda who brought a suitcase full of gifts from our parents. So last night I opened my very own Christmas Shoe-box! I feel so blessed to receive a whole variety of things from a cake tin and spatulas (finally!) to insect repellent, and of course a bag of Percy Pigs!

As always, thank you so much for your prayers and support. This week I’d really appreciate prayer for...
- Health, safety and good morale for the whole team including the local volunteers as a lot of people have been ill or tired recently.
- The success of the children’s Bible club that we’re running this week.
- Provision and finances for Smile Uganda.