This is very last minute, but please consider joining Thom and me this Saturday evening at 6pm at Homewood Church of Christ. We will be presenting the amazing advancement of God’s kingdom happening at Virunga Valley Academy in Rwanda. There is more work to be done! We need you to join us!

Saturday, June 28, 2025

6:00 PM

***

COST $100 PER PERSON 

OR $500 PER TABLE

If you plan to attend please RSVP to Jennifer Presley 

Text: 205-337-0613 or Email: jpresley@homewoodchurch.org

You may pay by check made out to Homewood Church or pay online at:

www.homewoodchurch.org/give

Please continue in prayer for the people of Rwanda, Musanze (the city where VVA is), and VVA students, teachers, and staff.

Much love,

Bekah

The school year is drawing to a close, and we’re deep in the rhythm of finals. It’s a season of reflection as we witness our students’ growth—not just in academics but in their faith and character. Thom’s math classes and Bekah’s science lessons have been more than equations and experiments; they’ve been opportunities to encourage critical thinking, resilience, and a pursuit of God’s truth. We’ve watched these young people blossom into future transformers of Rwanda, and our prayer is that they continue to seek God’s kingdom with courage and compassion.

Since our last update, VVA has been alive with events that have woven our community closer together. The School Festival in February 2025 was a blast— lots of games, vendors, and bouncy house insanity. (No kids were injured despite how many attempted to cram into the bouncy house at once.) The VVA 10 Year Anniversary was a milestone that filled us with awe, reflecting on a decade of God’s faithfulness since Matt and Andrea Miller founded VVA in 2014. We gathered to honor the school’s legacy of reconciliation—between people, to God, and to creation—recommitting to its mission as we celebrated with gratitude and hope. The Mother/Daughter Tea was a sweet time, where mothers and daughters shared stories and laughter, strengthening bonds that echo the importance of family. The Talent Show (just this last weekend) was ridiculously fun to put together though a lot of work. Students (all the way down to Preschool!) went boldly onto the stage and gave it their all. A special thanks to the men of F3 Birmingham that contributed to help make the talent show a success. (Funds were used to pay for prizes and some used to invest in lighting equipment for future events).

Thom’s F3 Musanze workout group has grown into a brotherhood that has been a source of strength and fellowship. Our recent mountain hikes (we crushed both Gahinga and Sabyinyo) were more than physical challenges; they were spiritual journeys that helped us to grow in mental toughness as we pushed each other not to quit. Our gathering at Villa Gorilla was filled with laughter and connection, a reminder of the community we’ve built through shared faith and encouragement. These moments have deepened our appreciation for the men of Musanze and the bonds we’ve formed.

A special moment was the visit from our friends at Homewood Church of Christ and Thom’s sister Sarah and her family in late March. They joined us for the 10 Year Anniversary, and their presence was a gift, bridging our worlds of Rwanda and home. Together, we went on safari, an adventure that left us in awe of God’s creation—from the wildlife to the vast landscapes of this beautiful country. Their visit was a powerful reminder of the love and support we carry with us.

As we near the completion of this chapter, the spiritual impacts of our time here are profound. The school year’s end has shown us God’s faithfulness in guiding our students’ growth, preparing them to serve their communities with Christ-like character. The VVA events have been more than celebrations; they’ve been opportunities to see God’s hand in uniting people, fostering reconciliation, and celebrating His gifts. F3 Musanze has taught us the power of fellowship, where physical challenges become spiritual victories, and God’s creation inspires worship. The visit from loved ones reminded us that we’re part of a larger family, sustained by prayers and shared faith across continents.

Serving at VVA has been a joy beyond measure. We’ve poured our hearts into this community - teaching, mentoring, and walking alongside students as they navigate this chapter of their lives. We’ve seen transformations—students finding their voices, families growing closer, and a community strengthened by faith. As we prepare to leave, our hearts are heavy, but they are also full, knowing that God’s work at VVA will continue through the incredible staff, students, and families we’ve come to love. We are grateful for every moment, and hope and pray to stay involved in the lives of our family and friends here.

Thank you for walking this journey with us through your prayers, encouragement, and support. Your love has sustained us in ways we can’t fully express. As we look to the summer and the new paths God has for our family, we trust in His plan, carrying the joy of this season with us always.

Much Love!
Thom and Bekah

During this season of the year, most of us spend time reflecting and remembering. We look back to Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the promise that was fulfilled with that amazing event. I also tend to look back over the year and ponder what I’ve seen and heard - what I’ve learned (or more likely, what I need to learn).

As I think about Christmas, I want to have eyes to see and ears to hear, as Jesus said in Matthew 13. As Jesus taught the Parable of the Sower to his disciples, he said, “But blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear.” Another version of this that I found is, "Happy ye, whose eyes and ears, voluntarily and gladly opened, are drinking in the light divine."

Today, my prayer is that you and I can both look and see the light divine.

I recently watched The Chosen’s depiction of the Christmas story called The Shepherd. I encourage you to watch this, as well. When I think of eyes wide open ready to see and ears ready to hear, I thought of the shepherds at the birth of Jesus. Their eyes got to see and hear “the light divine”, the glorious angels, the first news of His birth. They got to see our Savior. Without eyes ready to see, they may have missed it. They may have never known the good news.

This past year, God has blessed me and Thom with seeing glimpses of Him. This has come through hearing the stories of the people we have met, humbly attempting to teach and mentor our students, parenting our own children, and experiencing things in such a different part of the world that have brought more perspective.

One example of this was the day I got to spend at the district hospital in Butaro in northern Rwanda. After a beautiful but long drive on a rocky dirt road over mountains overlooking lakes, we arrived at a hospital where I got to join a friend who is working to teach medical students in Rwanda. There in the hospital, a mother and her baby sat in a large open room with many other patients. She had been there for 4 months, waiting on answers, with only one bed to lie on, no car to travel back and forth, many kilometers from her family. Experiences like this remind me of just how much I have, and just how much I must share what I have with others. I’ve found that so many people here have so little compared to what I’m used to - to what I have come to expect as “normal”. At the same time, there is little to no sense of entitlement from many that I have met. People seem to live at peace, with a quiet hope.

Peace and hope reminds me of Advent - of waiting for Christ at his birth, in His return to earth, and his coming in our hearts. Our “Rwandan family” and friends from here have been such a support and blessing to us. There’s a photo below of the large Thanksgiving lunch at the Millers. Also, I’ve been blessed to help with Bible club at school for grades 3 to 5. We’ve been studying the prophesies about Jesus written in Isaiah. These kids are interested and have so many great questions - ears to hear!

For our “Christmas card”, the best family photo I have to share is, hilariously, this one from VVA’s Light Party (aka the Halloween alternative).

I want to have eyes to see my own blessings. Thom and the kids are four examples of God’s grace to me. Thom loves teaching math and computer science to grades 6 through 9. He is helping with administration at VVA this year, as well, which has been a challenge and a joy. He also continues to coordinate biweekly workout groups for young men in Musanze. Hannah Joy is in the third grade and loves to play basketball after lunch, enjoys math and art, and has been learning to crochet. Mary Hope is in the first grade, and loves to talk about space and read any book she can find. She spends a lot of time singing in the bathroom and very carefully aligning all of her dolls and stuffed animals. John Valor has so much excitement and energy. He is super interested in paper airplanes and volcanoes (constructing one out of tables and blankets in our living room almost every day). I think his favorite thing may be cereal.

This Christmas, and all the time, I pray that I can keep eyes to see and ears to hear what God is showing me. I pray that all of us can be like plants that grow and thrive, without stones that hinder our growth and without worldly things that so easily entangle. I’m praying for God’s Spirit to empower us with HIS wisdom and HIS perspective, HIS presence (another theme this year), as we just….abide.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, everyone! Have a great holiday season, and we hope to talk with you and even SEE you visiting here soon. :).

Love,

Thom, Bekah, Hannah Joy, Mary Hope, and John Valor

Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth— that is, if we were both alert and honest.

The quote’s context is about allowing yourself to accept the premise that the author of a book you’re reading may have more understanding about a subject than you do, which when accepted will lead you to this type of shock which you must move through to receive their new understanding as your own.

We’re now over a quarter of the way through year two of our work in Rwanda at VVA. This year, with the additional responsibilities that Bekah and I have taken on intentionally or circumstantially, I’d (totally unscientifically) estimate what feels like a 5x increase in the stress on our family.

The workload of being an administrator of the school has been high for me, as I’ve been using my background in technology to enhance systems at the school such as the way the House system works, the way student report cards are generated, and the way the school-wide timetables are generated. So far, those efforts have yielded good fruit in helping to improve school efficiency and have also benefitted me personally as a means to scratch the itch of having some fun writing and integrating software.

I avoided taking on teaching new-to-me Math classes this year to help keep my workload from becoming too overwhelming, sticking with the 6, 7, 8 Maths and Algebra classes I taught last year. This was a great strategy; however, the incoming Grade 6 class is the largest middle school class so far and also has demanded significant attention to address behavior-related issues as the students are slowly adjusting to the expectations of secondary school.

Bekah has a similarly increased load on her plate as she is teaching a full schedule (she taught part-time last year because John Valor was in preschool). Her toughest bits these days are trying to organize and develop the high school Physical Science course during the year, as there isn’t a well-structured existing curriculum that she’s been able to use. She’s also teaching the Grade 10 geometry course, so she’s having to get caught back up on those skills, too. Do y’all remember doing Propositional Logic with Venn Diagrams back in high school geometry? There’s just something about those three circles.

The amount of work we’re doing is great though when combined with the other full-time job of being parents, things are starting to fray at the edges. When Bekah and I recently had some time to sit down together after getting the kids to bed last Sunday night, we had a conversation that we’d needed to have for a while. Among other things we shared honestly with each other, Bek said “people keep saying ‘I hope you got some good rest’ and it’s driving me kind of crazy because it’s like basically impossible to rest when you have 3 kids”. Resting is hard when we’re both constantly cycling between the teacher job and the parent job.

Thankfully, at just the right time little graces arrive, perfectly timed to keep things moving in the right direction and to lift us up. A good friend of mine gave me an unexpected call yesterday to talk about a big life decision he’s contemplating and to check in with me, which turned into a longer and really encouraging conversation. I had a great teacher coaching conversation with Andrea M. this week as well that gave space for me to share some of the things I’ve been feeling and she was very supportive. We had a video call with a former missionary to Mozambique, Alan H., who also gave us useful guidance on ways to lay “bricks of time in heaven” by observing Sabbath rest in helpful and really practical ways.

Yes, the responsibilities and pressures we have on our family are elevated, but don’t take away from this post that they are so high that we’re on a crash course for burnout or frustration. No, that’s not how I see it right now. Right now I’m seeing it as that earlier quote suggests— the shock of puzzlement and perplexity of being out of our depth. It’s easy for me to admit that neither I nor Bekah have been in a situation like this before, and we are clearly out of our depth. But the point of the book is an encouragement that the shock is part of the growth.

We both feel strongly that our purposes in Rwanda are for God’s glory and that He orchestrated the circumstances for us to be here and to do this work. If that’s the case, my convictions must lead me to the conclusion that He’s able to complete the work in us and give us what we need to do it. That moves me from a closed mindset to a growth mindset when I’m feeling that puzzled shock from our stressors— “How’s God going to work this one out?” “I’ve never seen any problem like this before, I wonder how he’s going to solve this one!”

I’ve leave you with one little anecdote from a recent experience I had. JV and I had an opportunity to have dude-time together as the girls and Bekah had an event to attend. We decided to go to a local pool to swim together and have fun. (Sorry, but apparently I only have significant life lessons when at a pool.) I recalled that a recent new member of my men’s fitness group, a guy we call “Psalms” in the group, shared with me that he didn’t know how to swim and wanted an opportunity to learn if I ever had time to teach him. I called Psalms up and he was free, so he joined JV and I to the pool to give it a go.

Psalms isn’t a huge guy, but he’s not a pushover either. He’s younger than me and pretty fit and has spent most of his life being responsible for himself. He shared with me that he’s effectively an orphan, born of an unexpected teenage pregnancy that led to family disunity and abandonment. Despite those obstacles, he’s made his way in life even though it hasn’t been (and currently isn’t) easy to support himself.

We get to the pool and all make our way into the too-cold water. JV immediately starts doing his JV things, living his best life shouting and doing cannonballs and making his “Hey daddy, look! A water wall shield!” splashes. But Psalms is incredibly nervous, it’s all over his face.

Having never taught anyone how to swim before, I start off trying to get him to learn to float. It takes only 1 minute of that for me to realize that he’s simply too afraid to even put his head under the water. He tells me that he feels this big fear around him and asks me what will happen to his ears if he goes under the water.

“Your ears will be alright, they won’t get hurt if you go under the water”.
”What about my nose? Will the water get stuck in my nose?”
”No, your nose will be fine. Hold it closed to be sure.”
”Let me see you do it.”

I give a quick, “1, 2, 3” and then dunk under for a second and pop back up. He looks less unsure. “Do it with me this time?” He nods. “1, 2, 3”. I pop down and when I come up his face isn’t wet. “I wasn’t ready,” he says. We try again. He joins me this time.

The slow progress of this exchange continues for about 10 more minutes, culminating in him being open to putting his full head under water but not being willing to do it himself. “You’ll have to help me, I can’t make myself do this. I’m too scared.” He holds out his arm and I take hold of him. “1, 2, 3”. I help force him down under the water completely, and he stays down for a good 3 seconds before popping back up. When he comes up, there’s a look on his face that’s both terror and relief mixed up together. Even though his face is wet, I think I can make out some tears there.

That look right there. That was the shock I’m talking about. He was completely out of control, over his head, doing something he knew in his heart he wanted to do— gaining a new skill but more importantly, conquering a fear he’d held on to for too long. He literally said to me in that very moment while shivering, “I can feel the fear, like, moving away from me”.

Love you all. Thank you for all of your prayers and encouragement. They mean the world to us!

Thom

P.S. I started a new teacher Instagram account to post pictures and videos from the experiences our family is having at VVA. You can find it at @thomatvva.

First, I will give a quick synopsis of the end of last school year. My last post was about the Habits of Mind that we do at VVA, specifically the one that was most special to me on Awe and Wonder. Throughout April and May, we finished the school year with its ups and downs. The secondary students worked hard to complete various science projects and presentations, Thom’s math students worked (sometimes in a not-so-trustworthy manner) to outperform one another on Khan Academy competitions, we visited Rwandan dancers, Spirit week and water day happened, I got sick a few times, and then the end of school came with a beautiful graduation ceremony. These first photos are of two of my classes’ science presentations. First was a body systems fair that grade 9 (biology) completed, and second was an African biome business fair that grade 7 completed.

This image was a great one from our experience seeing the Rwandan traditional dancers in action. We all got in on the dancing…

There were events galore at VVA - from Mother’s Day tea to a VVA 5K run. We continued to do workouts: both Thom’s men’s F3 group twice a week and the women’s workout group once a week. The school runs on a house system across all ages. My house, Muhabura, had the most house points at the end of the year! The whole school was yellow on the last day of school, as a fun celebration.

I love how VVA gives character awards to each child at graduation. I was so proud of Hannah and Mary Hope. Hannah received an award for showing dignity and optimism. Mary Hope received an award for showing wisdom and integrity. It’s such an honor to see traits in your children displayed, then recognized and awarded. The girls’ dance group even got to perform that day. We were exhausted, but I’m thankful for that time. (John Valor also had a graduation celebration! He starts kindergarten this year.)

Between the end of school and our travels back to the States for summer, Thom’s and his men’s workout group hiked one of the volcanoes, Bisoke. He may tell himself how “ridiculously hard” it was - harder than he expected I think! We also helped out with Maria and Pinto’s wedding, and our girls had the opportunity to be a part of the wedding! (Check out Thom’s forlorn face below…hahaha)

We left on June 10th to head to Alabama, where the first thing we did was eat out with both sides of the family at a Mexican restaurant. Ha! By the end of the summer, we definitely had our fill of cheese dip and chips.

As I sit here at 9:54pm on Sunday night in our home in Musanze, I’m asking Thom, “How do we summarize all of this? Do we even cover what we did this summer?” First off, we thank everyone who housed and cared for us. We are so grateful for all the dinners, lunches, coffees, texts, support, and the vacations, too. My brief overview of our two months in the states is the following:

• Vacationing in an RV at the Grand Canyon and southern Utah with Thom’s parents (One of my favorite things we did!). The kids even became junior rangers. Took an oath and everything….yeah…

• Going to Branson to see a live magic/variety show, Silver Dollar City, and Thom’s sister also got married…Surprise! (Mary Hope even got to be on stage for a show!)

• Time with my brother and his family

  in Mobile and at Orange Beach. We saw some pirate ships and ate as much shrimp as we could.

• Working back at my job at UAB for 2 weeks.

• Elizabeth Glory’s, Thom’s and JV’s birthdays.

I will share one perspective-shifting story. For Thom’s birthday, we had a date night and both ordered a nice steak. I had a filet mignon kabob and had 1-2 small pieces left on my plate. I asked for a box, and the waiter said, “What, that for the dog or something?” I laughed and then immediately felt ashamed. Many people we know here in Rwanda (the men who are our guards, for example) would never, ever let any meat go to waste.

There are more photos from the summer to follow, that may or may not fit in your email or even in this post. Regardless, we are thankful for the time with family and also with our friends and family at Homewood Church of Christ. We have been back in our home in Rwanda for 1 week now, and are in full swing of getting ready for school. Thom is on the administrative staff this year, so is helping a lot with scheduling, grading software, house points applications, etc…in addition to his math teaching! This year, I get to teach grades 7-10 science and even geometry. Thom sticks to his math and admin role. Our kids start kindergarten, first, and third grades. We will do our best to keep the updates coming. Perhaps a post soon on the first days of school this year and how we are all faring, again.

Thank you most of all for the prayers that you send to the Father on our behalf. We ask for prayers for our students and our own children, for the teachers and staff, for the parents, and for this community.

More summer photos below:

The students at Virunga Valley Academy discuss various “habits of mind” throughout the year. (We may have mentioned these a few times in previous posts, as they guide many of our own thoughts and perspectives.) About two weeks ago, we wrapped up what is now one of my favorites of the year: “Responding with wonderment and awe.”

Wonder and Awe: This is the only response to the amazing creation of God. One amazing song that kept coming to the forefront, and one that I showed my secondary students a few weeks ago, was So Will I by Hillsong United. Here is a lyric video that I recommend:

In my house (Muhabura), we taught the kindergarten through 5th grade these lyrics to sing aloud to the school:

And as You speak
A hundred billion galaxies are born
In the vapour of Your breath the planets form
If the stars were made to worship, so will I
I can see Your heart in everything You've made
Every burning star
A signal fire of grace
If creation sings Your praises, so will I

We experienced wonder and awe at the VVA Talent Show, as well, that occurred about 3 weeks ago. Thom, Steve, Amanda, and others were heavily involved in planning and coordinating an amazing night of singing, dancing, and dramatic performances. Even John Valor was on stage with his friends singing how “God made me!” Almost all students in the school were participants. Mary Hope and Hannah did an amazing job at their performance, as well, with Mary Hope singing and Hannah playing piano to the song “Great are you Lord”. (Hannah and Mary Hope also danced with their classes!). The winners of the show were the Rwandan traditional dancers, comprised of many of the secondary students at VVA.

It’s amazing how so many things throughout these past weeks have connected to the wonder of the universe that God created. I think when we are called to look for it and think about it, we can see God everywhere. Especially in His most precious creation - us, his people. In Grade 8 science, our current unit is on space. We have been learning about the phases of the moon, how solar and lunar eclipses happen, why we see so many colors at sunset and sunrise, how rainbows are formed, etc. I have been amazed to learn these things again. The Earth is tilted just enough to cause seasons and the moon rotates around the Earth (as the Earth moves around the sun) just perfectly to give us various moon shapes and colors. We see beautiful sunrises thanks to God’s blessing of light moving through more atmosphere and bending into red and purple and orange. I’ve been amazed over and over, and I have loved teaching this unit! Here is an example of a video from our curriculum that impacted me a lot:

For the Awe and Wonder habit of mind, each house was tasked with finding photos and images of things that made them feel wonder or amazement. There were 5 categories within which to find such pictures, and some had to be original photos. Thom’s house (Gahinga) sat all the kids down and asked for ideas, while they searched online for images and put them into a slide show. Each child had an image that they chose in the slides, and the kids made comments about why each thing was so amazing. Here is the presentation if you want to watch it - by the children of Gahinga at VVA:

It’s so important to remember to be in awe of what God has done in and around us. The first time we came to visit Rwanda, Matt took us up onto the side of a large hill just before sunrise. We carried chairs with us and supplies to make coffee. The plan was to see the sun come up over this “land of 1000 hills” - Rwanda. What happened was so much more amazing than I expected. Sunrises are so special to me, and this one, in the midst of prayer and time with other believers, was especially amazing:

But even more amazing are my own children. Tonight, I sat on Hannah’s bed as Mary Hope read aloud the first part of the Jesus Storybook Bible:

“The Heavens are singing about how great God is; and the skies are shouting it out, “See what God has made!” Day after day … night after night… They are speaking to us. - Psalm 19: 1-2 (paraphrased).

God wrote, “I love you.” He wrote it in the sky, and on the earth, and under the sea. He wrote his message everywhere! Because God created everything in his world to reflect him like a mirror - to show us what he is like, to help us know him, to make our hearts sing.

We love you all,
Bekah

At VVA, each grade was tasked with decorating and writing a special note to a child in another grade. Kindergarten and 3rd grade swapped notes with each other, for example. On Valentine’s day, they raced across hallways and walkways to give the other class their notes. The teachers also participated in the note-sharing. VVA has a few different “teams” or committees, one of which is the member care team. These few teachers (including Thom) dedicated a lot of time to organizing notes that the teachers and staff wrote for one another, then collecting them into bags along with some treats and giving them out yesterday. As I pulled out my hearts with notes written on them, it brought a smile to my face to see the kind words of my friends and new family here. It was a blessing to “examine my hearts” that I received yesterday. We all took the time as an opportunity to share love with one another and encourage one another…and eat chocolate.

All of the us teachers at VVA have also been “examining our hearts” in a different, deeper way. VVA is working towards becoming accredited through the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI). One of the requirements of such accreditation is that all teachers watch lectures and then write essays and give example lesson plans that incorporate the Bible. We have been meeting together once weekly after school to watch lectures given by Paul David Tripp (BTW, I love his talks on parenting!). These lectures have been talking about how we as teachers are not just providers of information, but we are also developing and molding children into disciples of Christ. As I listen to these lectures, I think also of my own children and my patients from the past. Working with young people is rewarding but also very challenging. To teach a child, you must move from his head to his heart. If there is a heart issue happening, there’s no way he can learn…or change. Getting to the heart of the matter is no easy task, and change is a very slow process. Heart issues cannot just be quickly fixed. “Making kids act right” is just like nailing fresh, ripe apples from the grocery store to an apple tree. We can imagine the outcome of this after a few days. The tree still isn’t producing its own apples after the ones we nailed start to go bad. We make things look ok for a bit, but the tree is still not fruitful and likely dying on the inside.

What I am learning is that this heart change starts with me. My kids and my students cannot change until I examine my OWN heart. Where is my heart set on something other than God? What idols are in my life? How am I being selfish? It reminds me of Psalm 51 where David prays to God, “Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right Spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me.” For us to teach and love and care for our own children, we have to first look inward and pray for God to show us our own hearts, then ask Him for the help to change, through his Spirit.

Last night, we went to one of the best parties I’ve attended in a long time. I was able to witness just a bit of the hearts of a few students from VVA. Thom and I were invited to the 6th grade Valentine’s day party at a local restaurant owned by one of the student’s parents. A student named JP planned out the events of the party. The first event was a tic tac toe tournament, followed by a flip the bottle tournament (whoever can flip a water bottle around and have it land upright 3 times in a row wins). Then, we requested songs and had a dance circle where each person led different dances. There were 7 students, Thom and I, and another teacher couple there. It was beautiful and amazing. These kids are genuine, loving, and kind. They served each other and showed love through their kindness to all of us. I was so impressed and blessed to have been with them. (Why don’t all parties have tic tac toe tournaments and dance circles??)

Some of them gave thank you cards to Thom for being such a great homeroom teacher. Thom is really doing a great job, at teaching the awesomeness of math and at just loving the kids so well:

As I examine my own heart, I’m reminded of the beauty of the hearts of those who were dear to Jesus: children. John Valor didn’t miss out on the Valentine’s notes, either. He made sure his teacher, Ms. Esther, took his photo of him drawing a card for me and Thom. That’s me on the left (with the longer hair) and then Thom on the right. If you’re wondering, the filled in circle on Thom is his “Really big belly button!” said with big eyes and in JV’s scruffy intense voice. (hahaha!). What a sweet boy.

Much love to you all.

Bekah

I’ve told you all some travails regarding the car when we first picked it up in Kigali and the gear shifter completely broke off. Well, we fixed that issue by replacing a custom-fabricated metal bracket that a local mechanic had rigged with an original Toyota part. This was the beginning of a series of tales I owe you.

In September, we traveled to Kigali in Rocky with our friend and financial administrator at the school, Fred. After the 2 and a half hour drive down over many hills, we arrived on the outskirts of the busy city at rush hour. You know you’re getting into the city when the moto swarm starts to thicken up around you. Just then, in heavy traffic, Rocky gave up the ghost and drove no more. I hadn’t been paying attention to the heat gauge on my dashboard, so I’d missed its screams as the temperature of the car had risen to a critical level.

Some locals appears from seemingly nowhere to push us to the side as we popped the hood to the steaming sounds of a boiling radiator. Thankful for the blessing of Fred’s presence, he communicated with them in Kinyarwanda and was able to control the growing crowd. After a few minutes and one man was running back and forth to the creek to fetch muddy water to pour into our radiator as the car had cooled enough to refill the empty radiator. That allowed us to get unstuck and complete our journey.

This led to the second repair necessary on Rocky, a patching and cleaning of the radiator. We discovered through this repair that Rocky’s radiator as so many of his parts are not original to the vehicle. You see, Rocky’s a story of continued “making do” that’s so common here. You pull-a-part here, maybe have an owner that can afford original parts there, and the car vacillates between stages of disrepair to stages of “runnin’ pretty ok”. He’s basically a retelling of the Ship of Theseus (“Like, is it even really the same car he was in 1990, dude?” “Whoa, that’s like, far out.”).

When we returned in January from the states, Rocky did not do well on the way back to Musanze. Rwanda is known as the land of 1000 hills - and there are a LOT of them between Kigali and Musanze - mostly up. We had to pull over a few times to let him cool down, add water to the radiator, etc. We all held our breath and said a lot of prayers with every hill, as we watched the temperature gauge. Our friend Albert K. drove us home that day and for the past few weeks and months, he has been amazing to keep helping us continue to fix Rocky’s problems.

Because it is not common to have a car (or truck) in Rwanda, those with them tend to travel with many people. In the mornings, for example, people in our neighborhood carpool to school with us. After school, many times we are trying to see how many people can fit inside the car to give people rides here and there. Even more-so when it’s raining as it does so regularly in the current months. So, when we take trips to the Lake, we typically take a carload of people along.

As we told you previously, Rocky was named on the first of the trips out to Lake Burera. Since that trip, he’s been two additional times and every one of those trips included some form of Rocky drama. You’d think we would have learned at some point. But it seems every time we went, we’d just completed one of the above repairs and had the thought “oh, it’s all good now! We fixed X, so it’s as good as new!” This turns out to be a bad way of thinking.

The most recent of these trips was Rocky’s final stand. We drove to the lake to celebrate an engagement of two friends here, Maria and Pinto. On the way back, we were worried Rocky would not make it up the hills again. He started out doing so well…until he didn’t. After dominating on a few hills, we were so happy, until all of a sudden he just refused to move forward. We broke down, again, this time just next to the market on the busiest day of the week. Imagine us in a caravan of 3 cars, packed full of people including our three kids, stuck on a dirt road next to a truck full of sheep, a lot of cows, and just downhill from a bustling market in the village.

Slowly, people started to get interested and gather round. There is nothing quite as interesting as a bunch of Muzungu’s (white people) who are bringing 3 cars through a small rural village, one of which isn’t working. First, the younger kids start to gather and ask for money. After they realize we aren’t giving them money and some of us are from Rwanda, they stop asking for money and just start watching us. Then, the adults also gather. Slowly, it feels like 100 people surrounding the area just to watch us. Thankfully a few of our friends spoke the language and was able to ask people to kindly back up from the cars.

As we continued to troubleshoot solutions (including attempting a makeshift tow with a rusted cable that popped twice), it became clear that we needed to redistribute folks to get them back to Musanze. We would have to leave Rocky sitting on the side of the Burera road. So, Bek went to the small car to get in the trunk (she fit perfectly) and I get into another car. As I became more and more overwhelmed by the situation, I noted that Bekah was buying roasted corn from a lady who’d approached their car. Our friend Fabiola bartered the price down to about 10 cents per ear. Slowly people in the car perked up one at a time - “Well, I’ll take one. Sure, me too.” They all loaded up with big ears of corn. Then, someone walked up to the car and said that the plans had changed. Bekah got out of the trunk and walked back to the other car with her corn in-hand.

At the same time, and at the pinnacle of my frustration with the situation, a man walked up to me (as I was dripping sweat and looking probably as mad as I ever look) and attempted to sell me a live chicken. He really went for the sale with a long stream of Kinyarwanda I could not understand. I looked the man straight in the face so very at the end of my rope and said in plain English, “No, I do not want a chicken!” The man seemed to take it well, smiled and turned to the crowd and mimicked a funny “No!”

Now, as you zoom out from this scenario, it had to have seemed the most hilarious situation. A bunch of white people (and a few Rwandans) in 3 cars trying to fix a broken car, walking to and fro with roasted corn and chickens being thrown into the mix. While it seems so funny, it was quite frustrating and overwhelming at the time. John Valor was in the front seat, then middle seat, then front seat - talking and growling like a dinosaur at all the village kids. It truly did help me through the situation that our school’s habit of mind at the time was “Finding Humor”.

We ended up leaving Rocky there on the side of the road in Burera, hoping that a man who agreed to watch the car would keep it safe until we were able to fetch it days later.

Albert was able to fetch it and tow it back to Musanze a few days later. He discovered that the clutch and flywheel were both ruined and needed to be replaced. This was the final straw for poor Rocky.

Now, let me tell you an amazing thing that happened when we were back in the States. I was having a coffee and talking about Jesus with a Christian brother, when he asked me the question “What’s the one thing you really need over there?” As the conversation had shifted to this question, we had just finished talking through some of these very stories about the challenges we’d had with Rocky in the fall, so I said “it’d be so great if we had a different car”. His response was to immediately start praying for that to happen.

The following day at church, it happened. Through the work of generous anonymous donors, I was told that the money had been raised to facilitate the purchase of a newer vehicle for our family to use in Rwanda. I didn’t know how to react to that news, and still don’t know the right way to react to it. I was so very deeply grateful for the generosity and simultaneously heart-pricked by the way the same amount of money could be used for such good here. Attempting to navigate those tensions with wisdom and discernment led us to the decision to use the money to buy a vehicle that our family can use while we are here and then donate as a school vehicle if/when we are called back home.

Last weekend, I took a trip to Kigali with Steve and we negotiated the purchase of a 2015 model Land Cruiser to replace Rocky. We have the truck now and have begun the process of getting Rocky sold to another caretaker. Happy trails, friend!

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

He prayed for us to know the Father. Later in the same chapter, He prayed for his people to be united, just as we stand together in a circle each morning at VVA - as a united body of believers. I was struck that, even in His suffering and death, He prayed for us to have life. Not just that, He knew what eternal life was and He wants all of us to have it. It’s so good to remember that life is not summed up by what we experience on this sinful, broken, painful earth. Our treasures are in Heaven - and the time we get here on this earth with others, in service to God, with the Holy Spirit indwelling, is like a bonus blessing.

My grandmother was faithful to God, a hard worker and a servant to God, to her family and many others. She had been given long life and with it, the blessings of wisdom and perspective. Recently she had a terrible head injury and never recovered. It led to her slowly losing much of her understanding and cognitive ability. As she neared the end of her life here on earth recently, she began to repeat the phrase, “Let’s go! We need to go!” She was quite adamant and even irritated that it seemed nobody was listening. When asked where she wanted to go, she said wanted to go to Heaven - go Home. Heaven was waiting on her, and she was ready. She had stored her treasure there for 93 great years. Let’s go home.

Thom, the kids, and I traveled back home to Alabama in early December to see my dad in his final hours. We were blessed to be able to be there with him before he passed on. He also was able to go home. After battling mental and physical illness for many years, I celebrated with him that he was able to walk into his new home without any of those things. No isolation, no sadness, no confusion, no pain. Only the joy of being with Jesus. The home that God has prepared for us is a perfect one.

Thankfully, we get to experience pieces of this Home here on earth. For example, we have experienced so much love and support from others during this difficult time. Some drove many hours to be by our side as we said goodbye to Dad. Others gave up their home to allow us to stay for days on end, providing food, prayers, words of encouragement, etc. These acts of kindness and service to us are glimpses of the Father - of what life is like at Home. I am so grateful to all of you for the love you have shown us.

We were blessed to spend time in our Alabama home(s) with our families and friends for a time. Now, we are back in our home in Musanze. Coming back to Rwanda from the U.S. overall went smoothly, though the jet lag was difficult! We just ended our second week of school and are happy to be working again with the amazing people who attend and work at VVA, as well as our other Rwandan friends and church family here. May we all remember where our Home is - and keep this perspective as we face this life now. May we all be united together so the world will know who Jesus is.

More posts coming soon! (There are so many blogs in our heads! We just can’t keep up with typing them!) We send love to you all.

We wanted to let you all know that we are organizing an immediate return to the States due to an unexpected health emergency that is likely terminal for Bekah’s father. Our current plans are to arrive and stay throughout the holidays before returning to Rwanda in the new year.

Thank you for all of your support and we’d like to ask that you continue to our family in your prayers during this time.

Thom & Bekah

All students at VVA are divided into one of four House Groups, named after the four volcanoes that surround Musanze. Each House Group includes children from kindergarten through the oldest secondary students. House groups meet three times a week and are like mini families within the school. I am a part of Muhabura, Mary Hope is in Sabjinyo, Hannah is in Bisoke, and Thom is in Gahinga. Every two weeks or so, the House Groups focus on a new habit of mind and work together to present these habits to the other houses in a type of competition. Habits of mind include the following (among others): listening with understanding and empathy, persistence, managing impulsivity, striving for accuracy, and thinking about our thinking. This last one has been insightful for me, as I think about my own thinking. It dawned on me just today that, as I’ve gotten older, my “adult” thinking has not always resulted in the best outcomes.

We adults have learned to use our brains to think like adults - to show maturity, to think through cause and effect, to make logical decisions. While this may sound like a very appropriate “adulting” activity, I think unfortunately I have learned quite a few bad habits and poor cycles of thinking along the way. A lot of our “adult” thinking can also be known as worry, rumination, too much concern about how one is perceived, and overall just attempting to control situations and people. As I think about my thinking, I realize that I actually want to think more like a child - where grievances are voiced and then let go, where emotions are explored and shared, and where concerns are not cycled in and out of our thoughts multiple times over.

One day Mary Hope asked me to help her draw out a calendar. I didn’t really understand why until I found this paper in her room (below). It seems she has been exploring her own emotions and writing them down. This was not prompted by me or Thom at all. How great it is to think about how you feel, write it down to share it, and then move on. I need to do the same.

Hannah has been writing down her thoughts and questions about Rwanda in a journal. Mary Hope adds things to this list sometimes, as well. Mary and Hannah ask and share pretty much anything you can imagine. Usually they start with, “Mommy, I need to tell you something.” Or, “Daddy, can I ask you something?” Example questions include the following: “Why do the kids on the street have holes in their dresses?” “Why does the water go out here but not in the U.S?” “Gaella always touches my hair. Why does she do that? I do not like that.” “Why do we have gates in Rwanda and not in the US?”

Sometimes we as adults don’t ask enough questions. Maybe we just don’t ask the right questions. Even more than that, perhaps we don’t listen very well to the answers. I think much of why we get caught up in our own thinking and our own spirals and our own habits is because we are thinking too much about ourselves.

Mary Hope shared in the car last week on the way to school about how she used the fruit of the Spirit to help her calm down before we left for school that morning.

“Mommy, can I tell you something? I was getting upset and crying, and then I remembered about the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control - self control! And I thought, I have self control. Then I calmed down!”

Wow. As she said this, I just looked at Thom in awe - first that she was able to identify the fruits of the Holy Spirit and then was able to apply what she learned by seeing them work in her own life. (I will stop here to thank the teachers and friends and family members that have sealed this in her brain along the way!). Why is it so hard to share like this as adults?

That same morning, the P.E. teacher at VVA and our friend, Rutendo, shared something beautiful about grade 3 at VVA. She had asked her P.E. class to meet together in their teams before the football game and prepare for the game. They, on their own, chose to pray for each other and for the other team.

Jesus said that the kingdom of Heaven belongs to people like these: like little children. As I get caught up in my own concerns - in worry about what will happen, in trying to plan out the little and big things of life, in caring more about pleasing others than pleasing God, in holding onto things and ruminating - I’m reminded how children think. They love big, they voice their concerns, they need to be heard, they are honest, they forgive quickly. They are open about their feelings (usually), but also need to be taught this by us adults (who are sometimes terrible at this). They don’t hold offenses. They ask big questions.

I pray that I can think and love and care as deeply as my kids can.

-Bekah

Bonus Points

Thom here! As Bekah mentioned the habits of mind, I wanted to share a brief video from this week.

As our STEM class that meets on Wednesdays has continued to explore various types of engineering domains, we’ve spent a few weeks refining water bottle rockets. Last week we used a new PVC launcher to fire off the latest versions of our rockets and measure their flights. My students have really enjoyed working on their rockets and regularly talk about how much they love STEM, which is a great reward for the effort put into making it delightful for them.

Usually on Monday’s our principal Steve Greek leads a whole school assembly in which he provides more context around our current habit of mind. Due to a preplanned Thanksgiving vacation, Steve is out of pocket and asked me before he left to share a rocket flight with the whole school at assembly to demonstrate the “Striving for Accuracy” habit of mind.

During the assembly, I shared about some of the fine tuning characteristics of our universe that make life possible. How as Christians we believe that God created this place “just so” to support life and existence as we experience it. In this way, as we practice striving for accuracy in the things we create, we are reflecting the image of God in ourselves as creators. But of course, our water bottle rockets, as proud of them as we may be, fall so far short of the ideal we are striving for in their flights. Even this makes for an object lesson for all of us that things aren’t perfect immediately but things take time for us humans to get right!

After sharing my thoughts, the students circled around our launcher, I pumped a rocket full of pressure and sent it soaring. Thankfully it’s easy to impress kids in primary school!!

Love you all.

-Thom

This post is all about things God has allowed me to see and learn during our short time here. With all of the differences in culture, lifestyle, language and otherwise, there is still no speech or language where God’s radiant light is not seen and his voice not heard. What an encouragement.

I will start with stories that have given me new perspectives - sometimes like a nudge and sometimes like a slap in the face. My first example is during our move from Matt and Andrea’s home to the home we are renting here in Musanze. We were slowly migrating our belongings over multiple days. This involved taking a car of one of the teachers at VVA (an automatic, because I still cannot drive a manual) during morning school hours, driving it to Matt’s, packing it up as best I could with John Valor in tow, then transporting it to our new house, unpacking, etc.

This particular day was very sunny and hot, and I was frustrated. I had my “nice school clothes” on during this endeavor and JV was especially crazy. I was sweating and the car had no air conditioner. I pulled out of Matt’s driveway with the nice guard opening the door for me and waving goodbye with a smile, as always. As I’m driving up the bumpy road, I’m grumbling to myself, “Ugh, it’s so hot! I’m sweating!” or something like that. Just as those words exit my mouth, I come upon a Rwandan lady walking on the road toward me carrying a baby strapped to her back with about 15 sugar cane poles on her head, wearing sandals.

Wow. That was more than a nudge. Where is her car? Wonder if her baby was especially crazy today? I’m guessing she’s probably sweating…a lot. I bet she doesn’t have a guard to help her in and out of her gated home.

She smiles at me and gives me the Rwandan eyebrow raise (also known as a way to acknowledge another person, or say yes - more to come on this!). No more grumbling came from me that day, at least. I do admit my memory fails me and I need reminders DAILY of these little blessings. I have a car to drive. I don’t have to carry sugar cane to sell at the market to make a few dollars to buy food for my family. I don’t have to farm the ground to grow the food that I eat. I have nice clothes. And so on.

We moved in to our new place and have had the blessing of meeting two men who work as our guards at our home. Guards and house helpers here are a normal part of life and culture. Many homes here have gates and grounds (plants, etc.) that guards keep and manage. We met our day guard, Victor, through a family closely connected to Matt and Andrea. He speaks some English which is a great blessing. Our night guard is a kind man named Placide who is always greeting us and saying thank you. They both have families - wives and 2-3 children. We asked about how much they should be paid from others who know the culture and “normal” wages here. We also asked the guards themselves. We negotiated a rate for the day guard (the guard who manages the other guards) of 90,000 Rwandan Francs per month. That’s about 85 U.S. dollars per month. Night guards get paid less - about 75,000 Rwandan Francs per month or 70 U.S. dollars per MONTH.

Those numbers flew in and out of my brain until a couple of things occurred on the days that followed. One was a discussion about buying frozen chicken here among some ex-pat’s including myself. We were conjecturing on where is the best place - is it Zamura Feed or the frozen chicken in freezers at the grocery store? There’s also an app that delivers groceries for you here - and they sell frozen chickens for about $12 per chicken. But Zamura is sometimes cheaper, like $10 per chicken for 3 kg chicken…. (continue to pretend you hear the chatter in the conversation.)

The next day, Thom and I decide to support a local hotel called Karisimbi Cave Resort which has opened under management of a lady local to Musanze and was asking ex-pats and others to come for a brunch. This would be a practice run for their kitchen and service staff. We went with our family and one of the other teachers, Maria. They had a large spread of drinks, pancakes, breads, spreads, cheese, and fruits. They served eggs benedict and other items. It was delicious and a fun experience. We get to the bill and it’s 75,000 Rwandan Francs. When we were driving home I felt a SLAP. Wait, wasn’t that the total monthly salary for Placide?

Reality has started to set in now. One chicken is a huge sacrifice for MOST people here to pay for. Meat is definitely only for special occasions. (Beef is another whole topic and even more special.) A nice brunch almost never happens for most families - families like us who have a mom, dad, and 3 kids. These things are mulling over in my mind as the days pass. A few days later, I passed a Rwandan lady (again) on the road holding a dead chicken, feathers and all, walking next to the car. She looked rugged and tough - a strong lady carrying this dead rooster likely to either sell or take home to save for their meat for the month. It reminded me of how much of a luxury it is to eat meat in excess like I’ve been accustomed to. I’ll be honest that I have almost never thought of this as a luxury while living in the U.S.

I’d be amiss if I didn’t shout out again to my stepdad, Ron. Ron, I still think of you every time I see a chicken. Ron also reminds me of his frequent stories about life in Alabama back many years ago when you had to chase your chicken to catch, then kill, feather, cook, and eat it. He also tells stories about fetching water from the creek to take baths. This leads me to the next big lesson on perspective. Water.

Oh, water. I feel so silly even telling this story, because again, so many in Africa are used to the travails of water outages. But I am not, apparently. We came home one day last week and made dinner. After eating, we found that the water was no longer on. We live on a road near the main highway and also near the main water line. We were told that water rarely goes out where we live. Well, tonight it was out. We stacked up the dishes and continued on with the night as best we could.

We walked into the bathrooms and kept doing that thing where you turn on the faucets over and over because you keep forgetting that the water is not working. Every time you audibly say, “Oh, yeah!” or for me, “Oh man!” because usually it’s right after you used the bathroom and flushed the last load of water in the tank of the toilet. Now you’re looking around for how to wash your hands. We continued this process through nighttime routines and finally got to bed, praying the water would be on in the morning.

(By the way, having HOT water is a whole other post and another topic. It involves turning on water heaters, hoping they work, waiting, then being quick about showers….but I won’t talk about this now.) So, we woke up the next day and…no water. We then went outside to get some water from the rainwater storage tank to use for washing dishes or hands. I started boiling some water on the stove. We thankfully had some drinking water in our large filter but were running out quickly. Thom walked outside to collect the rainwater. It was around 6am and we were just standing there in the backyard together thinking out loud about things like, “what if the water doesn’t come back for a few days?” and “how do we use the bathroom?” “I don’t even have hand sanitizer!” “Wonder if we could go back and use Matt’s showers?” This discussion continued until Placide walked up and said, “Mr. Thom. No water! I go out and get jelly-can.” A what? It sounded like “pelican” with a j. But after a few more tries, we realized he was saying jerrycan.

Oh, are those the big yellow jugs that so many are carrying on bikes or in their hands around the roadways? (It takes me a while to catch on, sometimes.) Yes, we had none of these and this was the way to get fresh, clean water when you have no running water. Placide then convinced us that we actually needed 15 of these cans. At first we thought that was a lot, but he apparently it’s normal to have at least 20 of them. So we gave him about 20,000 Francs and off he went.

That day, many of our teachers were chatting on WhatsApp about if others were out of water and if the school was out of water. The answer was yes and yes. There was a main water line that was being repaired (we found out later) and it would take likely all day to repair. The school had no water, but there were some reserve tanks, apparently. As for flushing toilets, cooking, washing hands, etc. the staff would be able to carry cans to refill all of the toilets, cook and wash with just water they collect in the cans. No worries at all - everything goes on as normal. I couldn’t help but think that such an issue would close a school in the U.S. No water usually means no school.

This is apparently a normal thing - very normal. There are some things that just happen here, and you get used to it. Power goes out more, so you have candles and “torches” (flashlights). Cars break down. Restaurants take a long time and don’t always get your order correct. Water just stops sometimes. You just know how to manage without running water if you live here. I knew this in my head, but it’s not until you experience it (even briefly) that you understand that many people in the world do actually live without running water and live perfectly normal lives. They just fill their cans at the community water collection site and that’s it. (Side note that drinking filtered water is important, so many have large filters in their homes.)

By that evening, there was still no water. As we stood in the kitchen cooking, I started to hear a drip. It had been about 24 hours - that was all. Regardless, that drip was a wonderful sight to behold. Showers! Flushing! Washing hands! Yaaay!

African life has taught me so much already in the 2 months here. One last story is briefly about our trip to Kigali this past weekend. Kigali is the capital city of the country of Rwanda - the largest city with the most resources, restaurants, shops, etc. Many here in Musanze travel to Kigali to buy products not available here including foods like beef, bacon, and good breads. We traveled there with our truck, 2 coolers, and 2 big trunks on top of the car to fill and bring back. What we discovered was more lessons on perspective. This likely should be its own post, as the story is full of car troubles, normalcies of African hotels, and what is defined a “short” or “long” walk to dinner. We also had the BEST coffee experience at Question coffee shop, probably my favorite part of the trip (below).

We started near downtown at what’s called the “Chinese store” (called T-2000) which was like a big 2-story Dollar General full of cheaper items for the home, crafts, appliances, clothes, etc. Our friend from VVA, Jean Baptiste (aka JB), met us there to help us through the day. We walked through downtown, passing small shops of various items that were lower in price. Later that same day we drove to Kigali Heights, a nice shopping center near to the Convention Center. It’s here that JB commented on how expensive everything was - and he was right. They had an ice cream shop there that was great - “the best in Rwanda” an ex-pat told us. JB had never had ice cream. He enjoyed it, but was taken aback and somewhat disgusted by the enormous difference in cost of the things in this place versus most other places in Kigali and Rwanda. The differences in class and wealth are seen everywhere, I suppose. This place that felt more like “home” than the streets of downtown Kigali was a place that felt quite foreign to JB and others who were not used to the niceties that come with wealth.

This was just another reminder of our blessings that we have been given - blessings of education, being born in and raised in a wealthy and privileged country, and parents with education and means to help us with school, which led us to great universities and jobs and careers. We have so much. There are so many other people who have so little. My job now is to remember this fact and keep the right perspective: to stay thankful for all of the blessings I have, to use what I’ve been given to lift others up, and to give sacrificially in order to bless others.

“The heavens declare the glory of God….There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.” Despite all of the cultural and class differences in our country and in our world, we all see and hear the same glory of God through His creation and His people. We are all His creation - we are all made in His image. May we love one another as He loved us, celebrating our differences while lifting one another up, listening to the perspectives of others, and keeping a heart of service and humility. May we always be grateful.

If one forgets that the last Saturday of the month is a special time in Rwanda, the reminders come early! As the sunlight dawns, groups of people begin walking up and down the streets, chanting and singing with jubilant enthusiasm, as they scurry to the various job opportunity sites.  It is “Umuganda” which can be translated “coming together in common purpose to achieve an outcome.” A form of Umuganda started with Rwanda’s independence from foreign rule in 1962.  It has become a national day of community development during which all Rwandans, and visitors to Rwanda, are invited to participate in any of hundreds of community development projects for a few hours on this special day. Traveling for leisure or business is seriously restricted unless it is oriented around national or community development on this monthly Saturday morning. Rwandans do not resent the restriction. Rather, they eagerly participate in opportunities through which neighbors help neighbors.

On the September Umuganda Day, VVA students and faculty were invited to assist a family that lost their home in a recent flood. The administration of the school got permission from local authorities to transport groups of students and VVA staff to the worksite.  We were told we would assist a family in “building a house.” People in our work group conjured up various interpretations of what this implied for our morning. Would we be throwing mud up on a frame of sticks to make an African hut with a grass roof? Or would we be hanging drywall, hammering plywood, painting interior walls, or fishing wires through ceiling boards?  As it turned out, we did some heavy work, but it was not what any of us expected.

Our caravan of vehicles turned off the highway onto a dirt road. After several miles and a few more turns, it became clear that our vehicles were no longer able to traverse the terrain, so we parked and started walking toward the house site.  The woman facilitating the community project stopped us and described our role in helping our local neighbors.  She explained that a truck had brought a load of sand which would be used to mix concrete.  It was delivered to this point, a central area where the lorry could turn around, but could travel no further. 

Our job was to tote the sand the remaining kilometer to the house site.  She passed out gunny sacks to be filled and used for hauling sand.  Young children and grown adults filled their sacks until they were an appropriate weight, hefted the bags onto their shoulders, backs, or heads, and started up the path covered with volcanic rocks. By late morning, our crew had moved a mound from the end of the road to the remote house site. With a bit of faith and a great deal of faithfulness, our group from VVA had indeed “moved a mountain” of sand!

Seeing the World from Below

Our family has built a house before; In fact, we have built two houses. We have shopped at Home Depot, placed orders at Lowe's Home Improvement Center, and benefited from the customer service and expert advice from Ace Hardware.  We worked hard and feel we have earned every blister, callous and splinter.  Nevertheless, Claudia and I have looked at the world differently after experiencing East African home building opportunities. On the way home from church today we passed a large pile of several tons of sand.  Claudia mused, “I wonder who put that pile of sand there and I wonder where it has to go next?”  The pile of sand looks different now than it did last month.

Our first invitation to build a house in Africa was in Kenya.  We knew that it would be intense labor, so we wore some work clothes and tennis shoes.  When we saw the mud pit, we suspected we were significantly overdressed for the event.  Men from the church had driven vertical stakes into the ground  in a large rectangle. Next, they tethered smaller sticks horizontally, weaving them in and out of the stakes to form walls that would hold large clumps of mud.  The women, and the visitors from America, took their shoes off and started stamping on a pile of mud, dung, and grass which constituted something like soft, adobe clay. This was thrown, packed, and smeared onto the walls of the new house.  We contributed one day toward the house building experience.  Our Kenyan brothers and sisters spent the following weeks finishing the house construction, but our shared, formative experience built more than a house that day. It caused some of us to reconstruct our view of the world.

Dietrich Bonhoffer was a prominent theologian of the 20th century. He reexamined his own theology while living through the atrocities of World War II. During the time he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, he wrote letters and recorded thoughts which were ultimately published as “Letters and Papers from Prison.” He underscored the importance of seeing the world from the vantage point of those who have fewer privileges:

There remains an experience of incomparable value.  We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.

Our Umuganda Day work crew did a marvelous job on September 30, 2023.  These 40 people did a substantial amount of work delivering sand from the road to the plot of land where a new house will be constructed. Yet all of us realize this is just the beginning of a significant building project. The impact this experience had on the students is also significant. The small entourage of students, teachers, parents and workers from Virunga Valley Academy got a glimpse at what it is like to replace a house that has been lost through natural disaster. They had the opportunity to look through a different lens. Perhaps this new vantage point can be described as “seeing the world from below.” The school’s participation in the Umuganda project was coupled with a two-week emphasis on “listening with empathy and understanding.”  One of the parents was overheard whispering to his son, “can you imagine what it would be like to lose your house in a rainstorm? That is why we are here!”

In reflecting on the life of Jesus, it is remarkably easy to note how Jesus saw the world from below.  Jesus was born into a scandalous setting.  His parents were hardworking, poor people, living in oppression. They fled Jesus’ native country to escape threats on his young life. Throughout his ministry he embraced the sick, the lonely, the outcast, the strangers, and those people viewed with suspicion and judgment by others. Jesus challenged his followers by kneeling, with a basin and towel, and looking at his own disciples from this vantage point. He looked up at them, from below, and personified some of his life’s teachings.  May we all learn to serve as Jesus did, seek to listen with empathy and understanding, and see the world from below.

We miss and love you all,

Steve and Claudia

Addendums

Hey there, Thom again. I wanted to also follow-up on Steve’s beautiful post with a couple of additional media items we had from the Umuganda event. The first is of the man himself, Steve Greek, giving a great overview of what was going on. After that is a video I took celebrating with some other Rwandans, singing a folk song that roughly translates to “Together We’ll Build It”.

When we made Mary Hope’s purple, pink and blue birthday cake two nights prior (above), little did we know that on her REAL birthday night she would have a super special surprise cake along with dancing and singing from the awesome servers and staff at the Karenge Bush Camp inside Akagera National Park. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone traveling to Akagera or Rwanda. (Dinner service below had multiple courses, by candlelight.).

I was so relieved and excited to see their flashlights raised high on Friday night to show us the way into the camp. Especially after the fiasco with Clark, Stu, and their two ornery rhino buds.

Wait, what was that? Who are Clark and Stu and what do they have to do with rhinos? Well, Clark and Stu are a couple of rhinos who decided to linger with us a bit longer than we desired on that Friday evening as we drove through Akagera to get to the campsite on the first night. The trip began smoothly with Matt and Anna doing an amazing job at preparing supplies for camping and keeping us on track to arrive at the North gate of Akagera by about 4:15pm.

After waiting about 45 minutes on the guards to arrive to open the gate, we were on our way to look for animals and enjoy the dinner and camp adventure for that night. We spotted a few antelope and got excited. Then came our first big sighting - one of the big 5 of safari go-er’s - the white rhino. Not just one, but FOUR white rhino together in a little rhino family. “Awww, how cool!” I said. About 45 minutes later, I was not saying that anymore!

We realized that these rhinos were traveling in the same direction on the same dirt road that we wanted to travel on. And after a while, two of them made it clear that they did not want us cramping their style by following them so closely. They turned around and started walking toward us, appearing a little annoyed. I was envisioning what Matt’s white landcruiser may look like with a rhino horn hole in the front of it. But thankfully, things simmered down and those two rascals went on their way. After 10 seconds of excitement that we could now move on to the camp (who was waiting on us to make dinner as we were not supposed to be driving at night) we returned to find two of the original rhino gang, still walking on the road ever so slowly. These two Thom lovingly named Clark and Stu. We watched their rhino bottoms for about 45 minutes…

and rejoiced when we could turn off the road to make it to our destination.

This first night was almost a “glamping” experience as the tents were large and had cot-like beds that were made up with linens. There were towels and soap for the nice outdoor shower. Each tent had a toilet and shower that faced toward a valley with a beautiful view - just the perfect thing to watch as you use the bathroom. The dinner and breakfast were amazing, and the customer service was superb. We had a beautiful dinner on Friday night and were surprised by the cake and songs that came from the staff for Mary Hope.

We awoke before sunrise to start the safari on Saturday, and immediately saw a group of lions within just a few minutes of driving. (The only photo I could find is below:)

This was followed by many other animals along the way: zebras, Cape buffalo (definitely win the award for most hilarious expression when looking at humans), rhino (again), and most of the 11 different types of antelope in Akagera. We had the whole experience with the safari guides Matt and Anna, giving us information about everything from bird species to animal behavior.

We had the amazing blessing of seeing so many amazing creatures that God has made. Here we will give summaries of each kid’s favorite:

Mary Hope: The leopard was her favorite animal, followed closely by the giraffe, or in Kinyarwanda, something pronounced like “ah-mah-shum-bah-sham-bah”. They ate so slowly and meticulously, grabbing leaves from around thick acacia tree thorns.

Hannah Joy: As of tonight (two weeks later), she remembers the experience with the cows before we drove into the park the best, when we stood outside and waited on the gate to open, ha! Here’s a photo of Anna and JV as we waited:

I think Hannah’s next best favorite was the lion we saw on the first morning there. She liked the first night’s tents and camping (and food) the best.

John Valor: He says he likes the baboons the best, especially when the babies rode on the back of the mom to run across the road. He also liked the elephants…and hippos. Hippos like to stand in the water with only their eyes and ears above the water and then intermittently come up and open their mouths really wide to threaten you, I think? For all of the rest of us, the best JV memory is us saying, “hey, look at ____!” and him immediately saying, “whey-uh?” (“where?” in a 4 year old voice). See below for hippos hiding in the water.

The second night was more like “real” camping - except there was a nice snack bar with a kitchen staff who made us dinner and breakfast. What I mean by “real” is that tents were involved with an air mattress and all of the Savages smashed into one tiny space with only a few flashlights. After seeing a leopard (wow!) just at sunset on Saturday night and looking for elephants (we didn’t spot them until Sunday morning), we got back for dinner and then immediately got ready for bed in the tent. The campsite was not far from the edge of the lake where some hippos are known to stay. (Intermittently you could hear them grunting which sounded like pigs). The kids were going bananas in the tent and I was getting frustrated. I’m sure all of the other campers loved hearing my pleas and rants to get them to hush and calm down.

Once we settled down, the tent’s layout was me and the kids on one big air mattress and Thom on a small air mat on the side of the tent. Actually, Mary Hope took over the air mat and Thom ended up soon on the air mattress with 3 more of us. About 10 minutes into this configuration everyone was asleep…except for me. I tried to get comfortable and ignore the sounds of animals and mosquitoes coming from through the tent wall which I was smashed against.

I think we had 20 different configurations of human bodies throughout the night in that tent that a time-lapse video would reveal and bring much laughter to all of us. I felt like I was awake for the majority of that night. One moment in particular was when John V. ended up off the mattress at the door of the tent in the shoe pile and I tried to drag him back onto the mattress, accidentally hitting Mary Hope’s head leading to screams and cries at 1:45am. I know that had to wake up some hippos.

This photo is of lunch on Saturday - packed nicely from the staff at Karenge Bush Camp for us to eat at the second night’s campsite. We ate at this same place on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

What a blessing to be able to experience this with some great friends and guides. I hope to go again - maybe with some of you reading this who can come in the future. But JV will remind you - watch out for Clark and Stu! And Hannah highly recommends the nice tents. Thanks to Matt and Anna for enduring many renditions of Hakuna Matata and lots of kid time to bring us some awesome memories.

The real work started once our stuff was in the house… the work of figuring out what things we needed to get fixed and which things we needed to somehow procure to start making this a real home.

The hot water heaters here are all mounted high on the wall in the bathrooms (we’ve got two of them) and hold I’d guess 15 gallons or so of hot water. You flip on a switch to get them going and hope they’ve got things heated up in about 30 minutes, then you can plan on about 10 minutes of hot water for your shower. At least that’s how we were told it was supposed to work. Bekah tried one the first morning and it produced approximately 2 minutes of lukewarm water. I tried the other and got maybe 4 minutes of hot water.

The showers are built such that they spew directly into the room and floor here. No shower curtains, or even really a place to mount them. You just blast yourself and it goes literally everywhere in the room and a little out the door into the hallway. Many of the markets sell these squeegee broom things and so we bought one for each bathroom and to clear the outside porches when the rains come. According to Tucker B., one of our favorite people and an intern at VVA, here the “squeegee is a lifestyle”.

We hired an electrician to help us mount our Starlink satellite receiver on the roof because I don’t have a ladder or any tools to mount it at all. When he arrived with only a small tool bag, I was confused because I’d confirmed with him the day before that he’d have a ladder. He doesn’t speak much English, but his pantomime climbing confirmed he understood me as well as his response of “It’s no problem”.

I handed the Electrician the satellite receiver and left him for a bit to address the needs of the plumber we’d also brought in to look at the hot water heaters. The plumber is an older gentleman who only speaks Kinyarwanda and French. Though I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, he just kept on talking to me as if the sheer quantity of his words would help me understand. At the end of the day, all I understood from him was “C’est Bon?” (It’s Good?). I grabbed that like a stray dog on a porkchop, walked him around the house to all of our various plumbing needs, made animated points at puddles, and emphatically said “NO c’est bon”. He got what I was saying.

I went back outside to check on the electrician. There was hammering. Why would an electrician tasked with mounting a satellite receiver be hammering to start the work you say? The man took spare pieces of wood, a bag of nails, and built a roughshod ladder right there in the yard.

I was stunned to see the fabrication. “You made a ladder! Are you sure this is going to be safe?” He stood up and smiled at me. He said, “I make accommodation. It is not safe, but only accommodation.”

He went on to use said ladder to mount the roof, discovering along the way that the penultimate rung was a booby trap designed to take him out. But this wasn’t his first rodeo and he was able to catch himself and skip that rung to climb onto the roof. You can’t make this stuff up. He was all smiles and laughing. I nearly had a heart attack just watching it.

I’ve started to lose count of how many hurdles, speed bumps, and annoyances in life here are simply solved problems in the States. If I needed to get on my roof, I’d ask any of my helpful neighbors like Ken, Mike, or Kyle to borrow their ladder or go buy one myself.

Our good friends here, Steve and Claudia G., shared a relevant story about their time living in Kenya in which they were invited to bring a potluck dish from their culture to share. Steve suggested a southern favorite, Potato Salad! All well and good until the realization that they’d have to make their own mayonnaise, their own mustard, and their own pickles - which they did!

This experience continues to teach us a number of things like these about flexibility and managing our expectations as a family. It’s helping us grow through the struggle and I can feel it building up our agency as a family. Though it’s difficult not having a break from all of these “teachable moments” of life here, we had a beautiful respite with dinner with other expatriate families last night, sharing our experiences and supporting each other. We’ve also found wonderful support in the community of teachers here at VVA and the house church here.

Thank you all for remembering us in your prayers! They may have just saved this electrician’s life. 😅

Whenever I offer an extra something I have on hand like a bag of chips from the teacher’s resource room or an extra cookie I grabbed on the way out to the car in the morning, the person takes it. Whenever I’ve offered to lend a hand to do a chore or fix a computer issue, my help is welcomed and appreciated. Whenever I’ve suggested that our family foot the bill for a need, it’s gratefully accepted.

I’ve tried this experiment a number of times here with 100% reproducibility.

In the States, I’ve lived and breathed the “I got this” attitude for so long that it’s just a default to politely reject help and do things myself. I’ll even admit to rejecting a Little Debbie offered in good faith from someone I didn’t know well because “who knows, they probably had some angle”.

I’m no sociologist to theorize about what cultural factors produced such a difference in attitude here in Rwanda, but I am confident when I tell you that it’s quite different and real.

We took our family to Hotel Fatima to go swimming. In the states, a hotel is typically thought of as lodging first and food/entertainment secondarily. It’s the opposite here as the hotels are primarily places to eat and use their amenities. At Fatima, you pay around $3/kid and $4/adult to use the pool for as long as you’d like.

As the temperature varies daily between about 62F to 80F year-round, the pool doesn’t get very warm and indeed was quite cold. This first outing to the Hotel Fatima pool was with with Chelsea C. and her children, and Bekah and I had the pleasure of a simultaneous jump into the deep end with Chelsea to get the cold shock over with. (It felt somewhat appropriate given this whole experience, but I’m not poetic enough to tie that thought together well.) Not too long after we’d received the Hot Chocolates and Coffees we ordered for poolside service, a group of about 6 young men from Kigali joined us in the pool.

It was apparent that most of the group of guys didn’t know how to swim. I think only one or them (maybe two) had experience and was using very rapid Kinyarwanda to explain technique as I pieced together from his demonstrations while talking. They borrowed Mary Hope’s goggles at one point for their swimming practice. (She didn’t notice as she was having too much with the other kids.)

My point about this whole story is found in a single moment when I saw two of the guys working together. One was learning how to hold his breath and swim down to the bottom. As they were working together, they were standing there facing each other holding hands together. Grown men in their twenties holding hands helping each other learn how to swim. As the one dove under water, the other placed his hand on his head and guided him down into the pool and helped him back up. There was no apprehension or reservation about the help being provided and the help being received.

When I saw it, I thought to myself how awkward I would feel if I were in close proximity to another man and allowing him to help me in that way. I started thinking about why that was the case.

I recognize the benefits of the American spirit of individualism in me which has carried me along to the point where I’m even here to experience these life lessons. The bright contrast, though, between that individualism and the high level of cooperation here makes me realize that leaning too hard into my own abilities shuts out others from giving me the gift of their own talents and resources. Likewise, leaning too hard into reliance upon others makes me a burden to my neighbors instead of a pillar of support able to give back to them.

These little realizations are stacking up into bigger changes in who I am and who I want to be.

A Typical Day

I’ll start with what a typical day looks like. Keep in mind that we are currently still at Matt and Andrea’s home for about 1.5-2 more weeks until when we can move into a home we are renting. That is to say that their house helper, Donetilla, is amazing at whipping up last-minute morning pancakes and prepping homemade cinnamon rolls about once per week for breakfast. When Donetilla is not spoiling us, our typical breakfast is cereal with milk or yogurt, toast with strawberry jelly (JV’s favorite), and/or scrambled eggs. Bananas are very, very common. Most bananas here are smaller than in the U.S. and sweeter. We all actually like them a lot better.

As the morning rush ensues, I am scrambling to get the kids’ backpacks together including snacks and water bottles. They eat lunch at school, but bring a small snack for the afternoon. The below is an example of what we’ve been sending them: Digestives, AKA biscuits, AKA cookies that like to sound more healthy than cookies. We also love the non-chocolate type, and sometimes add peanut butter (yes they have that here). That can go along with an apple or banana, and sometimes, if they’re really lucky, a juice box.

At lunch, the school provides a meal to the students and staff. Hannah, Mary Hope, and JV all go to the first lunch period, and Thom and I go to the second lunch period. At lunch time, everyone goes through a line and gets the same food. Yesterday we had beef stroganoff with noodles (the spiral kind), fresh cucumber slices, sliced carrots, and mixed fruit. I will stop and give a shout out here to the pineapple in Rwanda. Amazing. The mixed fruit at school is this pink-colored mix of pineapple, apple, Japanese plum, and sometimes banana. Other days it’s just one type of fruit (orange, watermelon, etc.), but fruit is a daily part of the meal. Last Friday we had samosas, which are like fried meat or veggie pies with salad and….you guessed it, fruit. Water is always the drink.

Then, on to dinner. I will skip the details on the afternoon snack pleas from the kids that run every 15 minutes from 4pm until 6pm. Dinner options are varied and include grilled cheese with tomato soup to beef and veggies in a gravy over rice with green beans. Spaghetti with meat sauce is VERY common around here, as is macaroni and cheese. Soups are also very common. We just had vegetable soup, buttered toast and fruit for dinner tonight. The Miller house has some great cookie and brownie makers in AnnaMarie and Kethia (the Millers’ daughters), so we got to sneak some of those tonight, as well.

Rwandan Food Facts

1. Avocados are grown everywhere, are absolutely ginormous, and as a result are very cheap. Thankfully, our kids love avocado, so it’s been going in and on many different things. Side note here to one of my favorite lunches at school which was chapati (thick pita bread) wraps with omelet-style eggs inside, avocado, and tomato. So good!

2. Eggs are fresh and sold in stores on shelves (not cold). They are a staple of life here. They must come from the chickens we see running around the road that we live on. :)

   

3. Spices are hard to come by, so many bring them in from the U.S. or other countries and keep their pantries stockpiled. This includes chocolate chips which have to be brought in. Obligatory photo of Matt and Andrea’s spice shelf:

   

4. There are cows and chickens around, so meat is available. Most beef is purchased from local butchers, and you “have to know a good one” I hear. So far, I’ve been blessed to have Donetilla take care of this. This includes ground beef, beef tenderloin, beef stew meat, even slices of filet. Chicken is available from most stores and markets sold as whole, frozen chickens. (Shout out here to Ron, my stepdad, who has asked us the most questions about chickens. No, I have not figured out how to catch and prepare a live chicken yet!).

5. French fries are called “chips” and are like thick Chick-fil-a fries with less salt and more chewy. They are always homemade. School has a day with just “Chips” on the menu where they pile you a plate full and then pour some beans and veggie stew on the side that you eat it with. Ketchup is included, of course! And fruit.

6. A future post coming I hope about milk here, as there are interesting ways to get it. Matt has it delivered fresh from a cow farm nearby daily. The milk man comes by and drops a white jug off, taking yesterday’s empty jug. Then the milk is strained and boiled to pasteurize it. There’s a long and funny story about Thom and I not knowing this process last weekend and guessing what to do.

7. There are groups in the city that use WhatsApp to communicate when strawberries or cheese or mushrooms come available so people can order them. There is gouda cheese in all markets, but other cheeses are hard to find here. I think there’s a lady in town selling cheese trays as a specialty business now. Strawberries are tiny and also hard to find! They’re almost always washed and frozen so they can last longer. Fruits like blueberries and grapes are only found in Kigali (the capital of Rwanda).

Restaurants

Musanze has a few places to eat if you’re in the mood for at least a 2-hour experience. First, I’ll mention Crema, which is the coffee establishment that Matt’s son Aidan started with some help from others at Homewood church and supporters in Musanze. They have food on the menu including avocado, bean, and meat quesadillas, baked items, etc. A popular restaurant is Migano which has a huge menu of drinks (must enjoy Ginger), smoothies, shakes, and many different kinds of foods from all over the world including pizza, burgers, chicken dishes, curries, etc. We had great ice cream there, as well. Chinese is a thing, as mentioned in the last post, but now I’m skeptical about the after-effects of the oily noodles!

But honestly we haven’t thought much about restaurants because of the epicness of Friday night pizza night at the Miller’s house. Magnifique!

Rewarming

Microwaves here are hit and miss. Depending on the time of day and the power stability, you might get more or less heating. Some mornings when I’m trying to rewarm my coffee it could take anywhere from 15 seconds to 2 minutes. Rewarming leftovers at night… chalk that one up. You could leave it running for five minutes and pull out food just as cold as you put it in. The other day, we rewarmed rice on a stovetop by putting it in a pot and tossing it around for a bit.

Side note: Only in Rwanda has it been totally normal to hold an unbroken conversation despite one participant abruptly dropping to the floor, nearly laying down, and shoving a match under the oven to light it before popping back up to finish their thought.

Coffee

I wrote this whole article without mentioning the star of the show! Coffee. It’s a staple here, as well, and delicious and tasty. We buy whole beans from the market (Gorilla Coffee brand) or from Crema (reselling beans roasted by Question coffee in Kigali) and grind them each morning for pour overs for all (except the kids). Crema and other establishments have great espresso drinks and other coffees.

One last thing: I wrote this post without ever visiting the big vegetable and fruit market in Musanze, so perhaps I can update you all after that happens. I’m told that the experience can be tough for a “mzungu” (the term people use here for people like me who are obvious outsiders), and haggling prices does not go well. There are market delivery app’s that I plan on using when we move to our own place.

A few days after we arrived, I fully discovered the expansive abyss of the VVA Teachers Google drive with all of the schedules, lesson plans, curriculum, etc. I had a first glimpse of our schedules, which continued to change slightly until the day before school started last week. The team needed me to teach in-person science to grades 7-9, three separate classes, all in the afternoon. Thom would be teaching grades 6-9 math and also a STEM elective once a week.

Grades 7-9 at VVA have been doing online science courses for the last 2 years, so I had to help download the curriculum online, organize it, then start reading through it and planning out lessons, just a few days before school began. All of this was happening as I also acquired what’s affectionately known as “the big D” - aka travelers diarrhea. Now, I could take time here to describe the delicious Chinese restaurant experience that happened almost exactly 24 hours before the big D started, but I don’t want to make anyone jealous. (They do have egg rolls, sweet and sour chicken, and an awesome fajita-style Chinese hot plate that I truly enjoyed.). I don’t want to blame the Chinese food, as it could have certainly been something else (and nobody else in our family had this), but it certainly threw a wrench in the works of me preparing fully for the Wednesday of the first day.

Thom and I worked at the school on Monday and Tuesday as best we could to prepare our rooms and lessons. We each have teacher aides that assist us with printing, supplies, etc. We had a few hours of meetings to prepare. Thom’s plan for the first day was to have his students make wall art describing their curriculum for the year. I found some things online to print, laminate and put on the walls. I was going to jump right in on the first day after some introduction.

We went home Tuesday afternoon with me searching around for the medication that we brought that could help with my “issues”. I also got some oral rehydration packets from Matt that tasted just like human sweat, even though the label clearly says “Orange Flavor”. Tuesday night I was feeling better, and went into Matt’s kitchen around 8:30pm to make some bath bombs. Yes, I said bath bombs. You may ask, “Why in the world would you make bath bombs the night before school?” The answer is that my 7th grade science course Unit 1 is based completely around the chemical reaction that is the bath bomb. Rwanda has no bath bombs and also has no Amazon, so we had to make them with cream of tartar, baking soda, corn starch, oil, and a few other things. Anyway, just to cut to the chase, my 7th grade bath bomb extravaganza started on the first day of school with me ending class by dropping the bath bomb in a bowl of water only to see a small splash and a few bubbles pop up slowly. (The kids didn’t laugh at least!)

Ok, on to the first day. We woke up and got out just in time to make it to the first day teacher and staff circle at 8:05am. The kids waited outside and played with the other kids until their class line up and assembly from Mr. Matt. Mary Hope lined up with her kindergarten class in her curly pigtails - the first big day for her. Hannah confidently lined up with 2nd grade. JV stayed with me as he attends the afternoon preschool session daily.

Our current routine is that I keep JV in the mornings until about 11:00am when I take him to school and an aide named Tucker helps with him until lunch and then sends him to his class at 12:15pm. School ends for everyone at about 3:30pm.

All in all, the day went great. Thom was impressed with the enthusiasm and creativity of all of his classes. Thom is also the homeroom teacher for 6th grade, so he meets with them almost every morning to do devotionals together. He has a very full day. I teach only 3 classes per day, starting at 11:40am. Thom and I get to eat lunch together daily, which is a blessing. The kids eat during our period 4 teaching time, all in the same lunch block. (Another blog coming with foods as I know you’re wondering.).

Mary Hope’s first day of kindergarten seemed to go well. She was exhausted but loved Mr. P and met a friend named Joella. Hannah had a great day, too, and had already gotten to know her teacher, Mr. Enoch, well during the prep days before school. JV had Ms. Esther who I think survived having him in class, hehe. He loved the train set that he got to play with.

The kids posed as we left that first morning. They had a great day and so did their parents, thankfully. We have since been learning SO much about how to prep, how to teach well, how to design labs, how to ask questions of 9th graders, how to manage grade books, and how to do it all in a new country with 3 kids who are also learning how to get used to a new school and new home. Even tonight, Matt and I brainstormed how to make something like agar to put into Petri dish-like plates so 9th grade can have a cool lab on growing bacteria. These things are easily ordered through Amazon in the U.S. It’s amazing the difference in resources that bring challenges I’ve never thought of before.

Thom and I are excited about the week to come, as Monday is tomorrow and so is the first full week. He has printed many, many worksheets and lesson plans and is excited to continue to do math with these bright kids. (Thankfully, we don’t have TOO many in any class, as 6th grade has only about 8 students, and 7-9th about 5-6 each.). I am going to be explaining bath bomb reactions, bacterial resistance, and collision science to three classes this week. We are grateful as well for all of the well-versed secondary and primary teachers and administrators who are also giving us guidance and feedback during this process. We are most impressed by the enthusiasm, knowledge, respect, and interest that the students are showing in their classes with us. We continue to ask for your prayers for the students, staff, teachers, and all of us here ministering in Rwanda.

The car was bought from a returning missionary Darrell who had since returned to the states and left the car in the care of his friend Paul. I’d had enough foresight to connect with Paul before the trip to ensure he would be there when we arrived, which was prescient because he let me know that he would be in Kenya instead. So we arranged to leave the keys with another fellow named Jonathan.

So, the day we arrived was a Friday night. We stayed in the capital city of Kigali that night with a plan of fetching the car I bought the next day. Saturday morning I reached out to Jonathan to get the keys, but our plans were spoiled when we learned that he wouldn’t be available until late afternoon with them. Our pivot was to then take Bekah and the kids up to Musanze (about a 2.5 hour drive) in the morning, I’d drive back with Matt to get the car and some other newly arriving folks, and then we’d return to Musanze later in the evening.

We finally connected with Jonathan around 4:30pm and received the keys and paperwork for the vehicle. At this point, I thought we were home free as I plugged Paul’s address into our GPS and we quickly arrived at his gate. Unfortunately, no one answered the gate and our best attempts at peeking over the compound wall did not reveal anything resembling a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser in “acceptable to moderate” condition.

Darrell was quick to answer and direct us to another place where the car would be found. Matt knew the area well (I would have been absolutely lost without him) and we popped over to a compound with an open gate and tarp covered vehicle.

Once I lifted the car cover and saw that the truck actually existed, I was ready to pose like George Bush in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner. And that would have been apropos because our fight was just beginning.

The insertion of the key quickly revealed there was no battery power. We popped the hood and saw that the battery had been disconnected, which was good given that it was sitting up but also bad because we had no tools to reconnect and tighten the terminal. Matt was able to find a Leatherman tool but the bolt was corroded enough to be unusable. We were able to get enough juice to start the engine by laying the wire on the battery terminal loosely.

Once the engine fired, Matt returned to his car and I summoned as much confidence as I could to prepare myself for the drive back to Musanze at night. It was about this time that I reached down to shift it into 1st gear that the gear shifter fell off in my hands. This was definitely not normal. This car was also definitely not going to be driven back tonight.

We picked up the other staff members arriving at the airport and drove home. Though quite deflated from the high-level of anticipation I had about attempting to drive it back, I was pretty relieved to hear that Matt has a contact who can be hired to drive cars to and from Kigali who could make the trek for me once the car was repaired.

The next day, I worked with Darrell to coordinate a local mechanic named Bob to take a look and fix the car. Another day later, Bob contacted me to let me know that the car was ready and functional. I immediately hired the driver, Viateur, who charged 20,000 Rwandan Francs (FRw) to do the job, plus a 3,000FRw for a bus ticket to Kigali. That’s about $23 for the job, which is at least 6 hours of work. This may give those of you in the State a sense of the cost differential in labor between the countries. Viateur made the trip without issue and delivered the car by 10pm the next evening.

By the next morning, we were experimenting with how to get our kids in and out of the third row seats. I took it for some driving around town, quickly realizing that what I was doing needed to be called something else. In America there are particular contexts back where your “hey, I should really pay close attention and be ready to dodge something” impulse elevate. Like, when you’re driving through a subdivision with lots of kids and passing parallel parked cars just waiting for that one kid to sprint out after a ball or something. Driving here is like the feeling of being that vigilant permanently. There are literally hundreds of people walking on the roadside, hundreds of bicycles carrying passengers, motorbikes passing indiscrimantly, huge diesel trucks, and THE BUSES.

There is a constant stream of buses carrying people to and from other cities. Most of the buses are minivan sized but there are a fair share of charter bus and you’ll see a few jumbo sized ones as well. I’m not sure what the incentive structure is for these bus drivers, but every experience I’ve had with them is that they are determined to get as many people as people moved throughout the country as fast as possible. They’ll blow through crosswalks, practically skid to a stop, jettison a few folks, then cram people on top of each other before peeling out directly in front of oncoming traffic.

It struck me as a miracle that there is not a steady stream of traffic fatalities every day here. There’s some kind of lesson in here about the adaptability of humans that despite all of these seemingly super-risky elements, the society functions just fine and people aren’t getting regularly taken to hospitals for road-related injuries.

I had maybe 8 total trips in my truck before volunteering to be a driver for our outing to “Bella’s Island” on the last day of orientation. Getting there was no problem at all and was quite a fun trip with a car full of new friends. I felt pretty confident in highway driving by the time we made the turn to go through the village and its rocky “roads” which were slightly more than what we’d call “milk lanes” or alleyways in the States. It was only once we were within sight of our destination that I had the realization that our ride was mostly downhill and how difficult the return trip would be.

The return didn’t disappoint. Thankfully, we were all in great spirits after the good time together. I turned on the song “Eye of the Tiger” as we set our face back towards Musanze. Just as the song ended, we were mid-ascent of a rocky hill that the truck refused to summit. The engine gave up and stopped. I cranked it again and tried to get up the hill in 1st gear, but my best efforts led to it rolling further backwards. After the car behind us saw our trouble and came to check on us, we decided it would be best if everyone got out and I tried to get a running start from the bottom of the hill. Thankfully that did the trick and everyone piled back in!

Each hill we encountered for then on was a gamble on whether we’d be able to make it up. Everyone was really encouraging though, and instead of complaining about it, each hill was met with all of us in the car giving our best “BUUUM, BUM, BUM, BUM” rendition of Eye of the Tiger to give the car the mojo it needed. I think that encouragement mixed with my increasing understanding of how to make good use of the clutch was just what we needed to safely get back to the highway without any further need for running starts.

That trip gave me the rapid increase of confidence that comes from sink-or-swim immersion. I’ve now driven it daily for about two weeks and feel more capable each and every day. The next big hurdle for us to jump is how to get Bekah able to do the same!

(Bekah: “Yeah, right! I’m still afraid the back door is going to fall off every time we go down a rocky road. And, yesterday the car almost stopped going up Matt’s road which Thom overcome by some combination of pushing the clutch, pulling the parking brake, and shifting all at the same time. ???????”)

All of the teachers and staff were gracious and welcoming to us. The teaching community truly did not disappoint. More than half of the teachers this year are from African countries including Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania. Most of the aides, staff, and some teachers are from Rwanda.

The orientation is held in the school’s gym, which is an open-air tin roof structure with a concrete floor painted for basketball that doubles as the cafeteria. The 32 folks on staff sat at tables arranged in a semi-circle around Matt M. who presented the orientation material.

The first day’s content was focused on calling everyone higher toward the spiritual purpose of the school and its missional vision. Matt shared a word from Isaiah 55, which after a series of other echoes has started to become the theme scripture for the year in my opinion. The focus of this initial talk was upon how God’s word goes forth and will accomplish its purpose. In our context, Matt called us to be circumspect as we teach our students spiritually and academically, knowing that vigilant effort invested now will result in transformation not seen until many years from now.

¹⁰ As the rain and the snow
    come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
    without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
    so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
¹¹ so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
    It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
    and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:10-11

The work content showed up on Thursday morning like a tidal wave. Matt presented a cheat sheet of links to content in the school’s Google Drive, and the firehose of information he covered gave me a big smile remembering what it was like on-boarding new engineers at Tanium. As Bekah struggled mightily with the learning curve of both Google tools as well as her daily laptop now being a Mac, I was also grateful to have had the experience I did at my last workplace to see how useful both of those tools can be. I must underscore, though, how tough it’s been for Bekah fighting the initial frustrations at me for talking her into getting a Mac. Not sure she’s forgiven me yet! 😅

We’ve both been rapidly learning everything we can about teaching — from classroom management, to differentiation techniques, to formative/summative assessments, to how long you can sit next to a laminating machine before the smell makes you sick. Bekah will be teaching secondary (7, 8, and 9) science; I’ll be the secondary math teacher for the same grades as well as the 6th grade. We’ve been spending the time reviewing our subjects’ curricula and turning them into lesson plans for the first week of school starting next Wednesday the 25th.

Bekah’s challenge with lesson plans is definitely greater than mine. She’s blazing new trails here by teaching the first in-person offerings of her classes, as their content was taught online previously. Collecting experiment materials and reading through teacher and student materials has taken tons of time. Both of us are terrified of being unprepared so most of our stress is admittedly self-imposed. All of this lesson planning brings me to a first big reflection I’ve had considering my own education and teachers: Thank your teachers for their prep! Prep is a labor of love and takes so much time to do well. I’m so grateful for my teachers that were well prepared.

I gained access to my classroom and started working on getting it cleaned up and organized to be functional. I went back and forth on whether to decorate the walls with some of the existing Math-related laminated materials I found in the shelves, but they just seemed like such random math concepts that I didn’t want to make things worse by adding irrelevant stuff everywhere. So I’m taking the austere approach and plan on making my first class period with each grade a collaborative activity in which the students work together to create wall art roadmaps of their math unit names. I’m hoping that this hits a few birds with a single stone of giving a good welcoming onramp to me as a teacher, each other as a class, and the content we’ll be covering.

The final day of orientation was a group trip to a special place called “Bella’s Island” with the whole team. We all went out in our cars about an hour from Musanze through a village to a shoreline where we boarded a boat and cruised over to the island. A small hike up the side of the island hillside revealed a nice restaurant-style meeting place where we set up. We took a couple of hours to simply spend time together as a team— hiking around the island (about 30 minutes to make it fully around), kayaking, and playing various games. I discovered a fun one called Qwirkle!

After a delicious lunch of roasted chicken, potatoes, and an interesting mix of vegetables prepared by the island staff, Steve G., our school’s new principal this year, gave us a devotional thought calling for us to imagine the future as shaped by our work at the school. He shared stories of students that he’d worked with a school for the deaf in Kenya 40 years ago and how the direction of their lives have now resulted in beautiful outcomes for them, their families, and communities.

Matt then shared a helpful batch of material helping us all to connect to our team’s various cultural norms via a tool called the Culture Map. To summarize some of the content that resonated with me:

• African culture is much more relational and slow to warm up to new people with trust being earned and not easily lost, as opposed to an American style with more swiftly granted openness and more transactional trust in relationships.

• Greetings are very important in Africa. Failing to greet someone, especially in the morning, is generally interpreted as a sign of anger toward them.

• Indirect feedback is the standard here and rarely is direct feedback an expected approach, especially from folks without deep relationship already established.

• The people of Rwanda don’t walk while eating. Seriously. Also interesting is that Rwanda is distinct from other East African countries is that nobody here touches their food with their hands.

So after all that orientating, do I feel prepared for classes to start next week? I feel well prepared to trust that God will give us what we need in terms of energy, focus, and patience to make it through these lesson plans and prep hours to give these kids what they deserve academically. I also feel well equipped to know what to be considering and where to look and who to ask for help. All of the content was useful, but to boil it down to my three things which resonated the most with me:

1. the talks connecting me to the mission of VVA,

2. the Cheatsheet doc and links to resources about procedures, and

3. the time bonding with the people of VVA on the trip to the island.

It was made very clear from the time devoted to worship and instruction that the orientation’s primary focus was to prepare us as a team to engage with our spiritual purposes here. We are on mission to make VVA a dwelling place for God by staying connected to Him and to each other, and through that to become “gates” for our students to also connect with Him.

We’re excited to get started this Wednesday. For our prayer team back home, please pray for the students to be open to our instruction this year and for giving us the right words to say to connect them to the material.

Love you all!