Let's dance!

This past week has been one of the best weeks I've had since being back. My students were awesome this week, and we had A LOT to be jubilant about. We have been fervently praying for the 33 miners in Chile by name since the very first day of school, so as you can imagine, to hear that all 33 had been safely rescued, was music to our ears and our hearts. We started following the news on my computer on Wednesday, and each time a miner was pulled up to the surface, my kids just rejoiced and praised and danced like they were having a party. Then, one of my students, Monia, suggested that we sing "Rejoice in the Lord," each time one was rescued. What a wonderful idea! So on Wednesday, each time there was news of another miner rescued, we stopped what we were doing and broke out into spontaneous singing and dancing! Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice! Rejoice, Rejoice, and again I say rejoice! We celebrated each rescue that day, and we calculated when all the miners would be out, based on the fact that they were rescuing one miner every hour. We estimated that all would be free by Thursday at 2pm, but we have learned that God doesn't work in a human timeframe; He is much bigger and greater than that! What humans say is impossibe, God makes possible. I think this has been the biggest lesson my kids and I have learned throughout this incident.

So when we all arrived at school Thursday morning, to find that all 33 miners had already been safely pulled to the surface, we were ELATED! Many parents said that their kids had stayed up during the night and prayed for them, or woke up super early to find out how many were still left underground so they could pray for them by name. Their response to this event was such a testimony to me. When we first started praying, the news media estimated the miners wouldn't be out until Christmas. But my kids were adamant that we continue praying, and be specific about our prayers, and ask God that they be rescued sooner. Back in August, instead of being freed at Christmas, my students prayed to God that they would be freed before November! At first, I thought to myself that they were asking a WHOLE LOT of God, to pray each day that they be freed 2 months earlier than estimated! It sounded impossible, and totally contradictory to what the media was reporting. But sure enough, our prayers were answered. Each time there was a story reporting that the miners could be released earlier, my kids danced and rejoiced! They would say, "You see, Miss Griggs, God hears our prayers! We have faith and He is listening to us!" What began as a rescue date of near-Christmas, turned into sometime in November, then October! And mid-October at that! What a mighty God we serve!

"You of little faith," He said, "why did you doubt?" Good question! Why do we as humans doubt when we pray?? When we obviously know how great God is and mighty, and how He can move mountains and perform miracles! Why doubt? I have to admit that I am guilty of doubting. I teach to others about having faith, and then when I pray, often times, I pray, not really believeing that God can answer my prayers. Sometimes, I think my prayers are almost laughable! Do you ever feel this way? I'll pray for a person continuously, but not really BELIEVE in my heart that God can move in this person's life. Anyway, this week's events with the miners, and seeing my children's response to this event was a wonderful lesson for me about faith. He wants us to ask and come believing! "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you." ~Luke 17:6. "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." ~Hebrews 11:1.

Back to dancing! Watching my kids rejoice and praise God each time a miner was rescued was AWESOME! Sofia, from Bolivia, made a huge Chilean flag that we had posted on our wall for the last 2 months, and she made a minature flag for each student. Sofia prayed for the lone Bolivian miner every day by name. It was so fun waving the flag back and forth and dancing and shouting praises when they were rescued. A wonderful day that I will never forget!

While I was watching them dance and sing praises so unashamedly, and not care who was watching them, but just having a big ol' time....I thought of David as he was writing the Psalms. David was just a simple shepherd boy, but he poured out his heart to God in a mighty way, singing and dancing to the skies, in the darkness of the night. No one was watching but God. I can just picture David with a wild, crazy, happy gleam in his eye as he looked up to the stars and just danced for his Lord. David danced all his life. Later on, he would take off his royal robes and shamelessly dance for joy. Michal despises David at one point and mocks him for being a buffoon. (2 Samuel 6:16-20), but David kept right on dancing. He was a simple, unashamed worshipper who delighted in God's presence more than anything in the whole wide world. That's the kind of crazy, unabandoned spirit I saw in my kids this week. They were dancing and didn't care a lick who saw them, or what they looked like. Being in God's presence is the BEST place to be...you don't care about anything else!

Psalm 34:8 says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" We are created to worship Him. Soak Him up each and every day! Not care who is watching. I know that at the center of heaven, there is a God who delights in glorious dancing, and someday we will join Him, circle around Him, and dance with dizzying delight and laughter. But until then...may we dance for Him here on earth! Like David, and my precious 4th graders, may we all dance with abandon and be filled with an overwhelming joy for our Savior!

"Dance then, wherever you may be,


I am the Lord of the dance," said he,

"And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance," said he.

Inzozi Nziza

Inzozi Nziza translates to "Sweet Dreams", and is Rwanda’s first ever local ice cream shop located in Butare (Huye). Try saying that three times fast! Inzozi Nziza, Inzozi Nziza, Inzozi zzzzzzz....! :-) We stopped here on the way back from the King's palace and museum. This one-of-a-kind icecream shop is a first for Rwanda, and there's a really great story behind it that I want to share with you. You all know how I love icecream, and it's also something near and dear to my family's heart (and stomachs!) Even though it's not Dairy Queen, it was pretty darn delicious! 

Blue Marble Dreams is an icecream shop in Brooklyn, New York, that has used the power of icecream and entrepreneurship to bring happiness and prosperity to people all around the world. 

Can ice cream really do all that?

It all started when Blue Marble’s founders, Jennie and Alexis, met a Rwandan, Odile Gakire Katese (better known as Kiki), at the Sundance Institute. Hearing about their work, Kiki approached Jennie and Alexis with an idea. She explained that while conventional development initiatives are vital to Rwanda’s physical wellbeing, there remains a need for efforts that boost the spirit of its people. Just as much as they need nutritious food and clean water, Kiki asserted, Rwandans need fun, joy, pleasure and laughter, as these are the ingredients of a life truly lived. And what better way to meet this need than through the sweet, symbolic magic of ice cream?

In her own words, this is why Kiki believes in Blue Marble:

“Because we struggle most of the time, we also find ourselves aggressive against happiness, love, joy, life. When we have children, we teach them that happiness doesn’t exist, that there is no pure love and, as legacy, we give them our despair, our debts, our doubts, our tears, our failures. Rwandan women … want to reshape life in its simple and sweetest form. We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death… We want to create a space where poverty, disease, illiteracy… are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings… We have to, for the sake of the health of our soul. The ice cream will have the power to reconcile people with life by providing privileged moments when life reminds them that it is also sweet.”

That was Kiki, Jennie and Alexis's dream, and now it’s a reality! Inzozi Nziza, a non-profit venture, opened in June of this year, and is an amazing little place! All the women workers are part shareholders of the shop, and they are also the only all-women drumming corp in Rwanda. I wish we could have seen them perform....maybe another time. Inozi Nziza also supports other women in the community by training them in English, hospitality, and computing. The menu is diverse and affordable. You can enjoy passion, mango, strawberry and coffee icecream, and chocolate on most days. They also offer freshly baked bagels, sambusas, cookies, granola, and even fruit salad. They use fresh milk delivered straight from the local farmers to make their icecream. And they roast Rwandan coffee at their shop as well. Check out their menu below. And a couple other pictures from their website...

Great menu!

Delicious coffee icecream with granola on top

Teta, a happy worker!



Leontine's famous sambusas

To learn more about this venture, and Blue Marble in general, you can visit:

http://www.bluemarbledreams.org/

http://www.bluemarbleicecream.com/

Fit for a king

Last weekend, some teachers from KICS took a daytrip to see the king's palaces in Butare...the small cultural town in Rwanda, and home to the National University. We woke up early, and took a bus the 2.5 hours to Nyanza, to see the original and post-colonial homes of the late Rwandan kings. King Mutara III was the last king of Rwanda, and he lived a straw/grass hut like what you see below in the last picture. (Sorry, the pictures are kind of out of order. It took me almost 2 days to upload them because of sparse Internet, and when they finally uploaded, they were all out of order, sorry!) The huts were very roomy inside, and even had a fireplace. The white outer rim that you see at the entrance of the hut was used as a special threshold that only the royals could use to enter the king's hut. All other individuals had to walk to the left of the hut and enter through a small, side entrance.

There were also two huts in the background; one for milk, and the other one for beer. The milk jugs are pictured below. I found it interesting that only a virgin lady could live in the milk hut. She was specially selected by the king for the important job of tending to the milk, and she was never allowed to be married. She kept this position until death. She had to be a virgin because if she was married, the king could never trust the husband with the milk, and would always be afraid that he would conspire to have it poisoned. The beer hut was next door, and this was tended to by a single male, who could also never be married. The beer hut was the only hut that did NOT have one of those white arches at the entrance. We learned that it was because the beer guy routinely tasted the beer and was frequently drunk, and therefore, they knew that he would trip over the entrance archway and spill all the beer. So it was the only hut without a special front entrance. Makes perfect sense! I don't know about everyone else, but I certainly wondered if the milk lady and the beer guy ever got together. Ha! :-) They did live right next door to each other. The second picture below is the king's bed...it was HUGE! Definitely fit for a king, and a lot larger than a king-size bed today!

The red, white and blue house was the first post-colonialism palace that King Mutara III moved into in 1959. There's also a picture of one of the hallways. I found it to be so strange, and disconcerting that the king transitioned from the straw hut directly to this very-modern, westernized palace with running water, toilets, windows, everything. One year, the king was living in the hut, the next year, in this palace....and then when he traveled to Belgium in 1959, he saw that the Belgians lived in even more lavish homes, so he had a larger mansion constructed that we also toured. But unfortunately, the king did not live long enough to move into this bigger mansion. Anyway, it's just bizarre to think about all the effects of colonialism, and to think about these strange, "mzungus" coming into this country and introducing all their strange ways to the Africans, and in doing so, allowing the Africans to think that many of their ways are wrong, just because they are so different. It was sad to see that in one year, the traditional king's home was transformed into a Belgian home. It's like one generation of Rwandans (and other Africans), were introduced to these foreigners' ways, and it was the "new, cool thing" at the time. These foreigners were bringing their new styles, new schools, new clothes, new religion, new ways of doing things into their land...and they also came with gifts and money! It must have sounded so promising for them at the time. How could they have known the terrible effects that colonialism would have on their country in the years to follow? It's sad to think about. We toured the bigger palace, which is now the only art museum in Rwanda. Each year, there's a contest, and one piece of local artwork is selected to be on display in the museum. Then we toured the National Museum, tasted some delicious icecream at Inzozi Nziza, and ate some chewy roadside goat brochettes on the bus before heading back home. I had a great day learning more about Rwanda's cultural heritage!


Inside the milk hut

The king's bed...it took up almost the entire hut!



our flag

A hallway in King Mutera's new house after the colonists arrived. The contrast between the hut and this house was unbelieveable!

I loved this artwork!

The outside of the "new" palace

The King's house, pre-colonialism

Pigs and Preachin'

I wanna share two GREAT articles with you that are totally non-related!

The first is an article in Rwanda's New Times paper, written by my friend, Hez, a reporter for Reuters. We're all sad that Hez just moved to Ghana last weekend, but I think he left in style with this last article! Pretty interesting, and hilarious too! The title alone speaks for itself..."Rwanda's happy hip-hop pigs help combat poverty." Read and enjoy! :-)

http://af.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idAFTRE69616320101007?sp=true

The second article was sent to me by a friend, and is oddly enough from the magazine, Esquire. The author is Shane Claiborne, a pretty radical guy. It's written as an open letter to non-believers, but I think it's pretty good, even from the believer side! It's titled, "What if Jesus Meant All That Stuff?"

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209

Chapel

My kids were in charge of the elementary chapel service last week, and they did an awesome job! Our theme was growing in Christ like trees. They all memorized Psalm chapter 1, and we sang a Fruits of the Spirit song. Then, they wrote, and performed the Zaccheus story, and we sang the song that goes along with the story that I learned when I was their age. Zaccheus was Siem, my guy from Eritrea, and he even scampered up a little tree! They all had fun learning about how God can transform someone's life in no time, and that no one is too far away from God's redeeming love.

"Blessed are those who delight in the law of the Lord, and meditate on His law day and night. They are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither-whatever they do prospers." ~Psalm 1: 2-3

Azarias and Eyoviel from Ethiopia

Megane from Rwanda

All my 4th grade ladies

Jashan from India

Megane from Rwanda

Monia from Arkansas/Kenya

Sofia from Bolivia/Dominican Republic

Naomi from Rwanda/Belgium

Marijke from Canada/Holland

Madelyn from Tyler, Texas :-)

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing!

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.


Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.


Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

Amen

Coffee Field Trip

On Thursday, we took a field trip to Rwanda Trading Company, in Gikondo. My friend, James (native of South Carolina!) invited us to be the first class to tour his factory. It was incredibly interesting; seeing all the coffee brought in from all over Rwanda, and learning about how it is cleaned, dried, sorted, packaged. I never knew what a long, hard process it was just to make a cup of coffee! It was so neat to see the entire process. Even though, I seldom drink coffee, I definitely appreciate where it comes from now! The only thing I didn't appreciate was James allowing all my kids to taste-test all the coffee, and THEN giving each of them a huge cup of coffee, complete with sugar and cookies, as they left. They were bouncin' from the ceilings when we got back to school, and we still had half a day left!! I know he did that on purpose! :-)

Coffee that has arrived at the factory, waiting to be graded and marked for quality. The farmers get deductions for things like beans with the cherry still inside, and coffee that is still partially wet or messed up in some way. Then the coffee is weighed, seperated by big machines, and mixed and sorted in a big silo.

RTC employs almost 350 workers (mostly women) to sort the coffee beans and pick out the bad ones that the machines miss. James pays the workers 30% more than other factories, but their daily wage is still only $1.50. While we might think these conditions are poor working conditions, this is a GREAT job for these women, because they get to talk with each other and encourage one another. They also are provided with proper shoes, and they get a hot lunch every day. Many of these women are the sole providers for their families.

Happy to be working!

Drying the coffee beans in the sun. They also have a machine to dry the beans, but it is more costly to run. However, when it rains, they are forced to use it!

A heavy load

Naomi, helping to sort the coffee. We had a race between the boys and the girls, and the girls won! :-)

Coffee!

Madelyn, in the coffee "laboratory"

Kang-Hee, observing the careful process of "cupping", which is removing the film from the top of the roasted coffee, and getting it ready to be tasted by professionals!

James, demonstrating the art of cupping. It's so neat to watch! They have to go around the table, with their silver spoons and slurp each cup, and then spit it out in the other cup. They actually have to slurp it loudly! It's funny to hear them. They are looking for consistency and quality among the coffee, and also trying to discover any unique tastes like a chocolate or caramel or fruit flavor that would make the coffee stand out. They slurp hot water after each "round" to cleanse their palate for the next round. Very neat to watch!

Jonathan and Azarias taking their tasting turns.

Sam, enjoying the tasting. It looks like he already had too much coffee! :-)

Trying to perfect my slurp!

We had a wonderful visit. I'm hoping to take my kids to a washing station in the springtime, where they can see the coffee being picked from the trees, and washed before brought to the factory. That's a neat process to watch as well! Rwanda Trading Company has really improved the coffee business in Rwanda. They operate by taking out the "middlemen", and actually going to pick up the coffee from the farmers themselves. This allows the farmers to earn more money. RTC exports most of their coffee to buyers in Europe and the USA. They just opened a new roastery in Little Rock, Arkansas. Check out their website!

http://www.rwandatrading.com/

http://www.westrockcoffee.com/