Catch up

This week I've been playing catch up. But the only problem is, it's already Friday, and I haven't caught up enough to feel like I'm caught up. Do you ever feel like that? We were out of school this week for our spring break, and also to remember the victims in the genocide 17 years ago. Local Rwandan schools are out the entire month of April. I decided not to travel during this break for a number of reasons, and I was completely looking forward to "catching up" on all the things I had on my To-Do list that I made. :) Last Thursday, I made a To-do list for my Spring Break, and now it's the next Friday, and I've crossed off only about a third of those items.....

And I'm proud of myself! :)

Earlier today I was not proud of myself. I was being typical-overacheiving Emily and I was completely frustrated because the internet wasn't working fast enough (does it ever here?), my passport wasn't ready in time and the Embassy increased the fee, my taxes kept being rejected for what reason I don't know, the internet stopped working altogether, the fare to Puerto Rico (to visit Ellie) just went up by $110, my tea is cold, these beans are dry, my moto driver is actually driving the speed limit when I need him to go super fast....and on and on and on.

Whoa! I had to catch myself! I was agonizing and getting all bent out of shape because of technology and silly time limits, and accreditation reports for school. What are those to our Creator, but mere mundane tasks! And to think, I almost considered skipping out on my kids at the orphanage because the internet wasn't working fast enough. I had to check myself...BIG time!

So I just left everything there, and went to my kids. And I'm sure glad I did. There was a small, really nice matatu bus parked outside on the red dirt road to Mother Teresa's Home of Hope. I had never seen anything parked outside before. When I entered the dusty blue gate, I saw eleven families, many from the States, talking with the nuns and playing with some of the children. Eleven of my kids were being adopted! They were meeting their families for the first time! Little Mario ran towards me like he always does and said, "Umuchichi, umuchici Emily!" Which means, Visitor Emily! :) I saw Sofia and Mario and Justine, and so many others that I've loved on for a year and a half. And they were meeting their forever families for the first time. It was so special. One dad from Oklahoma, asked me if Mario knew any songs in English that they could sing to him on the long plane ride home. So Mario and I busted out "God is so Good" in three languages for them. :) I was so proud to show him off in front of his new parents. It was a special moment. I played with Marico, my sweetheart (his adoptive family hasn't gotten their visas yet), and joined Genina and Felicita in a Rwandan dance. They are trying to teach me! And then I took them all for piggy back rides up and down the play area. And then we laughed, and laughed some more.

Then I left and visited Glory, my new friend from Venezuela, who I'm tutoring in English. Her husband just moved here for business and Glory knows almost no English, and is not a Christian. Her home situation with her husband is less than ideal, and kind of scary, and Glory has also been really sick with malaria and amoebas this week. I don't know much Spanish, so we just sat there and communicated with short phrases and the dictionary, and smiles. Cause everyone smiles in the same language. :)

I ended the day with a nice long run through my favorite village, and an impromptu soccer game with the kids. And at the end of this day, I wasn't frustrated anymore. I wasn't even just OK. I was overflowing with joy! I didn't check anything off my list for that day, but it wasn't time wasted. I left all the technology and paperwork behind, and played with His children. Spent time with His people. I forgot about emails to write, and reports to turn in. I caught my breath. Slowed down....and just showed up!

If you're having one of those less-than productive days, just show up! Show up for people...the people you love. Love them, and know His love for them....and for YOU! You're not gonna find any reports or emails or taxes in Heaven. But you will find people!

Everytime I leave the orphanage, I walk past a beautiful blue and white altar for Mother Teresa, and painted in script on the top, it reads, "Make of your life, something beautiful for Christ."

You can start today!

doughnuts!

It's become my Saturday morning ritual. Wake up, put my running clothes on, stretch, and run 5.5 miles to doughnuts. Then eat doughnuts. :) I know it sounds counter-productive to "run to doughnuts," but I run more for my mental health anyway. Plus, it's like the gold at the end of the rainbow that keeps me truckin' up the Kigali hills. Fresh doughnuts! Chocolate-glazed, cinnamon, vanilla, caramel-glazed! Even better than Krispy Kreme! Really!

Saturday morning doughnuts is just  "side" venture of African Bagel Company, a part of a ministry of Tentmakers of Rwanda, that was started by Robin and Rich Smyth, missionaries from New Hampshire. The Smyths moved to Rwanda six years ago, and have created different "centres" designed to educate and empower women in their community. Their centres specifically target women who are widowed from the genocide, orphaned, or HIV positive, and they teach the women financial planning, career skills and different trades, health and hygeine, nutrition, and English. The women also participate in daily devotions that help unite them, and teach them about living a Godly life. One of these centres is called the Phoenix Home, and was started in 2008 to care for homeless women and children in Kigali.

The African Bagel Company began when Robin was teaching some ladies cooking and nutrition classes, and some ofher ex-patriate friends in Bible Study mentioned that bagels were one of the American foods they missed from home. So Robin began working with the ladies and teaching them to make bagels. It soon spread throughout the international community here, and now the women sell the bagels at schools, churches, and even the Embassy. They are delicious and super-filling too! Now, they've learned how to make plain, wheat, sesame, onion, herb, and my favorite...cinnamon-raisin bagels!

But ABC is way more than just a business venture. It is transforming the lives of the women who are a part of this community, and is about so much more than making some cash and providing ex-pats with a taste of home. These women are learning English, learning how to work together, learning God's Word, sound financial planning, and how to take care of their health and that of their family. Even the cooking process is done with traditional measures such as charcoal, so the women are perfecting a skill set that they can use in their homes.

After realizing the bagels were a big hit, Robin began teaching the women how to prepare doughnuts as well. But the doughnuts are only available on Saturday mornings on a first-come, first-serve basis. That makes me run even faster! :) Now, Robin has also introduced chocolate-chip cookies, flour tortillas, chips, and homemade hummus, salsa, and peanut butter. ABC also provides a place for local artisans to sell their crafts and help generate an income for their families.

I love that the Smyths have taken a creative approach to breaking the cycle of poverty, and helping empower these women. And who doesn't love doughnuts? Saturday morning has become an enjoyable time of gathering, networking, and meeting new people in my community. It's the perfect solution for all. :)

To read more about the Smyth's ministry in Rwanda, visit their website: http://tentmakersofrwanda.com/

I finally made it!

The women busy preparing the doughnuts

Emma (daughter of a KICS teacher) is helping the ladies prepare the sugar ones.

Mmmm....fried food!!

Delicious bagels

Kigali: City of the future

Architect's drawing of the future Kigali (archibaseplanet.com) 

A CNN film crew was here last month, filiming this new snapshot video of Kigali and its growth and future economic plans. It's a great 6 minute snapshot of life in this city, and President Kagame also touches on his reactions to negative press and thoughts about the future.

It just so happens, a few Sundays ago, I was having tea at the featured Bourbon coffee, with Kristin Urquhart, a favorite mom of mine, before we headed to the orphanage. The CNN crew came in and filmed us for a couple minutes while we were in the middle of a pretty serious conversation! They told us to sip our drinks and keep talking and act like they weren't there. Ha! We never thought we'd be featured...until this afternoon when we were told that a friend had watched the video and spotted us. How? I have no clue. Because those 2 minutes of filming were minimized to all of ONE SECOND of face time. :) Literally, Kristin's coffee drink got more video time than we did. :) But still, it's fun to say we made the news! But you have to be looking! :) Freeze the frame at 4:06, and there we are! :)

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/business/2011/04/05/qmb.future.cities.kigali.cnn

17 years

A Hutu man who did not support the genocide had been imprisoned in the concentration camp, starved and attacked with machetes. He managed to survive after he was freed and was placed in the care of the Red Cross, Rwanda, 1994.

Today marks the 17th anniversary of Rwanda's darkest period in history. April 7, 1994, began 3 months of the gravest atrocities that humans could commit against humans, all in the name of political power and ethnic control. Today, Rwanda remembers so that they will never forget. This is a painful time for all Rwandans, as this month brings back to life memories and faces of loved ones, and stories of survival. Everyone has a story. Rwanda will spend this week in mourning and in remembrance, in prayer for their loved ones and for their government, and in hope for continued reconciliation and abounding forgiveness and peace.


In 1994 TIME photographer James Nachtwey witnessed the devastating effects of the Rwandan genocide. On the 17-year anniversary, the photographer looks back on the tragedy.

In his words...



Humans make war, and we make peace. We make love, and we make hatred – hatred and fear. Those two are the killers. Orchestrate hatred and fear, and humans make genocide. European colonialists used fear and hatred to cut an incision deep into Rwanda to divide and conquer. It was never allowed to heal and became the subtext for society long after the white rulers made their exit. In 1994, tribal enmity between Hutus and Tutsis was politically manipulated to a state of critical mass. Between 500,000 and 1 million people were slaughtered in the span of three months using farm implements as weapons. The killing by the Hutu interahamwe was committed face-to-face, neighbor-against-neighbor, and sometimes even brother-against-brother.


The number most often heard is 800,000. It’s a big number no matter what it’s applied to. Trying to imagine 800,000 people with their heads bashed in by rocks and clubs, impaled on spears, hacked to death with hoes and machetes – in just three months – stuns the mind, and we struggle to wring meaning out of words like “biblical” or “apocalyptic.”

Instead of sending more troops to prevent bloodshed as the West had in Bosnia, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force stepped aside. Because of the disastrous military operation in Somalia, our own political leaders made a conscious decision not to use the one word that could even begin to have meaning: genocide. They understood that the obligation to intervene was implicit in the language. As the world turned its back, the genocide happened in front of its eyes. Later, public apologies were made, something rare for politicians, but the gesture did not bring back the life of a single Rwandan.

Later, when the Hutu army and militias fled into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to escape the advancing Tutsi forces, more than 1 million people crossed the frontier in a single day. They set up makeshift shelters on rocky, volcanic earth, where it was impossible to find clean water, dig latrines or bury the dead. Within days a cholera epidemic swept through the camps. Tens of thousands died within a few weeks. Mass burials were carried out using bulldozers. Untold numbers of children were orphaned and abandoned. International relief agencies streamed into Goma to try to stem the tide of disease.

Those responsible for the genocide concealed themselves within the mass of civilians inside the camps. Relief organizations were in a dilemma. Because they could not distinguish who was a killer from who was a human shield, they were obliged to treat everyone. Ironically, the international community that had walked away from its responsibilities during the genocide was now forced to come to the rescue of those who had committed the atrocities.


All this happened in the same time frame in which Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, as if by some infernal metaphysics the best humanity had to offer would be offset by the worst imaginable. It was our world then, and it’s our world now. We have examples from both ends of the spectrum of human aspirations. Will we take heed from the lessons taught by our own history? If we don’t, who will?


James Nachtwey is a TIME contract photographer, documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. On his most recent assignment, Nachtwey was one of the first photographers on the ground in northern Japan covering the devastating effects of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Nachtwey was also embedded with a United Stated Medevac unit in southern Afghanistan, published in January 2011.

came across this great editorial in the Boston Globe...

Libya is not ‘another Rwanda’



The disciplined Tutsi rebel force led by Paul Kagame (left) in 1994 in Rwanda differs greatly from the ragtag opposition in Libya today.


Stephen Kinzer / Apr 1, 2011 12:39 AM

ONE OF THE most effective arguments in favor of American intervention in Libya is that it is necessary to prevent “another Rwanda.’’ But the situation in Libya has nothing in common with what happened in Rwanda. Repeat: nothing in common.


The insurgency in Rwanda was an effort by members of an exiled communal group, the Tutsi, to make an “armed return’’ to a country from which the Hutu majority had expelled it. Unlike the ragtag bands of Libyans the West amorphously describes as “rebels,’’ the Tutsi army was one of the most disciplined insurgent forces ever seen in Africa. It had a clear leadership, headed by the visionary Paul Kagame, who today is president of Rwanda.


Kagame was a well-known figure who was in constant contact with United Nations officers and foreign leaders. Many came to admire him, and few feared what might happen in Rwanda if he took power. In Libya, it is impossible to predict what kind of a regime, if any, might emerge to replace the current tyranny. The possibility that Libya will become another Somalia, fragmented among its 140 tribes and a base for crime and terror, is vividly real.


Regimes that seize power by force reflect the insurgencies from which they spring. A strong, unified, and clearly focused rebel movement, like the one that took over Rwanda in 1994, is likely to run that kind of a government. A fractured, leaderless one cannot be expected to do so.


In the months before the Rwandan genocide, and as it was unfolding in the spring of 1994, no one expected or asked the United States to intervene by arming the insurgents or bombing government positions. All that was necessary was for the UN to reinforce its peacekeeping presence on the ground. The UN commander, General Romeo Dallaire, literally drove himself mad with frantic appeals to New York for reinforcements. He believed that just a few thousand peacekeepers could end the killing.


This was because the killing was not, as the West was led to believe, a spontaneous and uncontrollable spasm of “tribal violence,’’ but a calculated effort by a handful of Hutu politicians who saw it as their best hope to keep power. Robust policing by blue-uniformed soldiers would probably have stopped it. Such policing would have no effect in Libya, where there is no UN force on the ground and no one has a clear idea of who the “rebels’’ really are.


When the Rwandan genocide began, the ruling clique had been in power for less than 24 hours — not 42 years, like the current Libyan regime. General Dallaire was undoubtedly correct to believe that it would have been easily intimidated by a show of force. Staring down Moammar Khadafy will not be that easy.


Another key difference between Rwanda and Libya is that Rwanda was a wretchedly poor country with no resources. No one who intervened there could be accused of wanting to loot or pillage. Libya — surprise! — is rich in energy resources the world covets. No big power ever makes policy decisions about the Middle East without considering the oil-and-gas factor. Some, like Britain and the United States, want access to Libya’s resources, while others, like Russia, live off oil and gas exports and support intervention in the hope that it will throw the country into chaos and thereby remove a competitor from the market.


Preventing humanitarian disaster is a praiseworthy goal, but there is every chance that if Libya is engulfed in civil war, more people will suffer and die in coming years than Khadafy would have killed in reasserting control over his country. Nor is it reasonable to believe that if Western power helps install a new Libyan regime, that regime will be pro-Western.


Military interventions always end badly. They may be justified on rare occasions when the result of not intervening would be even worse than the result of intervening. Never, though, should the United States or any big power use force to change the course of events in another country and presume that things will work out well. The real winner in Libya may turn out to be Al Qaeda, which profits whenever chaos engulfs a Muslim country.


There may be urgent situations that force the United States to wage war. Libya may even be one of them. Americans should be told frankly, however, that war — not a “kinetic military action’’ — is what we are waging. Perhaps we, and our representatives in Congress, don’t want to hear this truth. Far easier to reach back into history for a parallel like the Rwandan genocide, which is as heart-rending as it is irrelevant. Libya is not Rwanda. In fact, one of the most daunting realities of this war is that Libya is Libya.


Stephen Kinzer teaches international relations at Boston University and is the author of “A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.’’

Powerful Love

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may STRENGTHEN

you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so

that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I

pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have POWER,

together with all the saints, to grasp how WIDE and LONG and HIGH and DEEP

is the LOVE of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-

that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do IMMEASURABLY MORE than all we ask or imagine,

according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church

and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.

~Ephesians 3:16-21

A Map of the World

A Map of the World”

by Ted Kooser

One of the ancient maps of the world
is heart-shaped, carefully drawn
and once washed with bright colors,
though the colors have faded
as you might expect feelings to fade
from a fragile old heart, the brown map
of a life. But feeling is indelible,
and longing infinite, a starburst compass
pointing in all the directions
two lovers might go, a fresh breeze
swelling their sails, the future uncharted,
still far from the edge
where the sea pours into the stars.