pasika nziza!

translation: happy easter!  (belated, we know.)

we have been without internet access for the past 10 days at home, and daily power outages (some lasting well into the night), hence the silence on our end.  we have trekked out to three different establishments in hopes of using their free wireless and behold, we’ve found one that actually has working internet access!  we’re so very thankful.  😉  we know some of our friends and family have been worried about us because we’ve been MIA.  rest assured, we are well!

there is much to update, but i need to keep this update short.  j was invited to speak at my coworker’s father’s church yesterday in a village about 20 minutes outside the city.  in j’s words, being asked to deliver a message on easter was like a rookie quarterback being asked to start in the superbowl.  thank you to everyone who prayed for us, and for j specifically, leading up to this past weekend.  God enabled j to deliver an impactful message on the grace of God.  i’ll let j fill you in with details at a later time, but i will mention that the head pastor shook j’s hand afterwards and told him that he preaches like billy graham (j’s hero).  j was beaming.

as for me, things have been really cranking up @ work.  we had some heartbreaking losses on a couple of our cases–i wrote a blog entry about it but it was disapproved for publication for various reasons i won’t get into.  i will just say for now that these losses have highlighted the gravity of the brokenness of the public justice system here and the road that lays ahead for us as we fight against injustice is much more clear to me now.

ah–so much more to say, but i’ll have to keep it short for today.  we hope our friends and family back home had a wonderful resurrection sunday weekend!  sending much love to you all.  🙂

a time to remember

at church this past sunday, the pastor took just a few minutes at the very end of announcements to shed light on his experience and connection w/the genocide.  his family left the country and when he returned to his family home somewhere in rural rwanda, he found evidence of the war in his outhouse: a baby, hacked to pieces and thrown down into the pit of feces to rot.

today is genocide memorial day.  since we are no experts on what happened 17 years ago, we’d like to direct you to wikipedia (our brother john would be so proud) and hope that you’ll take an interest in this tragic, yet significant, piece of rwanda’s history.  we also ask that you join us in praying for this nation, its people who are hurting and its leaders who have the ability to steer this country towards a really remarkable future.

we’ve also put up our april newsletter.  if you’re not on our email list for our newsletters and would like to be, please send us an email (see “about jd” tab for email address).  thanks for your patience with us as we work around internet and power issues.  we’ll try to post more pictures when we can. 

miss you all–
j&d.

the people in your neighborhood

oh, who are the people in your neighborhood,
in your neighborhood,
in your neigh-bor-hood, say
who are the people in your neighborhood,
they’re the people that you meet
when you’re walking down the street,
they’re the people that you meeeet–each–daaaaaaay!

-old school sesame street song.

one thing i regret about our time in phx was that we didn’t really get to know our neighbors.  we knew some of their names–gary, lucas, jillian?–and on occassion, if one of us were to go out of town, the other’d take in their trash can after collection and pick up their newspapers.  we dropped off boxes of cookies from paradise bakery one new years’ and chit-chatted with them here and there but we didn’t really get to know them.

gary and his wife were retirees.  the house to our left was their winter home, and their summer home was somewhere up north, alaska i believe.  they were always gardening in their perfectly manicured lawn and their two cars–a sedan and an SUV–were always spotless. 

jillian (or was it julian? sigh…) and her family of five (husband and three little kids) just moved into their house just before we left ours.  they’d repainted their 3-car garage a peaceful sage green and their minivan was always packed with kids and groceries. 

lucas and his wife lived across the street.  they were a young attractive couple with a newborn that they took on walks early in the morning in a high-tech stroller.

sadly–and this is mostly my fault–there’s not much more i know about them.  and sadly, that chapter of my life is now over.

thankfully, i have a new chapter.  the people in our neighborhood here in kigali look much different.  we can’t communicate very well with any of them (yet), and though we’ve asked on numerous occasions what their names were, we just can’t get them right (and neither can they get ours), so j and i have resorted to nicknames. 

there is the guy who wears his same blue soccer jersey nearly every day (“soccer guy”) who is always around and appears to be head of the construction crew in our apartment complex.  he has a very gentle voice and sometimes works around the property without any shoes.  we think he spends the nights in the vacant apartment below us that is currently under construction.  for some reason, j and i are really drawn to soccer guy.

there is a really beautiful young woman that is mother to two twin girls probably about 3-4 years old (“the pretty mama”).  she lives about a 5-minute walk down the street from us, in a small gray cement structure right off the sidewalk, and usually greets us in the morning as she’s brushing her teeth outside or hanging up laundry to dry.  we’ve never seen her husband.  she is slender and delicate and has the most beautiful, regal smile, and her daughters (usually seen as two little heads poking out of the small window from their home) flash us the same lovely smile as we walk by.  i can’t be certain, but i think it was one of her daughters that i gave a banana to on my way home from work a few weeks ago.  (when little rwandan girls smile, they all look equally adorable and are super indistinguishable to me!)

there is a lady that lives in the house right next to our apartment building who sits outside in the evenings and belts, acapella, what we think are praise songs (in kinyarwanda) for a good half hour every night (“the singing lady”).  j and i love opening the windows to listen to her sing with crickets chirping in the background, even if it means braving those pesky mosquitos that somehow manage to breech every screen we have on our windows.  we don’t know her name and aren’t even sure what she looks like because by the time she starts singing, dusk has already fallen–all we can make out through our bathroom window is a small figure sitting on the steps outside her door.

and then, there is a young, skinny boy, maybe in his late teens, that (we think) lives in our courtyard.  we’re not exactly sure what he does or is maybe supposed to do (if he works for our landlord?), but he sweeps our courtyard and occasionally opens our gate for us when we come home (“the guard boy”).  i am fairly confident he only has one set of clothing–the one he wears every day–and no other possessions besides his plastic slippers and his cell phone.  j and i try to make him dinner most nights, and though we can’t communicate aside from saying “good morning,” “thank you,” and “God bless you,” we think that maybe the food helps us to connect even deeper than words would.

i hope that, when our time to leave rwanda comes along and this chapter of the story comes to an end, many, if not all, our neighbors will know us.  not because of the color of our skin or because we look and sound different from them, but because we were good neighbors to them.  because we loved our neighbors as we loved ourselves.  [luke 10:25-37]

they’re the people that you meet
when you’re walking down the street
they’re the people that you meet each day.