First Sunday away

After two home services, it was time to move. Emmanuel, the Head of the Education Commission of the Methodist Church in Rwanda, during one of a few meetings with his new aide-employee, Mattia, told the story of how, just last year, he generously built a church for two communities in the outskirts of Kigali (his full story will be posted shortly, don’t miss it) and invited us to join a sort of official opening service for the new congregation. So on Monday morning, at 8.00, we left with Eraste, director of Amizero, the special needs school where Elena works, and also one of the Church’s pastor, who was going there in an official capacity. For the first time (apart from August), we had a taste of travelling (and driving for Mattia) on the dirt roads: once we started to cover the car in red dust, Michele&Sam revealed that their school-bus takes a dirt road too, but just a short stretch, while we went on for 20km, through villages which were getting smaller and smaller, poorer and poorer. This was already a great experience for the boys, who up to know have had only a few glimpses of poverty, in Kigali.

After some 45 minutes we reached the church, a short walk from the road, in the midst of fields and trees, with a wide view on hills and valleys, as we had driven up a good bit. The building is simple, but the size and conditions are good and the mud bricks outside point to the future development plans, especially for the toilet block, badly needed when looking into the hut with just a few boards on the ground.

Emmanuel is both proud and ashamed of his project, as he shows to us westerners, but we help him to move the balance towards the first feeling and at the end of the service, well attended and as loud, passionate and musical as ever, he’s beaming, and with good reasons: in July there was just a small prayer group, now a church with over 100 people, eager to expand into a proper parish.

For us, the service is always hard (as it is linguistically bewildering) and long (especially for the boys, but they were good, anyway), but fun and engaging for its musical-dancing side: it is really inspiring to see how joyful and lively is their worship and though it could all be mistaken as a love for partying, it sounds instead compellingly relevant, an expression of a living, lively faith, which we’ve got a lot to learn from.

Of course we were introduced and welcomed, Mattia was asked to pray on the offerings (with translation) and at the end were also fed, with very typical boiled corn cob, to be eaten by hand after removing the leaves: despite the initial refusal, even the boys had a few bites, while they were playing outside, trying to make friends or at least spend some time with the local children, actually much harder to relate to than their city counterparts, but still nice to our kids.

If you want to get a clearer picture, go to the gallery page.