7/18/2014 – Rwanda and Congo

I am on the downward slope here in Kigali. Tomorrow will be my last day before I am picked up to go to the Congo on Saturday morning. Grace will remain here and probably have a very lonely weekend. Very few of the housemates here are available for her personal help, so she will have to find ways to occupy herself after Tuesday. The plan is for her to teach the women for two full days. This year, this is the greatest number of days they could commit to offering the pastor’s wives. They have so many responsibilities around the home with children that getting away for the two days is itself a feat.

I am beginning to feel the normal weariness of constant teaching and the demands of my own “availability” today. This is of course what I signed up for, but it doesn’t help when you’re tired. Fortunately, it is a very satisfied sense of exhaustion. The second week in Congo the feeling of having been “poured out” will intensify. It is especially more difficult because the way the schedule will operate. I do not plan at this point in being very much in public at all. I will get up in the morning and be taken from the hotel to the teaching site and back again. The dangers are very minimal this year, but I am going to take every precaution anyway. You don’t know how much I “stick out” in the Congo. Interestingly enough, there is another Baptist youth group that either will be somewhere in the Congo while I am there or will have just finished when I arrive. I hope to find out more about them once I’m settled in my Congolese hotel.

We will likely have at least forty receiving in Rwanda certificate tomorrow afternoon. Believe me, they will have earned it! The joy they feel at completing a course is palpable. They sing and rejoice, but more importantly they know they have more education supporting their respective ministries. This is why we have come and why will keep coming while we have opportunity!

See you tomorrow, Bruce