| From Untouchables to ArchbishopsThe archbishop partby Carrie Miles
At last, here is the final installment of our February/March 2013 trip report. I am glad to get this to you before the summer trips start coming in (and before it is 2014.) When I sent out the last report, Pastor Jean-Marie in Burundi wondered how we could have forgotten our time there. But we could not forget Burundi. When our wonderful time in Kabale ended, Frank Tweheyo drove Donell and me down to the airport in Rwanda. The three of us flew from there to Burundi. We had a bit of delay going out on Rwandair, which unfortunately was only a taste of the problem we would have returning. More on that later. Rwandair is a lovely airline, but they do not have a ticket office in the US. Their website, which promises e-ticketing and ability to pay by credit card, does not work. Last year our travel agent got paper tickets for us, somehow, but we had a hard time using them. The numbers on the paper tickets do not correspond to the numbers in Rwandair’s booking system. As Rwandair tickets are easy enough to purchase in Rwanda, I resisted buying paper tickets this year. Unfortunately, the Burundi embassy wanted proof of our flight home, so I had to buy them to get our Burundi visas. Fortunately, there was someone at the desk in Kigali who knew what to do with them, and we experienced only a short delay on the outbound flight. I should have asked him to fix the tickets for the return flight as well, but I assumed that last year’s problem had been fixed. I was wrong. We arrived in Bujumbura quite late at night but there was a big group there to welcome us, including Josee, Didas, Vianne, and Jean-Marie. It was wonderful to see these lovely people. In the past, when I haven’t stayed with friends, we stayed at King’s Conference Center, a hotel operated by the Scripture Union. When they first began operations, the prices there were very reasonable, but when they went “online”, an air conditioned room cost about $85/night, which I really didn’t want to pay. So we took a chance and stayed at the Swedish Mission this year. They have a nice facility where we had held program before, but I didn’t know anything about the sleeping accommodations. Donell, Frank and I ended up with a bungalow to ourselves, each of us with a separate room and bath and sharing a large sitting area. The price came to $10/night each. Can’t beat the price, although there was no air conditioning, of course. The price did include an assortment of very large red worms, which we found coming out of the shower drains — they dashed down quickly when we turned on the lights — and curled up on the carpets. Kind of creepy. I personally did not go to sleep until I had swept all the worms out of my room with one of my flip-flops. There was supposed to be wireless Internet but that turned out to work only on the patio of the mission office and only sporadically. But it was good to be in touch, even under these circumstances. All in all, it was a pleasant, albeit warm, place to stay.
Our first program in Burundi was Redeeming the Changing Family executive overview, which Empower/Burundi organizer, Pastor Jean-Marie Nibizi, organized. This seminar examines the economics of the family, looking at the reason for the traditional family and sexual patterns and how they are changing as the result of economic development. Then we look at what the Bible says about the Christian perspective on these practices. The leaders we work with find this framework helpful in understanding and coping with what is happening to their countries and peoples. As a matter of fact, I presented the same framework at a conference in DC in April, and the academics there found it interesting as well.
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While in Bujumbura, we visited Jean-Marie’s church’s training program for youth. The program teaches technical skills, especially around solar energy, as well as a catering class. Frank’s good friend Vianne and his wife, Sissy, took us out to dinner one night at a very good Chinese restaurant. Sissy is herself Chinese. She disappeared into the restaurant kitchen to personally place our order and came back, eventually, with a bunch of cilantro. That wasn’t our dinner — the restaurant staff grows some of their own ingredients, and shares them with Sissy. The availability of authentic Chinese ingredients – the tofu was the best I’ve had — is indicative of the growing Chinese influence in Africa, as is Sissy and her husband Vianne. Vianne is Burundi but he went to school in China (where he met Sissy), speaks Mandarin, and has a business importing furniture from China to Burundi. Something interesting we learned from Vianne and Bonus: Although there are thriving businesses in Burundi (noted by the World Bank as one of the poorest nations), Vianne and his friend Bonus said that the businesses are mostly importing goods from other countries. I asked if there were bureaucratic obstacles to building factories. They said no, one could get approvals in a day. The problem was the lack of reliable electricity. One can’t run a factory never knowing when the electricity would be on. Generating one’s own electricity, which many of the African hotels do when the power goes off, is much too expensive for factories. Pierre Kwizera, a physician who first brought Empower to Burundi, came down from the village where he is working to visit with us. It was so good to see him.
A highlight of the trip – and yes, the end point of these reports – was meeting with Anglican Archbishop Bernard Ntahoturi. You may remember that Donell and I were both in Africa in August, 2012, just a scant six months before our 2013 trip. I try to keep our trips to Africa farther apart, as they are so exhausting. But between going to India, where the weather gets very hot by late spring, and the archbishop’s request that we come to Burundi in March, when he would be there, we agreed to go again so soon. Then Pope Benedict retired. Archbishop Bernard represented Africa in the Anglican delegation to the installation of the new pope. He was also asked to bless the new archbishop of Canterbury upon his installation. I was disappointed that despite coming early, it looked like we weren’t going to get to see him at all, but it was hard to complain about our competition. There was a big political problem going on within the province of Burundi, however, and the archbishop had to fly home for a few days to deal with it. We were invited to meet with him before we went on to Matana. Archbishop Bernard is a warm, gracious, and humble man who is deeply committed to the welfare of the family. I was so happy that he took the time to greet us, and especially that Donell got a chance to meet him. |
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