Pledge paralysis

We had our first Rwandan experience of “pledging” in church last Sunday. This is the custom of publicly announcing your offering. It’s usually for something special, not just the normal weekly giving and it’s not so common in Episcopal circles : we have been here for 15 months before encountering it.
We are still not too sure what it was all about, as our neighbour, who was translating for us, was called up to the front and after some discussion ended up leading this part of the service. He was very good at it. There are visitors coming to the diocese next week-end to hold some special meetings and so the pledges were mostly for food, but even afterwards Charles was not really sure who the visitors are. However, he obtained many offers of sweet potatoes, potatoes, other vegetables, sugar and even meat, along with some money. There was quite a variety of pledgers, including a few children.
Events like this, so against our culture, produce a strange kind of paralysis. It is just impossible to participate, not because I feel it is wrong, but because it would require me to break a deeply-held belief, taboo, I suppose, about giving publicly.

Tragedy

The genocide of 1994 (or the “war” as it us usually referred to), continues to produce tragic stories 13 years later. Earlier this week some children found an old piece of metal in the wood beside their house. Thinking it might be valuable, they took it home. The grenade they had found exploded, killing 3 children and 1 woman and injuring several more. All this happened at the bottom of the hill where we live.

Contract working

This is my first experience of working a fixed-term contract and with 7 months to go I am sensing some of the positive and negative aspects of it.
The positive side is that there is absolute clarity about our position. Our Rwandan accountant left his job without notice in May and it caused us untold grief which is still not entirely resolved. My month in the accounts office was the most stressful of my time here. Everyone knows that we will be finishing our work here at the end of June 2008.
The main negative is that the end is already in my mind and affects quite a lot of what I do. It’s not that I am counting the days, or anything like it, but there are already some longer-term plans in school-building which I know I will not see through. Our current diocesan strategic planning work also emphasises our short time left here. The best way to work, of course, is to act as if I am staying here for the duration, but there is always a certain reservation.
Ever since we came to Rwanda we have tried to avoid unduly influencing decisions which will affect things after we have left. We give our opinion, but it is more consultative than committed, because that’s how we see our role here. However, it’s a bit uncomfortable for us when we are used to being in things for the long term.
I don’t foresee a career in “interim management” or anything like it when I return to life in the UK, but then the future remains completely unknown.

Singing in the rain

There’s not much else you can do while a tropical rainstorm lands on the corrugated roof of the church, as it has on the last two Sundays during worship. The noise is absolutely deafening and the sermon is simply suspended until it subsides. The congregation continues “singing and dancing in the rain”.

Patience, passivity and poverty

It is impossible not to admire the patience of Rwandans. Scots are very prone to complaining, but the way in which people here deal with everything from inconvenience to incredible suffering is amazing. Waiting is never a problem and the worst crises are met with equanimity, at least on the outside.
The weakness of this strength is that it can veer into passivity. In all kinds of situations, people wait patiently for those in authority to act, or even just to show up. I was once at a celebration where the food was underestimated and about 20 guests did not get “lunch” until afterwards (about 5pm). Not a murmur was heard. While this makes social life more congenial, it also has effects on the commercial activity of the country. It would be unimaginable in the west that some of the public services and even the commercial enterprises would get away with the appalling levels of service found here. It’s debatable that this poor service continues partly because of the patience or passivity of customers.
So I wonder whether some of the poverty in Rwanda has the same root cause. It’s an enormously complex and intractable problem, so I’m certainly not putting this forward as a whole explanation, merely a contributory factor. Perhaps if there was less acceptance of inactivity, poor service and low standards then economic activity would be more productive?

A day in Kigali

Within 1 minute of stepping outside my hotel, I have been approached to buy a newspaper, a wall-map of Rwanda, a phone card and a Ludo board (I couldn’t make this up). The streets, or rather the pavements, are the scene for a huge amount of commercial activity.
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The rain comes, not the usual Rwandan downpour, but heavy enough to get wet. Suddenly, with my umbrella up, I am almost the only person still walking. Everyone else is sheltering in shop verandas, waiting until it stops.
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The courtyard is just off the main street in one of the suburbs of Kigali and holds a fascinating contrast of tradition and modernity. On one side a few women are peeling vegetables and cooking chapattis, presumably for sale because it is only 10am. On the other side, some young men are at work on computers, editing wedding videos and dubbing with music. I have come with a friend who needs his video camera repaired. A young woman wanders in with a few children’s’ clothes which she is trying to sell.
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Back in the centre of town, the coffee shop with lattes and wifi internet access is nearly full, about 50% of the customers being white. In some parts of the city you could walk about all day without seeing a white face, but this is one place where we congregate. Like most of the others, I am working on my laptop. I have nowhere else to go while my car is being serviced : this is day 3 and I am still not confident about when I will get it back.
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Dusk brings the rush-hour, the streets in the shopping zone are full of lorries unloading huge amounts of materials. Keeping a large stock is common : in the craft shops you can hardly squeeze past shelves crammed with articles for sale.
I eat in a “pub” away from the centre of town – goat brochette and chips for £1.50. Here I am the only white customer and my presence brings a lot of interested stares.
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My hotel has no water. I’m not sure whether this is the persistent Kigali problem, or just some localised issue. It eventually comes back about 7pm, so I store some in a bucket in the bathroom. A further cut in supply the next morning shows that this was a sensible plan.

Prayer puzzle

I’m reading Philip Yancey’s “Prayer” just now and it is up to his usual high standards, posing some vital questions about how to live a life of faith and not ducking the very thorny issues which surround the subject of prayer. In one chapter he discusses the idea of prayer as a partnership between us and God, not a way of us absolving ourselves of responsibility, nor of controlling events.
When I was living in Scotland I continually returned to the mystery of prayer. We are reminded in prayer that God is far beyond our understanding and not under our control. This is partly a reaction against the excessive desire to be in charge which we have in western societies.
Here in Rwanda, I want to emphasise our responsibility. Too often, it seems, I hear the phrase “if God wills”, in a fatalistic rather than a “faith-full” spirit. I want to take people back to Genesis 1 where God makes mankind responsible for the earth and all life on it. As an example, large families and correspondingly large school fees do not just happen “because God wills” but by human action(!).
As Yancey elaborates so well, mystery and responsibility are not “either or” but “both and”. That is the persistent puzzle of prayer, if I can be excused theological alliteration.

Prize day

Our local primary gives prizes for “hygiene” and discipline as well as academic achievement. Hygiene would more accurately be described as smartness, or standard of uniform. The academic prizes are jotters and pencils : the hygiene prize was a plastic basin. Of course it is not so strange as it might first appear. It is likely that the children leaving p6 will end up at boarding school and will have to provide their own basins.

Failed harvest

In May we went to a rice harvest. A youth association in one of the parishes had been given money to buy some land and there were great celebrations as they harvested 7 overflowing bags each holding 50kg of rice to be taken for processing.
This week we passed the rice fields at Bugarama again and calculated that since it was 6 months since our last visit the next harvest must be nearly due. Unfortunately, there was a very heavy hail storm just a couple of days later and almost the entire crop has been lost. The ears were knocked off the plants and washed away.
For our youth association, this is a setback. For a farmer who depends on the rice to feed his family, this would be a disaster. November is already a difficult month, there is little to harvest because it is too soon after the planting at the start of the rains and prices in the market are rising sharply.

Christmas is coming

3 signs of Christmas this week :

The really good news is that our son Andrew will be coming to visit for Christmas. It will involve a rather gruelling journey with Ethiopian Airlines via Hamburg and spending Christmas morning in transit from Addis, but it is very exciting.

If some of the shops in Kamembe do not take down last year’s decorations soon, they will not need to! Last year the few public decorations we saw only appeared 2-3 days beforehand. They all lasted a long time afterwards, but "Alimentation OK" has gone for the year-round look.

The school holidays have started, except for those who are sitting national exams. As we travel around during the day, this means more calls of “Mzungu!”, “Good morning!” (at any time of the day) and “Banjower!” (oh, those French accents). There is also football on every available patch of flat land, which are not many. In the evening many of the boys take goats to graze, so a football pitch will have equal numbers of players and animals scattered across it. Neither seems to mind too much.