Saturday's Blog:

Today was the day of the Youth Conference in Byumba, but it was a little alarming at 9am, the time the first teaching session was due to begin, to find not a single delegate had arrived!  Needless to say, in true Rwandan style, people did gradually trickle into the conference room over the next hour.  A few spontaneous songs struck up as a signal to others that the proceedings were getting under way.  Pastor Eliab, the cathedral’s sub-dean opened the conference and we introduced ourselves in the usual manner.  After several ice breakers, including a series of human knots to untangle, the teaching finally got underway about 10am, when many young people had finally arrived.

After a break Paul organised some fun sporting activities in the garden next to the guest house.  The team went off to put on appropriate running shoes, but Isobel found that hers were missing.  She had put them outside her room, as they were stinking out her room, but wonderful room maid Constance, had taken this as a cue to clean the smelly items.  Andy later found them drying on the roof of the refectory, well out of anyone’s smell-range!  Paul organised throwing games to learn people’s names and the little known Alaskan baseball.  There were some elements of competition, plenty of cheating and a lot of misunderstanding due to poor translation, but there was also plenty of enthusiasm on the part of the youth, much laughter and exuberant chanting of team names. 

After lunch Paul once more valiantly pursued his game organisation.  The concept of passing an electric current throughout a lined-up team by squeezing each others’ hands seemed to surpass practically everyone’s comprehension and using a balloon pump was clearly a great novelty.  The balloon models they created, supposedly of Bible stories were however less than amazing!  Needless to say, it was an enjoyable day and fun was had by many!  Andy did a final teaching session looking at the call of Gideon, which brought the conference to a close. As the young people departed they burst into jubilant song and dance wearing many of their weird and wonderful balloon models on their heads.

As they walked past the cathedral in jolly mood, a church warden, dressed in the statement green overall, popped out to hush them up and move them on as a wedding was in progress.  On seeing Isobel, amongst the crowd however, she was keen to pull her in to join the wedding service just as the bride and groom were signing the register.  Grace had formerly past by and received the same treatment, clearly the presence of a mzungu at a wedding was a good thing! Once in the cathedral the children were certainly as interested as the mzungu presence as the bride and groom.  There was a curious medley of people at the wedding, a blue robed choir, several smartly dressed guests, lots of random members of the community, who had simply dropped in, like our room maid Constance and a collection of children, some wielding balloons, taller than themselves, which they had clearly purloined from the delegates at the youth conference.  The other children were clearly very envious of the balloons and once again the bride and groom were sidelined.  Rather oddly one child sitting quietly on a cathedral bench watching the marriage was dressed as spider man!

This evening’s meal out once more was a cause of some confusion.  Pastor Etienne was supposedly one of our hosts, but we were then informed that he was at a wedding in Kigali today.  The other host on our schedule was sub-dean Eliab, who had joined us for lunch and in conversation it seemed a surprise to him that we were dining with him this evening.  When we arrived at his home just behind the cathedral at the appointed time this evening, he informed us that his young 3 year old son had fallen over this afternoon and cut his mouth.  Eliab’s wife had taken the injured boy to hospital along with her other 2 children and Eliab hadn’t gone as we were expected.  He had drafted in Jacqueline, a  young girl who had been at today’s youth conference, to assist him in this evening’s hospitality.  She poured out large cups of hot milk for each of us for us to make tea or hot chocolate, and gave us each 2 slices of plain bread.   We shared the tea with them and prayed for the family but didn’t stay long as we felt it more important that Eliab went to the hospital to be with his family.  It was so selfless of him to honour our invitation this evening under very difficult circumstances.

Back at the guest house it was once more the Henderson larder to the rescue to provide pot noodles for our evening meal!

We had a phone call from Juvenal to say that Eliab’s son was okay and having received treatment, was being taken back home. We continue to pray for a complete recovery.

Tomorrow we go back to Gitovu to celebrate the installation of their new water-harvesting project.

Until next time…. Good-night.

Grace, Isobel, Hannah, Paul, Jonathan and Andy