Rimwe Na Rimwe (Little By Little)

Hannah has been unwell for several days. We think the culprit is her first molar; that little tooth is causing a lot of pain, fever and possibly even her diarrhoea. Although Will has had the latter too. I’m very impressed that he has remained toilet trained even with an emotional transition to Africa and diarrhoea, a real answer to prayer! In fact, he and Hannah seem to be adjusting beautifully and are quite happy. They love the outdoors, for which the weather here is perfect, and they love people; finding Rwandans very friendly, especially towards children, has made them smile many times. They miss their family and friends from home, and are extremely excited to talk to them on Skype; a technology which we are grateful for.

Thankyou to all who have been praying about our housing situation. Before we arrived the hospital had agreed to provide somewhere to live and is in the midst of organising it. The latest is that the hospital’s Tender Board will ask various places to offer housing at their best price before deciding on a house for us to live in for the short term, while they fix up a house the hospital owns for us to live in for the long term. We imagine both these processes will take quite some time. We are not yet clear on how it will all work out, but are very thankful for a lovely place with lovely people to remain in while we wait, provided by the diocese guest house and paid for by the hospital. There are very big cultural differences in how the housing situation is being approached, and so we feel quite unable to decipher how it is really going. We are needing to continue trusting God and placing it in His hands. A good lesson.

Tim has gone to Kigali today to try and sort out the visas again. We will see what comes of it. It helped to know better what to expect when we were told the car would pick him up 7am, after our experience of waiting last week. We had breakfast at 7.30am and started to look at our watches at 9. At 12pm, when we were down the road having a nice relaxed juice, the car arrived. We are used to being late for everything in Australia, but it seems here we will have to work hard at it to cause much notice. Some things do seem to start on time; church and the hospital meetings for instance. So we will still have to practice some time-management and it is possible, I suppose, that we will have some punctuality left when we return to Australia. For the moment though, I’m taking great pleasure in finding myself on the other end of the time-management scale: all of a sudden I appear to be quite excellent at it! Let’s not compare where I sit on the relational scale here though. A little more adjustment needed first I think. What do you prioritise? People or tasks?

xx Catherine