A few pics from Christmas, which we spent at Kibogora on Lake Kivu with some very good friends; another missionary family from Butare. Clementine (who works in our house and is part of the family) came too. Rwanda is a strongly Christian country who heads for church on Christmas morning.
‘Twas the night before Christmas…
Fast asleep.
Christmas morning. Celebrating Jesus’ birthday began with remembering the gift He is to us, then sharing gifts with each other to reflect this. We opened gifts from family and Penny (a lovely lady who is a member of one of our supporting churches). Adeline does not care one dot that her gift from us (the walker below) has already belonged to our other two!
Our friends had organised a Catholic mass in French and invited us to join them. Tim was quite sick in bed, poor guy, but the rest of us (except Clementine, who understandably attended church in Kinyarwanda as that’s her only language) passed an enormous stream of people leaving the Kinyarwandan service at church as we arrived. You can see a small part of the stream above!
Kibogora is pretty rural. The ‘akazungu’ (little white kids) began to draw attention as soon as we got out of the car, and an old man promptly asked us for ‘a little Christmas gift’. I was reminded of how normal our presence is in our home town of Butare now, and felt very thankful that we now draw (relatively) little attention there. It can be a bit overwhelming. Especially for the kids.
We were taken to this lovely little chapel, which I suspect the priests in this order use for their own prayer times.
My kids were a handful during the service. At one point I was breastfeeding Adeline to keep her quiet with Hannah wriggling on my other knee and William standing beside badgering me in my ear about wanting to go. You can see the beginning of the mutiny here, before the service even began.
However, it was an important part of our celebration of the birth of our King. It’s pretty cool to think of the gathering of the worldwide church on this day, praising God en mass. It was very nice of the priest who led the service to help (at least most of those present) to celebrate this important day in a language they understand.
We were too busy enjoying lunch to take pics of that, so you’ll have to imagine how excited we were to have lamb, apple tart and French cheese. Merry Christmas everyone! He came. He is here with us.
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