Urogendo Ruhire! (Have a safe journey!)

Currently it’s 10.30am on Sunday morning and the rain is bucketing down outside. Hannah is asleep in her cot/tent on the floor beside me, and Will and Catherine have gone across to the kitchen at the guesthouse to sterilise and assemble our brand new water filter, so it seems like a good time to update you on Project Walkabout.

Hannah makes another new friend

We’ve had a busy few days, the highlight of which has been a trip to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, a 2 hour drive away. I spent Thursday at the hospital, attending the morning medical round and preparing paperwork for our visas and my medical registration. A hospital vehicle was assigned to us for the trip on Friday morning: departure time 7am. Catherine meanwhile visited the house where we will live to find beds made, the house tidy, and the garden being worked on. God’s people at the Diocese are looking after us! Unfortunately the hospital has not yet signed the contract with the Diocese, so we’re still in the guesthouse until they do.

We awoke 6am Friday, breakfasted early as pre-arranged, and assembled to await the driver. 3 telephone calls and 2 1/2 hours later he arrived; we made a 9.30am departure for a 2 hour trip to the Immigration Department and Medical Council, both of which were scheduled to shut at 12. It seemed unlikely we could get either task done, but we needed to shop for our house anyway, so off we went at breakneck speed, the children restrained in car seats for the first time since we arrived, and an extended Kinyarwanda lesson thrown in by the driver gratis.

The immigration office was packed, so we took a number and sat down to wait. 12 o’clock came and went, but the office stayed open. Eventually the staff took pity on our children, and, after checking with those still waiting, graciously served us ahead of our turn at 1pm. We thought we nearly had our visas … until we discovered one or two details were incorrect: we needed 4 visa application forms, not one; each visa cost $100, not $20 total; the letter of application from the hospital was insufficient as it only mentioned Tim; my notarised Police Check was unacceptable and we needed the original, currently in Australia; and we needed birth and marriage certificates to prove the relationships within our family. We had brought all eight things mentioned on the website, but as was politely explained, five were wrong or insufficient! Back to the drawing board…

The hospital driver arrived back from another errand and we forlornly decided to drop by the Medical Board, before meeting an old friend of ours, Dr Manzi from Gahini, now national advisor on new initiatives to the Ministry of Health, for lunch at “1pm”. Manzi kindly called ahead for us, and the secretary at the Medical Council kept the office open until we arrived. This time the paperwork was correct, only the payment was wrong, and this could be easily topped up at our local bank branch.

The day continued to get better. Manzi arrived with his 3 1/2 year old daughter, Ophrah, and she and Will became fast friends. Ophrah speaks English and Kinyarwanda fluently, and English is her preferred medium at home, which worked nicely for Will. Manzi took us to his lovely house, in a newly developed suburb at Kicukiro, overlooking Kigali. Two years ago this area was all bush, but Kigali is growing quickly and now the hill is mostly residential. The kids had a great time playing outdoors, and we sat down to a much appreciated late lunch. Talk revolved around the friends we had known from Gahini days, children, and what each family had been up to in the intervening 8 years. The boys talked shop for a while, with Manzi’s extensive insights into Butare Hospital, the wider Rwandan medical system  and its culture being most helpful to this newly arrived novice.

Hannah and Ophrah, at Manzi’s house

Manzi’s wife, Aimee, 8 months pregnant, was chairing a meeting for the day and did not arrive home until late. In the interim, Manzi took us into Kigali shopping for household essentials: bed and bath linen, kitchen equipment and a water filter being the priorities. Manzi kindly invited us to stay the night, so, after making a rendezvous with the hospital driver to ferry our new purchases home, we returned to his house and were reunited with Aimee, who had accompanied Catherine on our only previous soiree to Butare, in 2003. It was great for our morale to be the beneficiaries of the Manzi household’s kindness, hospitality, and cultural insights as well as to be reunited with old friends.

Manzi’s household helps illustrate the differences between Australian and Rwandan families. As well as his wife Aimee and daughter Ophrah, Aimee’s little sister Liz and Manzi’s little brother Bill also live with them, helping around the house and studying at university nearby. Two other house workers, a young man and woman, also live and work with them, receiving food and board as well as a good wage which they send home each month to assist  their parent’s families. Cooking, cleaning and washing (by hand) are all shared between these four, leaving Manzi and Aimee free to work long hours in their careers. Ophrah, at 3 1/2, attends Nursery School all day, being about to enter Nursery 3 (the school system here consists of Nursery 1-3, Primary 1-6 and Secondary 1-6, with Primary and some of Secondary being at least theoretically compulsory.) 

Will and Ophrah shared a bed for the night, with Liz kindly giving her spot to Will and sleeping on the floor beside them. Will announced his intention to marry Ophrah, after being informed that Daddy, his first choice, was not a suitable nuptial partner as he needed to chose a girl!

The next day, the kids had a ball and we relaxed, before a leisurely lunch with Alex, Manzi’s brother, who lives nearby and is financial controller for the World Bank in Rwanda, and his kids. Eventually we had to go, and after a detour to Nakumatt (a huge Western-style 24 hour supermarket) to complete our shopping, we caught the Volcano Express bus home to Butare, along windy roads through a rainstorm. The kids slept alternately on the way home, and our Rwandan neighbours in the bus took turns variously helping entertain the kids, cuddling them while they slept and generally being incredibly useful to and tolerant of us all. We arrived home at dusk to find our new purchases safely stowed, but still no word on when the hospital and diocese would reach agreement on our (temporary) new house. We all slept like logs for nine hours last night!

Hannah’s favourite pastime at the moment, when left unsupervised, is eating dirt. She makes a beeline for the door and is off into the garden bed to ingest as much good, nutritious African mud as possible. Impressive gritty diarrhoea has been the result. If perchance the door outside is shut, she heads for the bathroom, and contents herself with splashing in any water she can find. She’s walking more and more, taking up to 15 steps at a time, though still reverting to crawling for speed and stealth.

 

Hannah caught heading for the dirt

Will was found yesterday, soon after arriving home, with a gluestick in one hand, and his muddy sandals in the other. When I inquired what he was doing, and what the sticky mess on his left shoe sole was,  he explained, “I’m going to stick my shoes on the wall.” At least they needed washing anyway…

Will playing soccer with Alex’s sons

 

For those of you praying for us, thankyou! I thought I might update our prayer points now too, given things are changing fast.

Give thanks for God’s provision:

of a house;

of new friends for Will and Hannah;

and of the English language congregation at Butare Cathedral which has made us feel so welcome.

Please pray:

for the visa process, that it will go smoothly and the required documents will arrive;

for good and productive communication with the hospital administration, to enable us to move into our house soon;

for the many people in material need here, and that we might know how best to respond.

Please feel free to email us or comment on the blog – we love hearing from you all!

A busy morning

We’ve had an eventful start to our Tuesday. In fact I’d been on 3 separate expeditions by 12pm, and well needed the siesta time we often have in the early afternoon, after a fine lunch of sambusa (African-style samosas).

View from the Shalom Guest House

As kids actually slept to almost 6am for the first time since our arrival, it then was a mad rush to get me presentable and be out the door by 7.15am to attend the hospital morning medical meeting. About 30 of us, all white-coated (except for me), gathered in a meeting room at the back of the hospital compound to discuss the medical admissions of interest or difficulty in the ward. Dr Andre, the Hospital Director General, and Professor Joshua, the Head of Internal Medicine, presided over the case discussions, which encouragingly were conducted entirely in English. The medical students presented the cases, to a high standard I must say, and the junior doctor staff filled in any clinical gaps. It was nice to have my first real clinical input to these discussions, and the Professor seemed most welcoming and keen to have a gastroenterologist added to the team. I think I’ll try to get along to this meeting several times a week as a sort of “orientation” to the hospital.

After the meeting, I briefly met Francois, the sole part-time visiting gastroenterologist, who apparently is mostly very busy elsewhere. He’s on leave for February, so I will not get a chance to discuss what he has set up at the hospital until next month. The Director General seems keen though to significantly build the gastroenterology department, and wants me to begin training some of the junior doctors in endoscopy. Having yesterday met Charles, the University Vice-Dean of Medicine, who is keen for me to teach clinical examination skills, GI therapeutics and also tutor students in the wards, I don’t think I’ll be short of work after our language learning phase ends!

Dr Andre and I then discussed the housing situation. Thanks to the many of you who have been praying about this. The hospital house we are eventually to move into is undergoing renovations at the moment, and, while these will ultimately make it far more pleasant to live in, with sealed floors and a third bedroom for guests, this process is likely to take a couple of months. In the interim, Bishop Nathan has kindly offered us an empty diocesan house, and the hospital has agreed to provide a stove and refrigerator. There is some basic furniture, but we will need linen, crockery, cookware and so on, so I suspect a busy week is ahead of us…

Inzoze Nziza

After returning home, the whole family came with me to Inzoze Nziza, a local non-for-profit cafe run by a women’s cooperative, which was great and relaxing. Wonderful fruit salad, yummy cookies, ice-cream for Will and Hannah, and the chance to take stock of our first week here. Oh yes, and grab a quick happy snap of our resident blue-tongued lizard, who managed to rapidly find and consume some chalk:

We’re gradually getting over jetlag and acclimatising to the altitude (1750m), have made some good friends, acquired our first 50 words of so of Kinyarwanda, and begun bonds with the Diocese, University and Hospital. Will has walked 3-5km a day, balancing on the side of culverts and reluctantly holding our hand along busy roadsides, mostly without complaint, Hannah is taking her first unaided steps and remains as irrepressible as ever, and both our kids seem to be rapidly settling into African life, food and activities. God has been very faithful to us.

Finally we made a foray into the heart of town to fit our postbox with its shiny new padlock, and to begin pricing some of the household essentials we will need once we relocate to the diocese’s house. Many may be cheaper in Kigali, but it’s useful to know the local price for comparison purposes before you start!

For those of you looking to skype us, faster internet may be just around the corner. Both the hospital and the university are soon to be connected to the new fibre-optic network which is allegedly almost finished, and the red signs warning of buried cable in English, Korean and Kinyarwanda that run right along the roadside through town seem to verify this:

Thanks again for all your prayers, and messages of support. We feel very loved and cared for!

Searching through the rain. a capella Amazing Grace and a few musings

We’ve been in Rwanda 5 days now, and I thought that as it’s 9.30am on a Sunday and we’ve already been to church and Catherine has the kids entertained with a game, it might be a good chance for a bit of an update.

The long rains are underway here, and the last few afternoons it’s bucketed down, in the way it only can in the tropics (and Eastern Australia it seems!) We have a great view from the upstairs balcony in the guest house down one of the valleys surrounding Butare and watched one of the storms begin.  Great sheets of rain roll in, visibility drops to almost zero, lightning tears the sky, thunder echoes through the valleys, and the deep drainage ditches along the roadsides stream with water. William does NOT like thunder, but the rest of us rather enjoyed the show.This morning it was almost cold, and we all wore jumpers to church (maybe more to combat African concerns of our children developing sore flanks from the cold than from any real need).

In the midst of this storm, the appropriately named Aimable, a local businessman, arrived in his car to take us to show us the apartments he rents out. Catherine reluctantly succumbed to the children’s urgent desire for 5pm feeding, and I was left to venture out alone in my waterproofs. His apartments are at the opposite end of the town, near the Museum, and thus a bit of a trek from the University, Hospital and town centre. After solicitously escorting me round, we sat at the kitchen table, and got down to business. Out came the pen and paper, his manner changed, and we were debating rents and dates, utilities and gas bottles. My reluctance to commit to a rental before seeing what the hospital had found worked in our favour, and the price promptly dropped 20%. I was driven home with a promise to call on Monday after viewing the alternatives. We rang Zafa, the coffee shop waitress who had introduced us, to thank her for her help and to reassure her that all had gone well, before a dinner of pasta with capsicum and tomato which the kids inhaled as if they’d just run a 100 metre race, and a “late” 8pm lights out.

This morning we attended the English language Anglican service 20 metres away at the Cathedral at 8am. We were the only white faces, and had the only children present, which meant we had no reference frame for the acceptability of the kids’ intermittently exuberant behaviour. About 30 Africans, mostly students but also John, a paediatrician at CHUB, and several other older folk, worshipped following a traditional prayerbook service. Great classic hymns were sung, mostly a capella due to the PA being mostly non-functional for reasons unclear.

I was particularly moved by the opening processional rendition of Amazing Grace, and it stuck me what a powerful account of the transforming and uniting power of God’s grace was given by these word s, written by a reformed slave trader who had trafficked in African lives, and sung here, in the interior of Africa, by his African Christian brothers and sisters. The sermon ranged across Jeremiah 30 and Acts 6, from God’s care for his refugee people, through the appointing of deacons to serve the poor, and finally challenging us to be as suitable as those who were chosen: “filled with the Spirit and with wisdom.” We both felt very ministered to by all present. We were given the opportunity to stand as a family and introduce ourselves at the end of the service, and the worship leader even took charge of our children during the sermon to enable us to listen!

I feel I am beginning to reach even keel from the initial splash of landing. I’m under no illusion that our journey here has really even started, but as the jetlag fades and the basic pieces of life here begin to take shape, our perspective on the world is already changing. We have taken less than 10% of what we had in Australia, yet  we have maybe 50x as much as most people here. The sum the Australian government will pay me for a day’s work in Australia is an unimaginable one to most Rwandans, far more than they will ever see in their life. The injustice of this is striking and compelling; how to best respond is less clear. We pray that God will keep our eyes open to these contrasts over the coming months and years, even as we build relationships, and acquire the cultural understanding and wisdom we need, to chart our course here.

 

Our first ever Post Box!

Following pleasant walk to a amazingly-open-an-a-Saturday Post Office, we now have a Post Box! It's right at Will's head height and thus he can see right into the post office so he's already pleased with it. We don't have a padlock yet, but will do long before any mail to us can arrive!

Our new postal address is:
Tim and Catherine Walker
B.P. 663
Butare
Rwanda

Now off to the shops to buy shiny new padlock....

Culture shock, with textas too.

It is exciting being here, and we have been thankful for many friendly exchanges, yummy food, beautiful scenery and perfect weather. At the same time, we feel quite stressed and at times overwhelmed by everything being so different. We don’t know how to talk to people (even when they speak English we often miss communicate because the culture is so different – “Oh, Andrew is going to lend me the scissors I asked about and here they are brought by the cleaner; I thought by his response they must be at his home far away”), we don’t know what to expect (Do you help yourself in the bakery section or does someone serve you? We are welcome to use the kitchen to cook dinner so is Andrew in here cooking us breakfast or waiting for us to cook our own? Should we ask or wait and see? The ladies here are helping me do our washing; is that part of their job or should we pay them extra? Should we give them a tip even if it is part of their job especially because they’re washing Hannah’s nappies? They’ve used the wrong detergent on the nappies, how should I explain this without offending or seeming ungrateful? This man is asking us for money for bread even though he works as a church gardener, should we give him money or some of our bread or a job or nothing?). Constantly not knowing how to behave is stressful and we’re looking forward to every day tasks and exchanges feeling easy and normal. It will take time.

Yesterday afternoon while Hannah slept I sat with Will on the luscious back lawn. We were colouring in an activity book with his textas and pencils. One of the two cleaner ladies, Jane, came to watch intently. After a little while I offered her some textas and gestured to invite her to join us. She thanked me for the textas and walked away with a happy smile. Hmmm, that had not gone how I intended. Oh well, at least she was happy, Will didn’t seem to have noticed half his textas were gone and maybe her children would enjoy them. I noticed her showing them to those in a small staff meeting she had wandered from. The other cleaning lady came to hover and watch intently. I knew she was hopeful for some textas too but couldn’t give away all Will’s textas without asking him. After a while she left. When we were packing up I asked Will if he would like to give his textas to the lady, because she doesn’t have any, and that we would buy him some more one day soon. His reply, “Why doesn’t she have any textas?. I want to give her the new ones and keep these.” A few minutes later I raised it again, reassuring him that it was his choice but we would buy him some more if he wanted to give them to the lady. He said yes he did want to, and I placed them in his hand. When we found her, she was sitting quietly alone reading her bible. When Will held out his textas to her her whole face lit up with excitement as she thanked him. Will looked at the ground not knowing what to do. When we returned to our room I told him I was very proud of him.

I was feeling very good about coping with all the unknowns yesterday, until Tim got home and said that our house would not be ready for two months. Where will we live? Suddenly the whole day seemed terrible, and it was clear that I was quite close to not coping after all. William noticed I was feeling down. He came over with his drink bottle and said, “Here you are Mummy, I brought you a drink to make you better. A drink makes me feel happy.” That drink helped a lot.

Freefall in Rwanda

No, the above title does not apply to our moods, hopes or prospects. Or at least, not yet. It refers back to my feeling of the process of leaving Australia and our loved ones behind, which felt analogous to standing on an elevator, sawing through the cable a strand at a time. Except that sawing through each bond holding us to Australia was a source of mutual reciprocal pain to us and our loved ones. Until finally the cable snapped and we began the plunge into a new life in a new culture far away.

We arrived safely in Rwanda after a (relatively) painless 34 hour trip door to door. Indeed William got off the first 10 hour plane ride (for him: meal, 6 hours sleep, meal) and asked if we could go on another one … or six!!!  He did get somewhat less enthusiastic subsequently in the trip, of course…

About 33 hours away from Australia, two thirds of the way down the road to Butare, Catherine and I were both struck by what a foolish errand we would have been on, if we were purely doing this for selfish reasons or grand ideals. How fortunate then, that we felt God’s call so clearly to come to this place. His strength and our weakness have been reinforced at almost every turn.

The Diocesan Guest House is a beautiful and truly welcoming place, with staff who’ve taken great care of us, particularly as we were not fit for man or beast by the time we disembarked, 4 Walkers from the back seat (the one working seatbelt shared after some negotiation by Tim and William) and 6 bags, a pusher and a child’s carseat from under the ropes holding them onto the back of the hospital’s ute.

Andrew, the Guest House manager, has been easing our transition, culturally and linguistically, while acting as breakfast cook, guide book, mobile phone troubleshooter, and finding time to kick the soccer ball with Will. This has been a blessing, as the changes are especially marked for a two-and-a-half year old suddenly transplanted to a world without footpaths, where cars and motorbikes go past dangerously fast on the “wrong” side of road, where parents actually clutch his hand while he walks everywhere. Who continually amazes us with his ability to cope with so many new faces, all friendly, who call, smile and greet him incessantly. Who consistently accepts, processes and adapts to the new rules of the world around him (while sometimes describing himself as “feeling sick” because he is missing his friends).

Catherine’s pride, cultural prowess, and fortitude in successfully washing her hair with a litre of kettle-heated water after no hot water emerged from the hot tap, was a little undermined by turning around to spy a water heater hanging over the shower that merely needed plugging in!

Today I met with the University Hospital Director General, Dr Andre. He was warm welcoming and spent much of his afternoon showing me around and introducing me to the hospital’s many staff before driving me home to the guesthouse himself as the hospital car was busy. The hospital is impressive in size and scale, some 500 beds, with about 25 specialists on staff, including 5 physicians and one part-time gastroenterologist. The medical subspecialty areas have limited amounts of equipment but what they have is impressive – one each of an Olympus 160 series Gastroscope and Colonoscope for pertinent example (recent and impressive pieces of equipment quite dear to my heart as I’m likely to use them daily!)
The bad news is that apparently our house will not be ready to move into for at least 2 months. This leaves us in limbo a bit, especially as we’re unlikely to stay in the Diocesan Guest House beyond the end of this week, and comes as a bit of a blow, as we are looking forward to settling in a bit. I’m sure God knows what He’s got in store for this time, but as we’re both fairly tired and stressed, leaving it in His hands is taking some effort.

Mornings here are the most mellow and pleasant times of the day (at least when one sleeps overnight) and I snapped a couple of shots of the kids playing pre-breakfast this morning after the Muslim call-to-prayer woke us all at 5am:

Hannah Is Crawling