Monday in Mutete

Mutete is a village north of Kigali in the mountains. After GFR's fundraiser in January, a corporation decided to sponsor 20 families! All of them live in Mutete. Once again, we did interviews, photos, handed out gifts, etc. We each escorted a family through all the stations. I escorted a woman named Verene. She had the youngest of her 3 children with her, named Isabelle, who was about 3 years old. I listened to Cyprien interpret her interview...she was so thankful to her sponsor because she had no clothing before, so she could not be around people. She was literally living in rags. Today she was so proud in her new clothing and Isabelle had a little purple dress on. Alan, Amber, Angela and I were each waiting with our families in line for their video and we played a game, pointing to our 'hair' or 'nose' and asking them the word in their language. Alan was a riot...he was asking the word for 'dance' and he was doing different dances. He got everyone American and Rwandan laughing! The family Alan escorted were orphans they were being cared for by the oldest boy who was 15 yrs. old. Unbelievable. They were very happy to receive some new clothing, etc. Every family was very happy when Christina printed their photos and gave them to them on the spot! That brought big smiles (museke')! Guy and Ryan kept busy communicating with the kids and of course, Jeff made some new friends too!

When the interviews were done, we walked down the path past the school (we caused quite a distraction there). We walked to another 'umaganda', house building. The house was being built with funds from KidCity, the children's ministry at Community Christian Church. That was very appropriate as there was another family of orphaned children that will live there. Half the team had gone ahead (Ryan and Alan included) and the rest of us picked up after the interviews.

When we arrived at the umaganda, Alan was chopping down trees with a machete, 11 of them!! He would chop until they were just about to fall and then he would do a 'tae kwon d0' kick to knock it down. All the villagers would cheer!! Ryan was shoveling a big pile of dirt into the house to spread on the floor. We were all about to meet the orphans when it started to rain, soon it was pouring so we all started to run up the hill, but when we got to the school the children invited us in! We ended up in Patrick’s classroom, he was one of our interpreters a few days ago and he was teaching secondary school English! By the way, I found it interesting that several students had been outside holding buckets under the gutters of the school to collect rain water for drinking. We spent about 20 minutes in the classroom, then the rain let up and we walked up the path to our mutatu (mini van).

Tomorrow we will visit an orphanage, that should be heart-wrenching, then pack for our trip home! Love to all, Pam