There And Back Again: A Rwandan Adventure

Why Rwanda?

If you’re not familiar with African geography, Rwanda is a small country in east central Africa, just south of the equator. A bit larger than New Jersey, Rwanda is home to 11 million people. The economy is based on subsistence farming with coffee and tea being major exports, but young blood is pushing for Rwanda to be an example of technology to surrounding countries. Temperate weather year round, green and mountainous, Rwanda is beautiful.

Tribal conflicts eventually erupted into a bloody and cruel genocide that claimed almost a million lives in a few short months. Depending on whose story you believe, Rwanda was either a peaceful culture that learned race hatred from the Belgian and German colonials, or a tribal mix with a history of conflicts that eventually exploded. Either way, Rwanda is a nation wounded. Trust is short in a country in which, just decades ago, husbands killed wives, friends killed friends, and churches were complicit in government sponsored butchery.

The genocide decimated the country’s stock of pastors. To address the need for leadership, a Rwandan Christian formed an organization named ALARM: African Leadership And Reconciliation Ministries. This body aimed to train new leaders, armed with the love of Christ and prepared to do the tough work of reconciling the war-torn nation. ALARM made connections with American churches in the Dallas area and sought seminary-trained men who could visit and contribute to the work. That’s where this story begins.

I have been a Christian since my teens, but my visit to Rwanda with ALARM was my first ever missions trip. Why Rwanda, and why now?

Puzzle Pieces

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was in the news when I was almost forty. Life at home was busy as always (a new six-month old son, changing roles at work and church), so I didn’t pay much heed. When I thought of it, I had the vague notion of half-clad savages chasing through jungles with machetes. I just assumed that was the natural state of things in uncivilized Africa. I was not racist, just deeply ignorant, in a world much wider than I knew.

In the past year or so, God has been stirring in my heart the need to take practical action in reducing the distance between churches of different ethnic makeup. Nothing militant, no sign carrying; just the simple step of joining a men’s Bible study at a nearby African-American church. I have built some relationships there, been part of their men’s retreat, and have come to love the guys in my circle. These men passionately seek Jesus, and when race has come out onto the table, it has been with good humor and maturity.

I have no idea whether this fact played any part, but Markus Lloyd, our own church’s director of external focus (who happens to be African-American), approached me and asked, since I have teaching experience, if I would be interested in an upcoming trip to Rwanda to train pastors there. I sensed the hand of God moving puzzle pieces into place, and when we later had an informational meeting on the opportunity, I was all-in ready to go.

One factor that might have blocked my trip was that the number of men in the team was likely to be much larger than previous visits there. So, I might very well have been off the short list in favor of men with more international missions experience. As it was, Markus was concerned that we had a large contingent of teachers and did not know how to give each of them a chance to teach! But when he heard that I also have skills in illustrating, his eyes lit up and he proposed that I travel primarily as session illustrator for the other teachers. My skin tingled as I saw again that God was up to something special. Much as I love to teach, I saw this as a unique opportunity to explore a fresh ministry and serve both the teaching team and the Rwandan pastors. Here I am! Send me!

Packing Light

A few of the team members (including Markus) had been to Rwanda previously, since this was part of a multi-year series of training conferences. I was full of questions for them. Would we be speaking through interpreters? What unique needs did Rwandan pastors face? Was there any lingering conflict that might erupt? What sort of presentation tools might be available for illustration?

One issue for me was the actual teaching content. Stateside, if I were asked to teach a weeklong series to pastors, I’d be consumed with producing a deep, valuable experience for them, well organized and worth their while. I expressed my sense that we had little time to prepare and that it didn’t seem like the material was getting the attention I thought it required. Markus and the others, though, assured me of what I later found to be true: that the structure of these training sessions was subject to sudden change, and that it was best to prepare for multiple outcomes and just be flexible. As Markus put it, don’t just be flexible, be vapor!

I knew God had it in His hands, so I turned my focus to the practicals. What does one wear? How do you prepare, what do you pack, what will the flights be like? Fortunately, there was plenty of information available on all these matters. I bought some clothes specifically for the trip and treated them with spray-on insecticide. I hit the drugstore for aids to sleep, to avoid constipation, to solve dehydration, whatever. I visited my bank branch to obtain a few hundred dollars in the newest, cleanest bills, since I’d heard that Rwanda would resist accepting older currency.

The one thing that first-time international travelers may be nervous about turned out to be trivial: inoculations. I needed vaccinations for Typhoid, Hepatitis A, Yellow Fever, and others. My doctor sent me in the direction of Passport Health, a clinic that would handle all of my needs (although a bit pricier than some other alternatives). The shots themselves were not at all unpleasant and I didn’t experience any untoward reactions. My wife and I went to our grocery store to get our flu shots and that was a bigger delay and hassle than Passport Health.

I am very fortunate that my wife is a very clever packer. I had one large suitcase that needed to contain clothes for eleven days, including a shipping tube containing a number of illustrations I had drawn in advance. She created a handful of plastic zippered bags, each with a set of clothes for one day. She also figured out how to shoehorn in all of the other items (shoes, shaving kit, drugs, books, and more.) Originally, I’d gotten the impression that luggage was likely to get lost so I’d be safer just to carry all of my clothing in a backpack; I am very glad that I did not try that!

Team Sport

As I prepared for this adventure, I found that I had two different angles on the team that was going. The first was the delightful diversity of the group. I don’t mean capital-D diversity as we mean it today, as if all we cared about was skin color. That said, we had one black, one Hispanic, one Asian, and seven lily-white Caucasians, but representing five churches of different denominations. The idea was to encourage the Rwandan church, badly split and struggling with trust issues, that it is possible for churches to partner together and serve Jesus effectively.

The second angle was more personal. Whenever I found myself asking, “Who should I ask about this or that detail? What did they do the last time around? What is the proper way to prepare?” I felt the Holy Spirit telling me that God was sending me to Rwanda. Yes, we were all sent as a team. But I needed to recognize that God had a specific agenda for me, a plan that would not fly without me. I needed to stop following, stop being reactive, and take responsibility for my own call; not in pride, but in servanthood. I needed to relax a bit and see the trip as a wonderful privilege, an adventure that few people get, given to me by a Father who loves to bless His children.

Shifting Terrain

Here is a bird’s eye view of how the trip was intended to proceed. The team would be assembled and would prepare for several weeks, then fly to Rwanda for about nine days not counting travel. There would be two venues: a formal Pastoral Leadership Training Institute and a more relaxed General Pastoral Leadership Conference, running in parallel. Some of the team would focus on one or the other venue, some would float between both, and I would act as session illustrator for all.

Since the conferences themselves would only consume 3-5 days, there would be plenty of time for other endeavors. ALARM sponsored a girls’ high school nearby that we would visit, and a coffee plantation that employed and taught Rwandans in needed skills. We would also get the chance to visit a few genocide memorials to gain an appreciation of that dark chapter in their history. There’d also be time to go into town, meet the locals, sample the foods, and perhaps shop for souvenirs.

We learned, though, to hold our plans lightly. For starters, the team itself went through a few iterations, as some intended members dropped out for various personal reasons. Then, more significantly, it was learned that the very structure of the general conference would change. Apparently, the Rwandan government had recently imposed some new laws affecting churches, and a government official would attend the conference and explain the laws. In a very short time, we pirouetted from a conference on servant leadership to a new focus on how the church relates to the state.

The days themselves were also subject to change. The general conference was held outdoors under large tents, and heavy rain affected the schedule more than once. The sessions with the government official and natural delays caused us to adjust the start of sessions as required. Then, too, teaching through interpreters meant that a given amount of material would take longer to present than one might have thought. Thankfully we were blessed with some very gifted translators! In the end, though, we learned to trust God with the schedule; we were there to serve the Rwandan pastors, not vice versa.

Getting There

The team met at Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport with high spirits, ready to face our first challenge: long flights and time zone shifting. Ahead of us were three legs: a three-hour hop to Chicago, followed by a seven-hour drag to Brussels and an eight-hour ache to Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. I slept well on one of the legs and watched a lot of onboard video in between. Not all of us fared as well, and full flights meant tight seats and discomfort. We were eyeing that first-class cabin with envy!

In Kigali we stood in line a long while to have our passports checked. Then we met with the ALARM folk who drove us to the ALARM compound in the passenger bus that would become a familiar vehicle over the next several days. The campus was beautiful! They had separate buildings for training sessions, meals, attendee dormitories, offices, a gazebo, and a separate building with rooms for us. Each of us had his own room and bath, which was better than I’d hoped. The bed had a mosquito net, and they supplied us with plenty of bottled water (which I relied on when I brushed my teeth on the advice of someone). Hot water was iffy, as was wi-fi for internet access, and the rooms could get a bit stuffy when the temperature crept up to the low 80’s, but they were more than adequate, and the staff kept them clean for us regularly.

Sunday Go to Meetin’

Our first breakfast at ALARM on Sunday was a pleasant promise of every morning thereafter. Mango juice, toast, tea, bananas, pineapple. Then Jacques, our ever-smiling server, would ask whether we would prefer a Spanish omelette or a spinach omelette (and often could not understand our answers!) This morning was special, though; after we finished, we climbed into the cramped passenger van and took a very bumpy ride to a Free Methodist church where one of us would be preaching and I would be illustrating. The little building was packed with adults and many children. Through the service, group after group would come to the front and sing and dance; it seemed that most members were in one choir or another, including the kids!

The afternoon experience was more sobering, as we visited the city’s genocide memorial. Rwanda has taken that dark chapter to heart; it is illegal to promote racial division or violence; people are no longer to use their tribal names. The memorial took us through the events leading up to the genocide, in words, pictures and short videos, as well as the aftermath. Particularly hard was the children’s room: there were pictures of children, their names, their favorite things – and how they died. Other rooms put Rwanda’s tragedy in context alongside other notable genocides in man’s long violent history. There are even “genocide deniers” who claim that it never happened. This was a fitting way for our team to prepare to encourage the leaders who serve hurting souls in this country.

For the remainder of the evening we prepared the main hall for the Training Institute sessions. Based on the course material and suggestions from the teachers, I had drawn about a dozen illustrations on poster paper and brought them with me from the States. Many of them elaborated on themes about conflict resolution from Ken Sande’s book The Peacemaker, or scriptural passages like Matthew 5:24 (“leave your gift at the altar, first be reconciled with your brother”). Some were labeled with keywords in the Rwandan language that I’d learned from the staff. These we taped up throughout the training hall so that the team could refer to them as they spoke.

One more night under the mosquito net, morning would dawn and the two conferences would begin. What would it be like? I slept well and dreamed big.

New Every Morning

I awoke very early to the sounds of a sunrise worship service outdoors. The pastors had filled the gazebo across campus and had joined in joyous singing. This became the pattern every morning throughout the week, and I loved it! The hymns and choruses were all in Rwandan, but there was no mistaking the frequently exclaimed “Hallelujah!” followed by “Amen.” I did hear one familiar tune: the American folk song “Nettleton”, more recognizable as Robinson’s “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, perhaps my favorite hymn, though of course the Rwandan lyrics were different. Still, hearing that song felt like a gift from God’s hand.

After breakfast, the team and the attendees from both conferences met under the tents for more singing, introductions, and announcements. Then one of the team taught a short devotional, after which the attendees of the training conference left for the main hall and the general conference got underway in the tents. We followed this program with minor variations as the week progressed.

Each morning the general conference began with a presentation by a lawyer who worked for the Rwandan government. She would describe the scope of some of the new laws governing faith-based organizations and requiring pastors to have theological degrees, then take questions from the attendees. She was impressive! With her prosecutorial experience, she fielded their questions with confidence and insight. This was serious business, for the new laws had already resulted in the closing of many churches. I felt keenly that God had sent us at a key turning point in Rwandan church history, to encourage and pray for men who would soon be making momentous decisions.

Then our teaching began. I confess I had had misgivings about the effectiveness of teaching through a translator, but these concerns vanished when I saw how skilled our translators were! All week they served us tirelessly and with a willing attitude. It helped that they themselves had some theological education and thus knew the best way to represent the ideas we spoke. As you can imagine, our American figures of speech gave them some trouble. We would say something like “a fly on the wall”, or “doing it old school”, and they would stop and stare at us with wide eyes until we rephrased ourselves.

That first day the team taught on the various institutions that God has ordained in His world (the family, the state, the church) and the importance of a proper separation between them. The Bible teaches that, although the church is distinct from the state and may often disagree, the church should value the state and seek peace with it when possible. Part of that process is to pray for leaders, and one of the more dramatic times on that first day was when the conferees broke up into small groups to pray for the cleansing of Rwanda. As those groups sought God with deep passion in their own language, we walked about in the open air, calling for the Holy Spirit to fall afresh on these men.

Seeing the Invisible

As the week progressed, one of my earnest prayers was to “see the invisible”, to look past the logistics, the language barrier, the daily schedule, and to gain an insight into what God was doing there, and why. I had a real sense that we were there, not as exalted teachers, but as observers and encouragers. Jesus had been in Rwanda before we arrived and would be there after we left. It was their story, penned by their Lord, and we were footnotes in that saga.

I also began to see how God had chosen this specific team of ten men with the intention of teaching each of us something that we needed. Each evening after dinner we would meet in the gazebo to debrief, connect, and pray together. Some of us were struggling with feelings of inadequacy, of being ill equipped for ministry. The more we served these pastors, the more God fed and encouraged us. He is always the good Father who loves to gift His children. More than once during the week, I saw a situation in which one of us received exactly the opportunity or affirmation he’d needed, and perceived that God had architected it. I saw the invisible.

For my part, I learned that my skillset as an illustrator is a valid gift that I can offer back to the God who gave it. I’ve always loved to teach scriptural truth with the spoken word, and there were a few opportunities on this trip for me to do so. Yet I saw, again and again, how the visual arts build a bridge across barriers of language or culture or experience. God Himself is a relentless artist, expressing truth and beauty in every flower, sunset, gene or galaxy. So, I came away with a renewed belief that sketchcraft will play an ever growing part in my service to Him. Again, I saw something hidden, with new eyes.

The climax came on Wednesday morning, during the general conference devotion. One of our team read from the beginning of the book of Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah was young, uncertain, awkward – but called. God is the one who personally connects with us, consecrates us, and completes His work, even when we feel inadequate or unqualified. That message resonated, the Spirit of God squeezed my heart, and tears came out. We are so performance driven, so self-conscious. Did I have to fly around the world to begin to see the unlimited grace, the open arms that He holds out? That day it was like the curtain had been pulled back. Yet we were just halfway through the trip; there was more to learn.

Light and Darkness

The Rwandan people are some of the friendliest and most accessible folk you’ll meet. Apart from the conference, we had opportunities to interact with people in the nearby streets, shops, and towns. We were always made to feel welcome. Smiles, hands waving, kind words – we know that the genocide left deep scars and sowed distrust, but we often saw a brighter, more hopeful face to the country.

ALARM birthed the Institute of Women's Excellence (IWE), a residential girls’ school boarding close to 200 high school girls in search of a future beyond the poverty and shattered families that were the legacy of the genocide. On Wednesday afternoon the team took a trip out to the school to see the work that was being done.

What a delight these students were! The girls gave us a room-by-room tour of the facilities: the library, the classrooms, the computer lab, the crowded dormitories filled wall to wall with bunk beds. They were learning the sciences, mastering math, improving their prospects. They put on a show for us with traditional dances, gave us gifts of hand-drawn artwork, made us feel welcome. These who had so little were remarkably full of light and hope.

Yet on another day we caught a different glimpse of Rwanda, as we visited a genocide memorial in another town. This had been a Catholic church to which thousands of women and children fled for refuge. Government-backed militia systematically killed the terrified occupants of the church building. They use grenades, guns, and then machetes and outright torture. Behind the building were mass graves; we entered and saw the skulls and bones of thousands, simply crammed into caskets and shelved.

Such brutality and cruelty are scarcely imaginable. It seems like an irrational madness, a dark evil leaking into the daylight like deeply buried poisonous chemical waste. This is no simple social malady; no amount of enlightened progressive education or sensitivity training or reconciliation happy-talk will banish this sort of insanity. It has the noxious stink of something subhuman, malevolent, demonic. 

As I prayed near that building, I saw how foul all sin really is. God warned Adam and Eve in the Garden that, on the day that they chose rebellion, they would surely die; and mankind has died a million deaths ever since. Every sin from then onward – every act of treachery, every casual lie, every injustice or murder -- is just the recurrence of a malignant cancer that is never in remission. Only when Jesus returns to heal all things will this leprous sickness be cleansed for good.

To our relief, children were playing and laughing at a school next door. Their voices lightened our mood and reminded us that life triumphs over death -- one day for good.

A Good Day for Coffee

Graduation Day for the training institute came on Friday. It was time for these men to travel back to their churches and responsibilities, but we had built a special bond with them. A few days earlier, I had been sitting in the training hall during a session, and as I looked at the pastors, I clearly heard the Lord say, “Do you see my children?” Now, as the conferences ended, I shared with them that message, and how they were like the disciples at Pentecost with flame resting above their heads, empowered to serve. Others in our team spoke as well, and one gave the students a solemn charge as we handed each of them a very special gift: a study Bible in the Rwandan language. With much singing, hugging, and photographing, we parted.

After a dramatic week of service and discovery, it made sense to step away as a team and process the experience. So, on Saturday we made the long drive to the Cyimbili coffee plantation. Situated on beautiful Lake Kivu, this plantation is managed by ALARM to provide jobs and experience to Rwandans, and produces a premium coffee unique to the country. We took a hike through the facility. Aside from machinery to remove pulp from the beans, the process is thoroughly manual; workers pick a bean at a time and sort good from bad by eyesight on large grids. Rain and the onset of evening ended the tour in some haste. We enjoyed a dinner that was perhaps the most traditional of any we’d had to that point, including a doughy form of cassava from which you pull off a piece that you dip in sauces. We ended the night with an intimate time of sharing what we’d learned about each other during our trip, as lightning and rain crashed about us.

In the morning we cooled off with a swim! The shore of Lake Kivu was literally at our doorstep, as if we were at a private beach resort. The water was cool and refreshing, and a couple of us swam all the way to a nearby island. Lake Kivu is in the top ten deepest lakes in the world reaching a depth of 1500 feet. I brought back a small piece of smoothed volcanic rock from the sand underwater as a keepsake. After breakfast we attended church at a building right on the grounds of the plantation. The place was packed, about 600 people; we later found out that this was because it served a second congregation whose building had been shut down by the new laws. One of us preached a message he had been longing to share for many years and that was so apropos for Rwanda: that Jesus came to bind up the broken-hearted, as the book of Isaiah tells us.

After church we had lunch and then hustled into the van to leave, since it had already been raining and the driver wanted to get out of the area before more rain made exiting difficult. It was terrifying! The little bus slid this way and that as it worked its way along twisty paths just a few feet from the mountainous edge. We were all cheering when the van finally reached the paved road. In about four hours we were safely back at ALARM, and (I confess) ready to prepare to return to our homes and families.

Take the Long Way Home

Our final day came, marked with farewells and final meals and pictures. We spent some time at markets and shops in search of souvenirs, then soon thereafter headed to the airport. Security was a lot tougher on the way out, and we all agreed that the return trip seemed longer and harder to manage than the initial trip. One of us even fell sick before the final leg with what turned out to be pneumonia. Eventually, though, all of us ended up home, ready to recover and full of thoughts.

I loved this trip, and I intend, if God wills, to return to Rwanda. I have begun to learn to relax, to trust the Lord with the work of ministry, and to expect that God is doing momentous things behind the scenes whether I see them or not. What will He do next time around?