Neal here.  Tuesday’s teaching is over.  It’s hot, sunny, with a slight breeze.  I am by myself sitting on the “veranda” at a roughly hewn table with an ill-fitting table cover sitting on a similarly roughly made bench with a foam pad that really doesn’t provide much padding. Such is Rwanda.  My mind in these moments turn to random thoughts…

  • When you must use bottled water to brush your teeth, it is amazing how little water one can use and still get the job done.  A 12oz bottle can last me 3 to 4 days.  Wonder why I use so much water at home?
  • Refrigerators.  They are slowly making their appearance here in Rwanda as electricity becomes more of a reliable commodity in the cities, but they are smaller than ours back home…think dorm room size type frigs. The prevailing practice seems to be to turn it up as high as it goes and when things begin to freeze, unplug it until things warm up and then start the cycle all over.  I guess they think it saves power, but it could be that the instructions are in English or Chinese, but who knows.
  • Progress or not?  Clearly things are changing.  We will eat in restaurants several times while we are here that were unthinkable when I started coming in 2010.  The buildings are getting taller.  The pastors are growing in that they are reasoning better and asking better questions. Our kitchen has a gas stove and an electric blender.  But in other ways things aren’t changing.  Many still don’t or can’t go to school. The vast majority live without power or running water.  In the rural areas, most of the country, they still cultivate small parcels of land with hand- tools.  Safety measures are few and far between.  And push come to shove, sometimes they just stick to the old ways…case in point, our meals for the pastor’s training are still be cooked over an open fire.
  • Cities everywhere have the same problems…traffic, noise, and the have and have nots. They also have the proverbial arena.  Turkey just built one for Rwanda here in the capital and it wouldn’t look out of place in Boston.
  • People are people everywhere.  Different language, but same personalities, characters, and so on.

Enough rambling.  Good Rain 2020 has been like all the other Good Rain’s.  Profitable, rewarding, and exhausting.  Not sure I would have it any other way.

Thanks for your prayers.  Two and half days of teaching left and on more sermon to deliver.