until God sends us somewhere else

One of the most popular posts on this blog from when I was living in Madrid, Spain was a series I did on my favorite people. And so, a few snippets of the amazing people that I have met in my six weeks in Rwanda. Meeting people is absolutely one of my top three favorite things about traveling. And this summer a few people I've had limited interactions with have had a BIG impact on me.

• Akagera Couple - a woman who developed curriculum for USAID and her husband, who have been living in Rwanda for one year but have been living in Africa or the Middle East for 27 years. When I asked them if when they got married they had any idea they would live overseas for most of their marriage, he responded, "We didn't know at the altar, but God made it pretty clear shortly after." And I just love that. When asked how much longer they would be in Rwanda, he chirped immediately, "Well, we'll be here until God sends us somewhere else." I just loved that. Aren't we all just somewhere until God sends us somewhere else?
• Mimi - Mimi lived in the DRC as a missionary kid for the first 15 years of her life. Then she went to boarding school in the US and didn't see her parents for many years. It could take a year for a letter to get to DRC from the US in the 50's, if it even got there at all. She told us some incredible stories and I could have listened to her talk for hours. I said to a friend of hers how impressed I was and that she should write a book! She responded plainly, "She has!" Click here for her story and devotional books. Her husband, a doctor and professor of medicine for the University of Colorado is in Rwanda working for the Clinton Foundation to help educate doctors in Rwanda to promote better family health practices. 
• Two high schoolers with such maturity and wisdom far beyond their years in Rwanda for several weeks to help Mimi with her projects and around the house. They have such bright futures ahead! 
• A girl who is here in Rwanda designing the sowing projects for a women's cooperative with her fashion design degree. SO COOL!!
• Missionary Family #1 - Gary has been here in Rwanda for 27 years. It goes without saying that he has an incredible story about coming here on a short term mission trip, and never leaving. Read on HERE.
• Missionary Family #2- A couple who have lived in Southern California and Oxford, UK and now have their two children in Rwanda. When they first met, they had no idea that he would chase a Masters in Divinity in Oxford, that would lead them to WorldVenture, that would lead them to Rwanda. These missionaries host a school for preachers. Since Rwanda's education system is built on memorization, the average Rwandan doesn't know how to use the critical thinking portion of his or her brain. This blows my mind, because as a law student, the ONLY part of your brain you use is critical thinking. So the preachers here start preaching to churches, only on what they have memorized or feel "called" to talk about, but have no formal biblical education. Very interesting the work they do, and how it can have such a huge impact on Rwandans whose faith is stronger than most faith, but whose biblical knowledge and spiritual foundation is lacking.
  Read MORE here. Really cool work, interesting people and this organization is the one who provided us a house to live in while in Rwanda.
• Devin - fluent in Kinyarwanda (I cannot overemphasize the impressive nature of this statement because this language is so impossible) from living in rural Rwanda for two years with the PeaceCorp. She is now in law school at Tulane, and is a delight to spend time with. 
• Mary Ann - a student working on her Masters in Counseling, in Rwanda for a few weeks to host a training session with our IJM counselors. Mary Ann is awesome. She came to Rwanda with open eyes, an open heart and dived right in. She asked some hard-hitting questions, and got us each thinking about God's plan and our futures as she was contemplating her own. Interested in using her gifts for counseling victims of trauma, I am confident that wherever God sends her, she will be a great asset to that community. We were so sad she wasn't here for the whole summer. She also boldly drank an entire glass of fermented milk. You may be thinking, "that's not so impressive," but I couldn't stand within 20 feet of the milk for more than 30 seconds until I got gagged and had to run out of the room. And she drank it! Then survived a three hour drive on bumpy, uneven, dirt roads in the back of the car. She is a champion. We miss you Mary Ann! 
• A girl who works for WorldVision, about my age. She is on a tour of East Africa, spending a few days in each country visiting WorldVision sites. After three sentences, I was green with envy for her job.

The people I have REALLY gotten to know this summer I will "teach you" (as you would say in Spanish) about in my next post.

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field."
-Matthew 9:36-38

to relish is both a blessing and a curse, but it is mostly a blessing

"What is it like there??" you've been asking.
Here's the best I've got. A typical weekday around here:
Wake up at 6:30: take a semi-warm shower. The "shower" is actually a tray on the ground against a corner with a loosely hanging curtain that only covers 1 side and leaves the side by the toilet completely exposed for water to go spraying everywhere. But it is a shower and not a bucket, which I am very grateful for.
Get dressed: work attire is business casual, I usually wear a pencil skirt with a nice top and cardigan or dress pants. Women dress very conservatively, professionals are expected to dress smart, and the backs of a woman's knees are the sexiest part of her body. So, shield your eyes America.
Eat breakfast: usually cereal (which costs about $8-10 per box), Mango Juice (a highlight of my day) with a piece of toast and jam if I am extra hungry. Milk comes in fortified Ziplock bags, which is the sketchiest thing ever, but thankfully it also comes in unrefrigerated boxes. Fermented milk is also big in Rwanda, but in the wise words of Shelley, "it tastes like milk with some hoof" so I stay away from that.
Walk to Work: this takes about 10-15 minutes and is about half a mile. It's usually crisp in the morning, by the afternoon it is hot.
8:00 am- Stillness - this is an IJM-wide phenomenom, a time of silence and reflection with God over the work. Taken more seriously at HQ than in the Rwanda office, it is still a highlight of my day. I have been reading through some devotionals that I would encourage you to add to your daily routine. Click here!
It is culturally expected to greet anyone as you walk past them, and with my desk at the very front lobby of the office, the mornings are full of Maramutse! Amakuro? Nmeza. (Good morning! How are you? Good.) to each person that walks in. This continues all day as clients pour into the office, visitors come in for various meetings and staff walks in and out.
I take this time to pray over the staff, IJM work globally, and to journal, read my Bible and pray for anything that comes to mind. Let me know how I can be praying for you by leaving a comment or sending me an email. I will add you to my morning routine!
8:30 am - Staff Devotional begins - Led by a different staff member each day, we usually sing 2-3 songs in either English or Kinyarwanda and take time to reflect over Scripture. Then we take Prayer Requests and Praises. We close with a prayer over all that's just been discussed and a blessing over each of us for the day ahead.
9:15ish - Check Emails, and get right to work on whatever is the most pressing. A few of the projects I've been working on:

• (current project) Preparing IJM for its annual registration with the Rwanda government. IJM activities must be in line with the government's priorities and their envisioned plans for the future of Rwanda. This involves making an "Action Plan" of all of IJMs activities, recording the realized activities from last year and also forecasting for the next years. We are applying for 5-year registration, and fingers crossed, prayers up - this laborious process will be easier next year if we get registered for 5 years. The registration paperwork must be approved by all of IJM's government partners AND by each of the 3 districts of Kigali. It is a huge, laborious process with documents that are 100 pages each.
• Writing stories of our clients for Headquarters to share on www.ijm.org
• Doing legal analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of potential client cases and making a recommendation as to whether or not IJM should accept or reject the case
• Doing legal research in several areas- criminal procedure, evidence law, Child Protection laws
• Preparing the quarterly report for headquarters from each department
• Assessing donor's needs and requirements, and whether or not we are meeting them
• Reporting on our compliance with our Memoranda of Understanding with our government partners
• Inputting cases from hard-copy files into the online case tracking system

We have a nice long lunch break in the middle of the day. If we aren't meeting someone, like the Pepperdine students working at the Ministry of Justice, or girls we have met through church, we usually walk home for lunch.
5:00 pm - on the dot, we all get kicked out of the office.
6:00 pm - The only decent window to talk to my boyfriend, who has been such a trooper to chat with me on his lunch break everyday. A huge highlight of my day!
Then, Carmen and I work out. We do these videos from Hell called Insanity. We have improved though from the first time I did it. But basically I end up laying on the floor sweating, as red as a tomato and thinking "this is what dying feels like."
Next, we usually attempt to scrounge together something for dinner. Sometimes, our house staff cooks for us, sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes we attempt to cook and fail, sometimes we attempt to cook and it is decent. We have learned quite a bit, but its still cooking in Africa and thus is a great gamble. We have made banana bread about 10 times and really have it down. We have also managed to burn rice and nearly set the house on fire. So, hey, you never know.
Sometimes we go do something like go on a walk to the cafe with internet, grocery shop or meet up with friends. Sometimes we watch a few episodes from the DVDs I brought, or read books, or play around on the Internet.
More or less by 10:00 pm, we are both in bed and exhausted.

They say that 9:00 is "Missionary Midnight" because the days are so jam-packed and the work is so mentally and emotionally exhausting. I read child sexual assault cases all day. Lots of words and phrases make me feel like I've been sitting in dirt like a pig rolling around in mud. Time passes quite slow here. It's remarkable because I am cognizant of what I am doing, each word I am typing, everything I am thinking. It's a nice treat to get to relish in a moment and truly appreciate it. Something we rarely, if ever, slow down long enough to do in the US. It is also troublesome to sit with the dirt and the challenges and the obstacles that the office here faces everyday. It is frustrating to not have power or Internet when the work is pressing. Frustrating doesn't even cover the feeling when you read the evidence for a case and then read the perpetrator was acquitted. Or that his sentence was much less than what the law explictly calls for. The time spent waiting on the power to return feels painstakingly slow. The weekends and the nights pass slower than a snail's pace. As it turns out, slow paced life is both a blessing and a curse.

Working for IJM has truly been everything I could have ever dreamed it would be. It has exceeded my expectations in every possible way (and my expectations were high). I love that I crawl into bed knowing that what I did that day could have made a legitimate difference in someone's life. I love the feeling when my head hits the pillow that I have done something with my day that was "worthy of the calling I received." (Eph. 4:1) And I love that I legitimately jump out of bed in the morning to do it all over again the next day. I've even kicked my atrocious snooze habit AND stopped drinking coffee!!
I repeat, I love that I legitimately jump out of bed in the morning to do it all over again the next day.