Dear Family and Friends,

The boys and I are now in Gisenyi, Rwanda. We are staying at Simon Pierre’s and Caritas’ house. Their family just finished their nighly devotions where they read a passage of scripture, talk about what it means, and then pray. Caritas asked Chuck to pray tonight and he did a great job, although I think his heart about stopped when she asked him. Right after the devotions were finished, Tychique, Simon and Caritas’s 17-year-old son, put in a CD and now everyone is dancing.
Dinah, Simon and Caritas’s 15-year-old daughter, jumped at the chance to dance with Jimmie. Now there’s a slow dance on the CD player.
Pretty cute. One of Dinah’s friends walked home after church with Jimmie, Dinah, and Chuck today. She held Chuck’s hand all the way home. There are plenty of available girls for the boys here!

We’ve having a great time here in Gisenyi. We are in Gisenyi until Friday when we leave for Kigali. We’ll leave for Nairobi on Sunday–about midnight Saturday, MST. Here’s a story that happened a while back:

On Monday, June 1 we left at 9:45 a.m. with the Point Loma team to build a new church in Mumoshu. We arrived at 11:30. It was a muddy, but beautiful drive once we got out of Bukavu. Bukavu could be a beautiful city, but most of its trees have been cut down and, depending on the season, there is mud or dust everywhere. When we first got here at the tail end of the rainy season, there was mud everywhere. Now there is dust in everything. There’s one road we have had to travel on far more times than I care to remember where our taxi drivers insist on rolling up the windows no matter how hot it is until we’ve made it through the dust zone. You get shaked, baked, and cooked in the dust zone.

I love the Mumosho church. The area in which the church is situated reminds me of Costa Rica-there are lush green, banana-lined hills everywhere and the soil is a dark, rich coffee color. The people in Mumosho have started several ministries that allow them to minister to over 100 orphans and about a dozen handicapped people. They have a tilapia pond, a sewing workshop which your gifts have started, a literacy program to which we have contributed books and pencils, and they grow several acres of sweet potatoes and cassava. Jimmie and Chuck even dug up sweet potatoes.

Our main reason for going to Mumosho today was to build them a larger church. The people at Mumosho already had most of the holes for posts dug, poles cut, and metal sheets for the roof. The boys carried several posts, Celestin and I put in a couple of posts, and the Point Loma students set the rest of the posts before it began to rain with
monsoon force. The only time I’ve ever seen it rain this hard is
when I was in Papua New Guinea. It was like a damn burst in the heavens for over two hours. On the way into the village from the “main” road (I put “main” in quotes because it wasn’t much of a road, even though Celestin says it’s the #2 “highway” in all of DRC) our bus got stuck in the mud so we walked the last five minutes to the village.

We ate a lunch of beans, rice, bananas, incredibly delicious avocados, and pop and hoped that the rain would stop after we ate lunch so that we could finish up the work on the church. As gifts for our work, the Mumosho church gave us a huge bunch of bananas, a rooster, and several dozen eggs and avocados. Unfortunately, the rain never completely stopped. After almost two hours the rain finally slowed down to a drizzle.

After all the rain I thought there was no way that the bus would ever get out of Mumosho. Fortunately our bus driver parked our bus out by the main road which meant we walked in a trickle of rain and waded along a muddy path for about twenty minutes. But at least we weren’t stuck in the bus.

The Point Loma team brought enough project funds to help the church put up posts for the walls, trusses for the roof, and metal sheeting.
The Golden Church and friends are going to supply the siding to finish up the Mumosho church. We are also going to help Mumosho buy milking goats. The kind of goats we have bought so far are the eating kind where churches and individuals build their flocks and then sell them to someone else to build their flock or to eat. Milking type goats are very expensive here–$125 each. I about fainted when Celestin said they cost that much. Celestin thinks that Mumosho is the perfect place for us to start a flock of the milking type goats. He says this kind of goats also have 2-3 babies every time they give birth so that every year they are giving birth to as many as six “goatlets” as Celestin calls them.

Unbelievably it took us 4 hours to travel the 15 miles back from
Mumosho. Yes, four hours to travel fifteen miles. We slipped and
slid up hill and downhill all the way to Bukavu. At first I thought going uphill was the worst and that we’d get stuck for sure, but then we started going downhill in the mud and I quickly changed my mind about which was more dangerous. Mud is far worse than snow, because on snow it’s at least possible to get traction-and most cars in America have decent enough tires. Most of the tires here on cars, trucks, vans, and buses look bald. It’s a miracle they get any traction at all. I never thought about this before, but after our trip back from Mumosho I think mud is more like ice than snow. Once you start sliding in a certain direction mass and velocity do their thing until traction shows up. If traction doesn’t show up, it’s all over. It’s a mountainous drive to and from Mumosho so there are some fairly steep drop-offs to the side of the road. Thank God we had a great driver who drove slowly and never put us in harm’s way even though a couple of times we slid a little closer to the side of the road and drop-off beyond than I was comfortable with.

The last 2 kilometers back to Celestin’s took us two hours because of a traffic jam in Bukavu. While were waiting in the traffic pile up in the dark (there are no street lights in Bukavu) with the windows down, a fistful of my arm hair was yanked out and Jimmie’s face was slapped.
At first he didn’t know what happened, but the more he thought about it the angrier he got. Celestin said he heard people walking along our bus saying that we wazungu (white people) were United Nations “peacekeepers.” The people here don’t like the U.N. as they think the U.N. causes more problems than does any good. There is definitely no love lost between the Congolese people and the U.N. It’s a really a shame that the U.N. doesn’t appear to do much more here than drive around in large caravans stirring up dust. If the U.N. did even some small nation-building like things such as plowing roads or giving the people a hand up, the people here would sing a much different tune about them.

Thank you for your prayers. God bless you and your families!

Joe, Jimmie, and Chuck