Another Day in Rwanda

It is 6pm Tuesday, the house is dark (the electricity is out for the neighborhood), and there is lightening all around us.  We just made it into the door before the heavens opened up. 

Last night the plane arrived at the airport with some of the tardy bags – at least Shane and Christina now have new clothes to wear.  But the wayward 10 solar systems are still unaccounted for.  Neal is very diligent, i.e. very aggressive on the phone, he made sure that all bags were tracked down.  And with any luck at all, we will have the full set of solar system in our hands by 9pm tonight.  Of course, that is if Neal’s prediction that the rain will prevent the plane with our last two bags from landing at the Kilgali airport tonight.

It was a great day with the pastors – I led off the batting order with John Chapter 5, then Shane with Chapters 6 and 7, then Neal with Chapter 8, and a final bunt by Shane to start Chapter 9.  The pastors are amazingly good students – hungry for the teaching.  It really is a wonder to see.  Now we have taught a little more than 8 chapters in two full days – we will need a faster pace to actually complete the book of John in the next two and a half days – John has 21 chapters.  Neal says – no problem!  We have attached a few pictures from the training. 

Note: the building that you see in the photos is one that Hope Chapel helped build with our tenth-year Pass on the Blessing fund.  We supplied $20,000 to establish a revolving credit fund for the Rwanda church (the Harvest Christian Church network), they are able to borrow money to finance churches, improvements and repairs.  As money is paid back to the fund new loans are made.  This seems to be working well.

Christina went to meet with the second group of women leaders at the Hermon Church, which we refer to as the “tent church”, which meets under the tent Hope supplied.  She is in the next room recounting stories – I can tell you that she is very excited about what she learned and the interaction with these ladies.  But I will let her tell that story in a future blog.

Note: Many of the Rwanda churches rent their church space.  This can be expensive.  The concept is that Hope Chapel provided a tent.  The local church would purchase land and use the tent instead of paying rent for a building.  The savings from not paying the rent would be saved and used to build the church, then the tent would move to the next group in the network. 

We now have six solar system trainers – capable of repairing most problems that will be encountered by the pastors – they have spent the past few days teaching all of the pastors both the operation and repair techniques for these systems.  For the most part, this involves diagnosing the problem, making sure that red goes with red, black with black and then tighten the screws.  This is the part of the training that I did not complete last year, Peggy’s fall preempted this final task.  This time, the job has been done properly.

Tonight, we will have the balance of the solar systems, tomorrow I will pack the systems in their respective bags – then distribute these systems to the second set of pastors.  I am hopeful that we will get a discussion going between those that received the systems last year and those receiving the new systems.  I want them to share what they learned.  So far, I have heard stories of using the charged batteries to run the lights in churches, homes, and local community facilities.  Many of these lights were run from 7 to 11pm each night.  Some used the batteries to run their church organ, others used them to charge cell phones.  But no on used the systems for all of the above.  This is what I would like to change.  Some charged money to electrically charge cell phones, these pastors have effectively doubled their income.  This is an idea that we want to spread across the pastors.  This could be a straight forward way to reduce hunger, at least for the local families that receive benefit from the solar systems.

This has been a very successful and blessed trip – except for the minor inconvenience of the delayed bags – everything has gone perfectly.  Thank God.