Yesterday

I need to blog more often about my normal days because sometimes things happen that are not so normal and I forget. And other times it might be helpful to just read about a normal day! So…yesterday. Yesterday was umuganda (the last Saturday morning of every month all shops are closed and no one can be driving, so that everyone can do community work) so I woke up to the sound of the man walking around with a microphone or bullhorn or something telling me that I should wake up and go to Umuganda! Well, many people have different theories about whether or not muzungus should go to umuganda (they shouldn’t—it’s distracting to the other workers, they should—it builds community, it doesn’t matter); but, I didn’t go. So I woke up and just had a slow morning…cleaning my room, washing a few things, playing with the kids…then I went and bought a few things so that I could bake with our new toaster oven from my mom! After baking banana bread and banana chocolate chip (thanks for sending the chocolate chips!!) muffins, I hung out with the kids some because Annie was out shopping. I then enjoyed having the time to warm plenty of hot water to bathe with, dry my hair, iron my clothes…and get everything ready for church the next morning! Right after that, Andrew (who was at our house enjoying the freshly baked things and a movie) told me that someone in our church was very sick and needed to be taken to the hospital. So, I threw on some clothes and we hopped in the car to go pick up this guy. He was very sick (unable to walk, moaning in the back of my car, bad stomach pains…) so his brother and a member of the worship team were also in the back of my car helping him while andrew was in the front explaining the health insurance in Rwanda that costs 2 dollars a year and gives the benefit of paying only 10 percent of whatever your hospital bill is (as long as it is a government hospital, which of course is not the highest quality hospital in Rwanda). When we arrived at the hospital, Andrew was dealing with all the paperwork, so I was talking in broken English and a little Kinyarwanda with the member of the worship team. I see him pretty much every day, but I really knew very little about his life. He was telling me about how his father died during the genocide, and his mother died a year later. He grew up living on the streets, from about age 7-14. From then on, I am not sure all the different places he has been living. I just know now he lives with a few other people in a small room the church owns. It was a reminder that even though life feels very normal here, the people I am friends with and am sharing in life with have had very different experiences than me. Around 11:30pm or so we were on our way home and Andrew and I talked about the end of the world…He was telling me about an article he read that talked about the uniting of nations and people wanting to insert chips into our foreheads and certain barcodes that had 666 ingrained in them…and I explained how I thought you had to be careful when you read things about end times because there are so many different opinions. Then, we all went home and went to bed so we could be up for church the next morning! I have to step back sometimes to take in the things that are so radically different than how I have grown up. Living here makes those things seem more “normal”--sometimes I miss even noticing them.