Fridays in Kigali

While I was in Rwanda I would often wake up to an SMS (a.k.a. text message) from my boss saying that there was a problem with the days program so I should just work from home. I often work from home now that I am back in Canada but in Rwanda I didn’t have any work to do from home. That was not the nature of my job. So these frequent messages were a source of frustration for me a lot of the time. I was in Rwanda to work; I was there to learn how to “do development.” How could I do this if I was at home? But looking back some of my favourite days were these days when I was supposed to be working from home.
My roommate Pip was working with International Teams and on these days I would sometimes join in with whatever she was doing. Fridays were the best. On Fridays we would walk down the hill to Eglise Vivante and help the mamas make lunch for the street kids. Vivante and IT partnered in a street kids ministry and on Friday there was a large lunch served for about 100-200 of these kids. Pip and I would arrive between 9 and 10am to help with the meal. I think in some ways I was not so much of a help as a source of entertainment for the mamas but it was a great time. Chopping cabbage, picking stones out of rice, washing plates, peeling bananas – I never managed to any of this as quickly or as well as they did but I got better every week. The food is cooked over open fires in the church courtyard. Nothing smells as good as Tanzanian rice cooking over an open fire on a Friday morning. While the food cooked we would sit and socialize, sampling some of the food, especially the sauté – essentially fries but the entire potato is put in the oil. Oh so good! It was always fun to talk with these women. I practiced my VERY limited Kinya-rwanda and learned new words, spoke French and translated for Pip and just listened to conversation and laughter. Such a warm place to be! I can still hear Chantal telling Pip to “EAT MEAT” and Mama Francine and Mama Deborah’s laughter and teasing. When the food was cooked we would load it up on plates in an assembly line. I usually did the sauté or the sauce. Pip would steal pieces of sauté and present them as gifts to the other women and we would tease Manou that he was getting ‘so big’ because of all the fries he ate. Finally we would have all the food served out on plates and could let the kids into the courtyard. They would file in and wash their hands with the buckets set out and get in a group. They knew the drill and though for the outside observer it seemed like utter chaos there was a method to the madness. The plates would be distributed and the food would disappear with lightening speed. On my hungriest days I could not even eat half the amount of food that we would pile on those plates but these kids, even the smallest of them, would pack it away and if we could have been able to give them seconds they would have eaten that too.
I think one of the things I value most about these times was the relationship we built with the mamas at the church. As the time approached when both Pip and I would be leaving they planned a goodbye dinner for us. We met at one of their homes and had a feast. They taught us how to cook some of the meal, although we were late so we missed out on some of it. Cooking chapatti on an open fire is harder than you might think! There was so much food. There was Chapatti, goat brochettes, fries, vegetables, salad, rice, pasta and every good thing. We were taking a group picture towards the end of the evening and for a reason that now escapes me we were trying to make fish faces for the picture. I have never laughed so hard. Tears streaming down my face, doubled over in laughter and almost in pain I remember looking into the eyes of Chantal and seeing her tears of laughter and hearing her laugh and all that made me laugh even harder. I have the pictures from that evening on the wall of my little cubicle here in Canada and they never fail to make me smile.