The Hills Are Alive....

Today we headed to Cyangugu, a 2½ hour drive from Karongi. Bishop Jean Pierre told us he had arranged to meet the team from Cyangugu halfway as we were going to visit a small remote parish before reaching the guest house. After a lovely breakfast we bade a sad farewell to the Karongi team who presented us with bags of Rwandan coffee to take home.

We left the guest house at 8.30am, the road is good and there was very little traffic to hold us up as we wound our way along Lake Kivu and watching the world go by.

By 11am we had covered the 85km to the meeting spot and sure enough Jonas and the driver were waiting. Bp JP continued on with our cases while we transferred to the pickup truck and headed off through Nyungwe Forest. This is a popular destination for chimp trekking. We saw a few small black and white monkeys and several military patrols (we are not far from the Congo & Burundi borders), but nothing more exciting than that. Turning off onto a murram road we made a quick stop to register with the forest guards and take the opportunity for a comfort break, our first long drop experience of the trip, before continuing our journey through the mountains.

We finally arrived at our destination, which really was the end of the road at 1.30pm, rather late, as it turned out they had been expecting us at 11am.

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Gakenke Parish must be one of the remotest we have ever visited, the packed church and wonderful welcome bought tears to our eyes, we didn’t realise how much we have missed the joyful worship in Rwanda. This church has somehow remained open, although we are not sure how, and we think the entire community had turned out to greet us.

Despite being so late we were first ushered into the pastor’s house for a very quick ‘mid-morning’ snack (the programme must be adhered to).

Then into the church where we were welcomed enthusiastically and the choir and MU group were each allowed to sing one song, we are sure several others had been rehearsed.

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Then we were whisked away to serve the nursery children their porridge, bread and egg. These poor children, many suffering from malnutrition, had been made to wait for their food just so we could serve it to them. It was lovely to be part of the process, but we felt very sad for the children, some of whom were not terribly sure they were pleased to see muzungu. The cost of feeding and the parent’s inability to pay means these children only receive lunch once a week.

We left the teacher to finish serving lunch and returned to the church where the remaining introductions and formalities were observed and the choir were allowed to perform one more song. 

We were presented with the most beautiful gift of patchwork aprons then outside for some photos before being ushered back to the pastor’s house for lunch.

This is a community with a high number of very young and teenage children, they live in desperate poverty with little opportunity to change their lives. The soil here is poor and despite working hard their crops often fail. Many teenagers leave for the city and never return, those that do often return as single mums with young babies.

The pastor is a lovely man who has served his church and community faithfully for many years, sadly he did not complete senior level education, has no hope of gaining a degree, and must therefore relinquish his post to comply with government regulations. He will continue to serve as a lay reader.

There is so much potential in this community, and much that could be done to restore hope.  Please pray for wisdom as we consider our involvement here.

We would have loved to have stayed longer and spent time with this community, but another appointment awaited and all too soon it was back in the car for the 2¾ hour drive, mostly on rough murram roads, to the guest house where Bishop Nathan Muhutu and his team, together with Bishop Jean Pierre were waiting for us to join them for dinner over which we shared information and got to know each other a little better. Bishop Nathan has only been in place since December 2024, so this was our first time to meet.

It has been a lovely, if a rather long day and we have an early start tomorrow. Time for bed. Good night.