I’m Thankful…

Thanksgiving always reminds me of standing around with my family taking turns saying what we are thankful for. I won’t be standing in that circle this year, so I thought I’d share through my virtual circle of friends and family here. I’ve always felt extremely grateful for people and things in my life, but being in Rwanda has blown all these things into an extreme, exaggerated view of how fortunate I really am.

I am thankful for my family.

After effects of the 1994 civil war/genocide combined with a lower standard of living has left many Rwandans without family. It is not uncommon for me to talk with someone younger than me who has lost one or both parents, or numerous siblings. If a person reaches age 45 here, they are considered to have lived a full life, and if they die it is not out of the ordinary. I love my parents and brother very much, and the thought of being without them now (or when I was growing up) is not something I have ever really contemplated until now. Thinking about this makes me extra thankful for them and my entire extended family.

I am thankful for my education.

Throughout my entire education I worked very hard, reading, studying and practicing to do my best to get good grades. Never, however, did I dig in a field for the privilege of going to school, or have to ask a person from a foreign country to pay my elementary school tuition. The Rwandan government is beginning to provide public education, but it is still limited. Therefore, children must pay for all their schooling, and often their parents (if they are still alive) do not have money to help with these costs. The result is the students working or begging for money to study. Furthermore, many bright students will never make it to university, solely for financial reasons. Many people who graduate from secondary school can get a decent job in their field, save for years, and will never have enough to begin paying university tuition. I have had a world-class education handed to me, and for this I am grateful.

I am thankful for my friends.

Because being away from them makes me really appreciate them in my life!

I am thankful for security.

While money isn’t happiness, it makes life a little more comfortable. If I am sick, I will get the money to be treated and when I am hungry I will have money to eat some food.  I have become very aware that for many people in this world, these common luxuries are not the case.  The other day the lady who maintains our house was in my room and I realized that I had more loose change sitting on my desk than she would earn that week.  My meager $50 monthly stipend is more than a majority of the employees in the center earn every month, and they must support their families.  I have never in my life been worried if I would eat dinner, or if my parents would make enough money to take me to the hospital if I was sick.

I am thankful for beer.

Because, well, who isn’t?  Although even this brings up an interesting point.  A large Primus beer costs 600 Rwandan Franc (just over $1).  Yes, this is cheap -- for me.  However, many workers I know earn 1000 Franc a day.  Yes, its easy to say, then, that beer shouldn’t be a priority in their spending, which I may agree, but it brings me back to being thankful that I am in a position in society to enjoy such things.  After all, the only reason that I get to enjoy Primus and the farm worker does not is because I was born in the right country with the right family.

I am thankful for opportunity.

As I have alluded to, being a white, American man from a middle class family has afforded me so many things in life.  A loving family, education and security, to name a few.  This privilege stares me in the face every single day in Rwanda.  Every time I go to work, put change in my pocket, drink a beer or ride a bus I cannot escape this feeling of privilege.  I do not feel guilty… most of the time.  I pray that through my recognition of this privilege, appreciation of all it has afforded me and through some service to those who have so little, I can be comfortable living in my white, American, male, middle-class world.

Happy Thanksgiving!

"I want to visualize it"

This is a request I got in an email recently and I thought it would make for a good blog post, so here's my best attempt! See the last post for more pictures.

The Centre de Jeunes is a big place. We are on the edge of Gatenga, which is the name for the part of Kigali in which we live (actually we are on the border of Gatenga and Kickucuro, but call it Gatenga). We have 27 acres of land, shared between the school, playground, farm and living quarters for priests, students and volunteers.

To get to the center from the eenter of the city is about a ten minute drive down a good, paved road. As you reach Rwandex, one of Rwanda’s biggest industrial areas in Kigali, you turn down a red dirt road towards our center. Immediately things change from the paved-road industrial world, to that of developing Africa. A large machine/mechanic operation is right outside our walls and often time we must navigate parked semis to get to our front gate.

(You can actually see the center on Google Maps. Search Kigali and when you get to the page it is clear where the city center is. Follow the road Boulevard de l’OUA southeast out of the city center. Zoom in and you will be able to see Rwandex labeled on the map. To the Southeast of Rwandex is a large Green space. That is where I am! Another post might try to explain this is detail more later)

As you walk in the front gate, you walk into a red dirt-road circle driveway with a statue of Don Bosco and the building where the Salesians live directly in behind Donny B. Here live two priests, Fr. Frans, the director, and semi-retired Jean Paul from Canada, more on them later. This is also where I eat most of the time, so I spend a lot of time in this building.

Taking a road to the right leads you past one of the professional school buildings on your right, where students study building (carpentry, bricklaying, electicity, etc) and secretarial skills. On the left is the small church, with outside seating because it is always full on Sunday mornings, and a small computer lab where Chris spends most of his time in the school year.

Continuing down the road you approach the farm and playground. I haven’t measured, but I think we have almost as much playground space as farmland. The “micro-garden” consists of maybe a one-acre plot where we have a vegetable garden, green house, seed bed, offices and a small area dedicated to teaching seminars to locals about how to maintain their own kitchen gardens. Continuing down the hill (literally sloping down) is the main field where we currently grow corn, and the marsh. The marsh probably takes up at least one qarter to one third of our total land, and it is a constant battle with water on the farm. In the dry season we struggle to water our plants and in the wet season can’t get the water out of the corn.

The back side of the center consists of the Foyer, where about 125 students live during the academic year. This large building is next to the “other side” of the school, which consists of agricultural studies and metal-working. Past the Foyer is the small center within our center where the pre-novitates live, work, study and pray. There are 11 pre-novitates from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in the very preliminary stages of studying to become religious. They are young guys who are passionate about many of the same things I am, and some even speak English, so they are great to hang around with.

And behind the pre-noviates, past the bananna trees and about a 10 minute walk from the front gate is my home on the very back side of the center. It is an old house for nuns, and could be described better as a dormotory than a house, with each having an individual room down a long corridor. I have a concrete floor, a bed, a desk and a cusioned chair that I stole from our “living room.”

The entire center is surrounded by an eight foot high brick wall topped with barbed wire and throrny vines. We do have a back gate, thankfully, and just down the road is “Agents Bar” where I can occasionally be found on a Friday night eating Brouchette (goat meat on a kaboob stick) and grilled plaintains with a 73 cl Primus beer.

This is a panorama from the watertower behind my house. The metal roof on the bottom is my house and this is a shot looking over the banannas and marsh.

more pictures

The boys working in one of the many bananna crops.


The playground. We have three basketball courts, three volleyball courts (two concrete, one grass), two small soccer pitches and one full size soccer pitch.

An aerial view of the center from the water tower behind the community. Out of the picture on the left is the foyer. The buildings you can see on the left are some class rooms and the metal shop. The building below is one of the places we keep the pigs and the ponds are for raising fish. You can also see one of our small vegetable garden below and some bananna trees on top of the photo. The large green area is non-aereable land and out of the picture top left is my house!

This is the path I walk to and from work and meals every day. Not a bad commute!


We have a "back door" gate that allows us to leave the center by our house. This is the road right outside our back door.

My Address

A couple people have asked for my address, so here it is:

Mitchell Lincoln
Centre de Jeune - Gatenga
B.P. 468
Kigali - Rwanda

Chris received a package from his mother yesterday and it took exactly one month to arrive. My dad sent something about three weeks ago and I haven't received it yet, so take this how you will! I think mail works, its just painfully slow!

I'm headed back to the lake this weekend (with our contract guarenteeing the price we demanded), so I'm excited to go see the waterfall. And Mom, I promise not to go to the DRC this time.