Nairobi

Recently I was fortunate enough to be selected to represent my province at the Salesian Conference for Volunteers in Africa.  The conference was three days and focused on the specifics of Salesian thinking in our work, human rights and justice and evangelization.  I came away from the conference with a renewed and better understanding of why exactly I am in African volunteering, and how to view my work through a Salesian lens.

The conference itself, while refreshing and reinvigorating to participate, wouldn’t be very interesting to write or read about, so I won’t.  I will highlight two of the things we did outside the conference hall, however.

1) Visit to the Kibera Slum

After talking about justice and human rights all morning, our group went to visit a Salesian working in the slums of Nairobi.  The Kibera slum is just outside Nairobi, ironically across the street and behind a brick wall from one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the city.  It is roughly measured by the length of the 6 km road that runs through the middle, and its population is estimated at around 1 million.   Running water and electricity are scarce, sewage runs uncovered in the streets and government services are virtually nonexistent.  

About the time I was completely overcome with heartache, anger, frustration and desperation, we met the Salesian who was located in the middle of the slum.  He was a native of the slum and after completing his studies returned to the slum to set up a school and a social project.  His school provides education for over 200 students and his social project consists of a nurse and a paralegal.  The nurse preaches hygiene to anyone who will listen and caters to girls and women’s health issues.  The paralegal works  to organize a micro-finance project to empower local residents and they both work together to, and this is repulsive, bring justice to rape victims, especially children (some as young as three years old) who do not have the means to attain justice.

2) Bosco Boys – Nairobi

On our final evening in Nairobi we visited one of the many Salesian communities in Nairobi, Bosco Boys.  This is a  community that works with others to get children off the street and out of slums like Kibera.  The students at this particular site were in the final stage.  It was great to see the positive change the Salesians were having on the children, as I sat and talked with all  of them as we watched dancers and performers put on a show for their special visitors.  The coolest part of this experience, however, was mass at the Bosco Boys chapel.  There were only young people in the church, including the choir and 15 dancers that danced at every part of the mass.  I have never felt so much energy or enthusiasm in a church before!

Four months already?

This week I celebrated my four-month anniversary of living in Rwanda.  To mark the occasion I visited the office of Immigration to finally get my visa.  Needless to say, they were not happy that I had waited so long and I got to pay a pretty substantial fine because of it.  There is a long story about me visiting and them not accepting documents, but I won’t bore you with that.  To make it short, I spent my four-month anniversary very angry at Rwanda.

But there has been much good also.  I see that I have not really made a good post since Thanksgiving, so there is quite a bit to update.  To answer all your questions, yes, we did kill the turkey I am pointing at in the Thanksgiving picture, I prepared an entire Thanksgiving feast, and the whole international community I live with loved the American holiday that none of them had ever celebrated.  Chris was out of town for the week so I was the only American to celebrate this American feast, but they loved it and it in turn, made me very happy.

As far as my work is going, well honestly, I’ve been slightly bored.  The school year ended in late October, and since then things have been pretty quiet.  While I am not teaching, the whole pulse of the center beats on the school, and without students, a school is pretty boring.  I am still working, but with not many students to spend time with and many of the farm staff also on vacation, it has been challenging.

Graduation itself was a very bitter-sweet day for me, as all graduations are.  The students that I had grown close to over the past months were now leaving, some of them probably forever.  It was nice to see them, nice to know they remembered me, wanted pictures with me and cared enough to take time from their graduation day to talk to me.  This day was affirming for me, as it reinforced my hopes that I was truly making meaningful relationships with the students here.  We even got invited to a couple graduation parties, unfortunately we could only go to one, which may have been the longest, most boring event of my life!  But regardless, it was a good cultural experience, and the fact that I got invited was a very special gesture.

Because there is no school we had a summer-camp like program called “patronage.”  This is where young children aged about 3-15 came to the center every morning for our program, which included singing, games, dancing, mass and group outings.  I taught a group of kids the words and accompanying hand motions to the song “Yes Lord” in five different languages, so now every time I go outside our center there are hundreds of kids who recognize me and scream “Yes Lord” while giving either a thumbs up or making an “L” with their fingers to accompany they lyrics.

After patronage ended was when life began to get really boring, but luckily Adam, our director from New York, came to visit, breaking up the lull of school vacation.  As soon as Adam left we  were off to Jinja, Uganda to visit some friends who are volunteers with Holy Cross that we met at our training last summer in New York.  Christmas is not yet very popular in Rwanda, so I wanted to go somewhere with some American spirit so we could celebrate Christmas as best we could without snow!

Jinja was great.  Terry, Derrick, Whitney and Joella are all teachers and also bored on break.  But we turned down time from boredom to relaxation, as they live in a house with a front porch, a kitchen and a living room decorated in appropriate Christmas spirit.  We spent the week reading, talking, sleeping and cooking, culminating in a giant Christmas Eve feast followed with a personal (nearly) midnight mass in the living room.  We followed mass with Tom and Jerry’s and readings from the gospels of the Christmas story.  It was almost like home.

We also had some fun in Jinja.  As soon as we got there and had our first Nile Special beer we knew we would visit the brewery which is very near.  It wasn’t quite Anheiser Busch, but it was still a good tour with our new friend, and tour guide, Herbert.

We also decided to bite the bullet and pay for the expensive, touristy rafting trip on the Nile -- it was the Christmas season and all.  This is something I will never regret spending money on, as it was one of the coolest things I’ve done here.  The trip was 30 Kilometers of rafting with multiple series of Class IV and Class V rapids.  I got thrown out of our raft three times, one of them was when the raft flipped completely over.  I only feared for my life once, but luckily my giant life jacket pulled me up from the rapids I had been frantically trapped under for a better part of 20 seconds.

We returned to Kigali with Derrick, who was having his own visa problems in Uganda and had to temporarily leave the country.  Even though Hannah is now gone, our house is getting full.  There are two young men from Belgium who are experienced in agriculture and have come to work on the farm.  We also have a young Belgian woman who was adopted from Rwanda at a yo9ung age and has returned to meet her family (a successful reunion!) and our favorite “community mother,” Rita, who takes care of all of us.  This collage of Belgians has everyone speaking Flemish and has gotten me anxious to start researching my own family Flemish roots (one of the Belgians has the name Hooge in his family, which is similar to some of my origins).  It has also been nice to have a couple extra hands on the farm, especially guys who have studied and worked in agriculture!

To round off the holiday-season post… on New Years Day we went to an East African Community Party held at the National Stadium in Rwanda, featuring some of the top artists from across East Africa.  It was a great time and somehow, even though we purchased regular tickets, we found ourselves in the VIP section standing right in front of the stage!

As I’m reviewing this post it looks like I’ve just been partying all the time, so let me redeem myself by telling you that I still work.  In fact, I have begun to cultivate a new plot of land with the intention of planting a special kind of beet that will be able to sustain the cattle during the dry season when their main source of food, grasses, becomes scarce.  I am also overseeing a construction project for a new shop on the perimeter of our property.  Here I will manage the supply and selling of agricultural products, hoping to earn the center a little extra money.  I am also going to begin helping to teach some of our teachers English.  They will all have to attempt to teach in English this academic year, and for some of them it will be challenging.  I recently helped butcher a hog.  It was interesting, although any hope I ever had of trying blood sausage was dashed after I helped to make it.  I have also become the go to man for soccer refereeing.  Am I qualified to referee soccer?  If you consider playing and refereeing park and rec soccer in DeWitt qualified than yes, but I do not.  Regardless, I’ve taken the role pretty seriously and am even starting to enjoy it.  Its nowhere near the feeling of calling balls and strikes, but its filling some kind of void there.  Last week I had a match where a team from the Congo came to play our team in Rwanda.  I gave two yellow cards, which is something I think baseball needs to adopt.

Oh, and I’m still digging.

All I want for Christmas…

Many people have been asking me two things:
1) What do you want for Christmas?

2) I want to help, what can I do?

I want to give a good answer to both, so here it is:  The only thing I want for Christmas is for you to help the school I am working at.  The problem, however, is that I have not quite narrowed down how to do this yet.  Chris and I have been working for weeks with the community trying to figure out what is of the most need and how to go about obtaining it.  This is a long annoying process that we are still working on.

So in short, I want you to save that love and generosity until I can tell you exactly what I want!

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.