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.

Mitchell and Hannah's adventure weekend

Last week, myself and four of my friends wanted to get out of Kigali for the weekend. We heard that a Nyngue National Park was pretty cool and made plans to go. However, after lodging, transportation and general interest fell through, all that remained was my friend Hannah and I and no destination. While I wanted to go to town and get on the first bus we saw, regardless of destination, Hannah was a bit more sensible and picked a destination: Ruhengeri, in the Northwest of Rwanda.

With backpacks and travel guides ready, we departed Saturday morning. It immediately started raining and with Hannah forgetting her rain jacket, it seemed maybe the travel gods were plotting against us. However, after we got to the city center and were soaking wet sitting on a bus bound for Ruhengeri, we got a break and sat next to a student who we knew in Kigali who lived at the Imbabazi Orphanage and was going home and invited us to join him. The Imbabazi Orphanage has a cool backstory, and is detailed in the book Land of A Thousand Hills by an American, Rosemond Carr, who moved to Rwanda and spent her whole life here. Coincidently, I was just finishing the book and was excited to see the place I had been reading about. When we reached Ruhengeri, in true adventure fashion, looked around and decided we would not stay there and changed buses with our friend.

We got on a bus heading for Gisenyi and halfway there stopped in the middle of the road to leave the bus for the much more exciting motorcycle ride down a terrible dirt road, but ascending and desending the hills and looking out over the Rwandan landscape in the shadow of the giant volcanoes that are the Northwest boundary of Rwanda. While it was cool to see the orphanage and meet the very friendly Americans who worked there (Mrs. Carr died a couple years ago), the most impressive part of this was simply its location and great views of the country side.
Before dark we jumped back on a moto and by a stroke of good fortune were able to flag down one of the last busses headed West towards Ginsenyi, where we found cheap lodging and a place to eat on the beach of Lake Kivu.

Sunday consisted of relaxing on the beach all morning, which was amazing. It was a little too cool to swim, which I was actually happy about the relief from the heat, and I spent the morning laying in the shade watching the waves come on shore. While this was great, I can only sit still for a little bit, and the close proximity of Goma was calling to me.

Goma is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was the place where thousands of refugees fled during the Rwandan genocide. As a long result of this, it has continued to be a place of conflict both within the DRC and with its Rwandan neighbor. The history is long and complicated, but quite fascinating to learn about if you are interested. There is also the most active volcano in Africa on the outskirts of town which erupted in 2002, taking out half the town. Today it still smokes all day and glows at night.


Because of the secuirty issues, we were told by a couple people not to go to Goma. I think these warnings just made it more appealing, so we decided to go. After waiting in line for one hour, bribing two Congolese officials and paying $40 a piece, we got into Goma... and were kind of disappointed. It was cool to walk on the lava rock from the eruption and see the reconstruction and the smoking volcano, but other than that Goma wasn't much more than a gray, drury town with too many United Nations trucks driving around. We were there two hours and crossed back and found a bus back to Ruhengeri.

The next morning we headed north from Ruhengeri to visit Lake Burera, and the accompanying Rusumo Falls. After another bus ride followed by moto, we arrived at a small house with a boat on the water and told the drivers to stop and let us off. It was a boat tour operation, and the manager seemed very happy to see us, it was out of the way and I don't think they get much business. After arguing over a price for one hour, it began to rain so both sides gave up and we sat inside and drank tea, looking out over the lake, whose banks are formed by an impressive collection of hills, giving it a unique, jagged appearance.

After the rain we decided to walk back to the main road to catch a bus back to Kigali. To do this we walked through some very rural areas and with the lake on our left and volcanoes on our right, my visions of amazing African landscapes were fulfilled.

Monday night we arrived back in Kigali, mentally rested and physically exhausted. On Tuesday I was back to work, clearing brush with a Machette in the morning and playing rugby with the Rwanda National Team in the afternoon. Yes, Africa is good this week.



This is Hannah walkin with our escorts back from the lake. In the rural areas "Muzungos" are fairly rare and they love to walk with you, touch, stare and say "good morning" regardless of the time of day,
This is me negotiating prices with the boat operators. We were drawing in the sand and doing math arguing about what a fair price is. Because i have been here for a two months, I have a pretty good idea what fair prices are, and what a decent wage is. When people try to rip me off because I am white I get a little irritated and while in reality we are often bartering over small sums of money (in this case a difference of about $12) I think my stubbornness plays a bigger role than my wallet.
Smoking Mount Nyiragongo, the most active volcano in Africa (in Goma).
A view of Lake Kivu and some of the hills of Rwanda.
Hannah, Gaudi and myself at the orphanage with the beautiful gardens maintained there.

Finals Week!

Sorry for the delay in posting. We had a slight problem with our electricity recently which killed our wireless modem. Fortunately for me, nothing of mine was damaged, but my friends in the office next door were not so fortunate.

Anyway, right now we are in “exams” period for the students. It reminds me of finals week in college, where everything stops, except testing. I remember during my last finals week sitting in Gage Union watching a man wash windows. I thought to myself, wow, I’m done studying and ready to just work. Well, here I am, with everyone else studying I am the one happily working away.

The big news for the past couple weeks was a trip to Gitarama, the second largest city in Rwanda (even though I didn’t even know it until after I left). Later that week was the first plowing of our corn field and apparently being from Iowa qualifies me as the expert in plowing and all tractor operations, so I happily plowed along, getting a sense of satisfaction from my work. My dad reminded me that I do indeed come from a long line of farmers and this is to be expected. Last week we actually got out of the center a little bit and went to the 2^nd annual Mutzig Beer Fest, which was a nice change of pace from our full, busy days at the center.

We’ve been to the Embassy two times now to watch football and its glorious. We hang out with about 5 or 6 other American guys and watch football. It’s a simple pleasure, but I do love it. Last weekend we even bought some ground beef and made hambergers!

I have posted some pictures below. I have many more, and hope to take many more, but until I get more reliable internet I won’t be able to get them online.

Also, if anyone knows how to get episodes of The Office from a non-US IP address I would be eternally grateful!

GO HAWKS!

Some Pictures

This is Chris, Pascal and I with a bunch of random Rwandan kids in front of some rural landscape. We visited Gitarama and stopped to take some photos and the kids (who live outside the city and aren't used to "muzungos" came running)
Every Saturday morning the kids who live in the center come to work on the farm for a couple hours. It is my job to assign tasks and supervise so last week I took 40 students and cleaned a drainage canal - I almost called Mike Rove of "Dirty Jobs."
A seed bed in our "micro=garden"
Our center is reknowned across the city for its acrobats and other performers. Here is one practicing.
Ah yes, me and one of my tractors, plowing along. This one has a cab with a radio that get "Voice of America" so I was plowing and rocking out!

p.s. if you are reading this on facebook you might not see the pictures. visit: www.wanderingkohawk.blogspot.com