"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.