The End... for now.

Thursday came and went with no sign of laptops but many phone calls from John Isaac.  He had promised the day before to call me four times a day.  Once in the morning to see how the night was, once in the afternoon to wish me a good appetite, once in the evening to see how the day was, and once at night to wish me a good night.  He actually called five times.  We spoke to Rogers who was hopeful that the computers would show up in the evening, but Anna and Peyton still went to sleep laptopless.

I received a phone call from an ecstatic Anna on Friday morning while I was at school and she was on her way to Kigali.  She said that John Isaac had called and he had her laptop in hand and that everything was still on it!  He described to her everything on her desktop and she was overjoyed to know that all of her files were still there.  He called me later and played me some music that was on her computer to prove to me as well that her laptop had not been cleared.  We communicated with him all day and found that he had retrieved all of our belongings and turned them in to the police.  What an angel!

Friday evening I received a phone call from Anna who was in Kigali making sure we were at home because Rogers was coming to hand deliver all of our belongings.  Shortly after I hung up with her, the police truck pulled into our driveway.  Rogers brought in Peyton’s backpack filled with various belongings of ours.  We spent the next hour and a half rejoicing over the recovered possessions and building an even deeper relationship with the Regional Commander.  I showed him pictures of my family and pictures of my favorite places in the US from my road trip last summer.  While we are still missing Griffin’s iTouch and Peyton’s digital camera, we were overjoyed to receive all of our precious pictures, music, and documents on our practically untouched laptops.  Our computers have now been to more countries than we have, but they are all safely back in our arms.

A few days later, Anna received a call from Rogers about some more of the missing items.  Griffin’s iTouch had been recovered!  Rogers delivered it to Anna and shared an interesting story about the last missing item: Peyton’s camera.  Apparently, Jimmy bought it from someone in Musanze then lent it to his friend so she could take pictures at a wedding that Saturday.  At the wedding, the woman’s purse with the stolen camera inside was itself stolen!  So now instead of just one robbery investigation, there are two.  We are not sure we will ever see the camera again, but then again, we were pretty certain our computers were never to be seen again as well.  One thing we have definitely learned is that there is ALWAYS hope.

At one point during our crazy day, John Isaac asked us if we prayed before we went to bed the night before.  We all assured him that we had, and he informed us that he was the answer to our prayers.  After sharing the story with the teachers at Sonrise, we heard many stories of the prayers they had prayed for our things and us and were overwhelmed by the answered prayers.  Miracles do still happen.  I told a student the story, and he said, “Things like that happen as a testimony to God.”  Many people wonder how people can see God’s beautiful creation and not believe in God, but I must ask, how can you hear a story as absurd as this and not believe in God?  Thank you God for showing us that You truly are capable of absolutely anything.  Even recovering thousands of dollars of goods stolen from a little house in Musanze, Rwanda from the Congo, one of the most corrupt and dangerous countries in the world via one of the few goodhearted men left in this world.  All day during our covert operation we found ourselves laughing at random intervals, thinking of the absurdity of our present situation and praising Jesus for the adventure in which we were given the opportunity to participate.  Oh, what a story I have to tell my grandchildren one day…