Way to Use Your Head!

My main responsibility here in Rwanda is to teach English to some of the greatest kids in the world.  I try to cram their heads full of useful information.  Sometimes I think their heads might explode.  Like this week, for example:  exams started yesterday, and they will be finished next Thursday.  My children have SEVENTEEN exams in six days.  Count them:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 exams.  Their heads are filled with little tidbits of chemistry, math, Christian religious education, entrepreneurship, physics, English, French, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, leadership skills, literature, biology, fine arts, political education, history, geography, and computers.  Can you even begin to fathom the stress they feel in their little heads? 

While some of my students take such a great institution as Sonrise High School for granted, most of them are quite grateful for their educations. I hope to instill in all of them an appreciation for the blessing of a good education and to enable them to rely on their own heads to succeed in life.  I pray they will utilize their heads and their education to become things like teachers, doctors, pilots, and business people who will use their heads everyday to better themselves and their country.

On my two-mile walk to school this morning, I snapped a few pictures of the locals.  Some were children on their way to school.  Some were children who work rather than going to school.  Some were grown-ups doing their daily chores.  Some were grown-ups headed to work. While they may or may not have had the blessing of a good education, they all had one thing in common:  they all knew how to use their heads.

So whether these people use their heads to solve the development problems of their third-world country or to carry their well-toiled-after goods to market or to come up with major medical breakthroughs or to eke out a living to feed their families, I admire each and every hard-working Rwandan person I run across in my daily life.  I’d like to propose a toast in honor of each and every one of these beautiful people.  If you will all please raise your glasses with me…. 

"To using your head!"

“To using your head!”

“To using your head!”

“To using your heads!”

Another Visual

Click below to see the newest video I made to meet the B2R Borrowed Talent and see what Rwanda has meant to us so far!

B2R Borrowed Talent

Enjoy!

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…

A Fateful Day in March...

*Read the previous post first, or you will be lost.

Fast forward to Wednesday morning.  I was absolutely exhausted from two long days at Sonrise and thus slept through my morning run.  I lazily prepared for the day and randomly asked Peyton if I could check my email on one of the two computers that were left in our house.  Here is what I found from my good friend Rachel who just happened to be one of the few people I had told about the robbery a couple of days before:

Hey Kel, just got this today...maybe has something to do with your computer? I don't know, but it would be a really weird coincidence if someone was trying to scam me and happened to write to me from Gisenyi, though I suppose they could have just gotten my email off of your computer. Weird all around.

Ø   hi rachel. My name is John Isaac i m in Gisenyi Rwanda. So if you can now you can call me on 0788570017. In bref i have some thing you lost. Please if is possible call son as pos. Merci

So my heart started racing as the prospect of actually retrieving my computer presented itself.  So I called this John Isaac character, and his phone was busy.  I immediately tried again and was ecstatic when he answered the phone and told me that yes, he DID have my laptop.  Someone tried to sell him my laptop at midnight the night before, and he said that he took the computer and promised to pay $800 the next day if he wanted it.  Peyton and Anna listened in and asked about their computers, so I asked John Isaac if he knew of other computers being sold as well.  He said his seller had eight and that he would pretend he didn’t like mine and ask to try another one until he got all of our computers back.  He asked that I come quickly to Gisenyi for he needed to return to Congo very soon.  At this point, I wanted to shout from the rooftops in joy that my computer had been located and my baby would soon be back in my arms!

Amidst the hullabaloo, we had to decide what to do.  I knew that I had to go to Gisenyi as soon as possible, but Anna and Peyton had classes to teach.  Anna decided to call the police who have been working on our case who said they would accompany us to Gisenyi, but we needed to wait one hour.  We spent this hour buying airtime for our phones and gas for our car and arranging for Anna and Peyton’s classes at Sonrise.  While we were waiting, I received a phone call from John Isaac who informed me that he had been receiving and ignoring calls from the seller and that I needed to come quickly.  Soon, we met the Regional Police Commander (second in command in the entire country), Rogers, at his office where he assigned us an undercover police officer named Innocent to accompany us to Gisenyi.  Rogers would follow us with his bodyguard and continue to be in charge of our case, because he trusted himself more than he trusted the Gisenyi police, and we trusted him, as well.  Anna drove us very quickly the hour or so to Gisenyi.   We were only pulled over twice on our journey (these Rwandan police mean business!), but Innocent easily got us out of each ticket just by showing his face to his friends.

As we were approaching Gisenyi, I called John Isaac to find out our destination.  We were relieved to hear that he wanted to meet us at the Serena Hotel (nicest hotel in Rwanda).  We entered the Serena and sat in the lobby to wait.  After about thirty minutes, a man walked in with a paper grocery bag under his arm.  He looked directly at me and said, “Hi,” to which I responded, “Hi.”  He then walked to the reception area and greeted everyone who was working like they were old friends.  We thought he might be John Isaac but could not be sure.  Soon, though, he emerged from behind the reception desk empty-handed and sat with us on the couches and said, “I am the man.  And you are Kelly.”  He invited us to the restaurant to have a drink while we discussed the matters.  We all ordered Fantas and then started in on our discussion. Soon, John Isaac excused himself from the table and returned with my laptop in a brown paper bag.  I was finally reunited, and yes, it did feel so good! All John Isaac asked for in return was for me to fill his flash drive with my music.  I loaded him up with the good ol’ folk music he had been listening to all night as he scoured my computer for a way to get in touch with me.  As I loaded him up with music, he called the seller to negotiate the price on my laptop and to express interest in the small black computer, the white HP, and the camera he had been offered the night before.  John Isaac had apparently stayed up all night combing my computer for my contact information and coming up with a plan to retrieve more stolen goods.  This man now knows more about me than practically anyone on the planet.  He definitely wanted to involve the police, but was apprehensive about contacting the Musanze police who were already on the case.  Thus, we did not inform him that Innocent was a Musanze police officer.  He also had no idea that the Commander of the entire Northern province was hiding in the parking lot ready to follow us wherever we were to go.

After we finished our Fantas, we ventured to the police station in town.  At this point, John Isaac found out that Innocent was not our driver, but was still not suspicious as to who he really was.  At the police station, John Isaac stated his plan and received advice from several different officers.  The first course of action was scoping out the seller’s house.  He wanted me to go with him, but I convinced him to let some others accompany us.  Anna, Peyton, John Isaac, Innocent, and I piled back into the car and headed down the bumpy dirt roads to the seller’s house.  We parked far enough away that our car was not visible from the house and John Isaac and Innocent went to scope things out.  The police truck followed us as well, and parked in an equally hidden location.  The two men returned with news that they saw a Dell laptop in the house, which we thought could be one of Peyton’s machines.  We then delivered John Isaac and Innocent to the KBC building where they would meet the seller to seal the deal.  John Isaac was to call me when they were approaching the goods so that we could follow and inform the police.  We again parked far enough away to not be suspicious and waited.  Rogers then summoned us back to the police station.  I received a cryptic text message from John Isaac that said merely, “So” and the police requested that I text him to ask him to text me when they were to move towards the stolen items, to which he replied “To fina bank.”  At this point the police also moved to Fina Bank to arrest their suspect. 

John Isaac had previously mentioned that the perpetrator drove a red car, and we saw a red car outside of Fina Bank on our way back to the police station, so we informed Rogers.  He sent with us another undercover cop to take note of this red car.  We drove slowly past the bank and the red car and returned to our stakeout spot to watch the action from afar.  Our undercover cop hopped out of the car and strolled up the street, but we stayed put so as to remain as unsuspicious as one can be being a white person in the middle of a sting operation in Gisenyi, Rwanda.  Soon, the undercover cop came back and summoned us to Fina Bank.  When we arrived, John Isaac was sitting at a table, and the undercover cop pulled up chairs for the rest of us to sit.  We greeted John Isaac, and he responded by holding up his two fists backwards with his wrists together to insinuate handcuffs and said, “I was arrested!”  I apologized profusely, feeling terrible that our accomplice had himself gotten in trouble with the law, but felt foolish when John Isaac told us it was all a part of the ploy.  The police had to arrest both men so as not to stir up any suspicion in the seller. 

Since we were in a relatively nice building, Anna chose to take this opportunity to “go for  a short call” as my Sonrise students euphemize visiting the restroom.  While Anna was in her stall, she received a call from Rogers instructing us to leave Fina Bank immediately.  He was bringing the buyer back to the bank, and we were on strict orders not to be seen with John Isaac.  Anna asked if he could give us five minutes, but he did not grant her such permission.  She charged through the three security doors and shooed us all out the door into the car, yet again.

It was now nearly 2 ‘o clock, and none of us had eaten since an early breakfast.  John Isaac had not eaten since dinner, and claimed to be fasting.  We wanted to help him break his fast, so we drove back to the Serena Hotel for the best food in Rwanda.  Just as we were sitting down and receiving menus, we heard from Rogers again.  He needed us to bring the “white computer” (my Macbook) back to the police station.  So we told the waiter we were sorry, but we must be going and we got in the car again and headed for the station.  When we arrived, Rogers informed us that we were not friends with John Isaac.  At this point, the seller still didn’t know John Isaac was on the police’s side in this investigation.  At the station we found the seller and a pile of goods that had been confiscated from his house by the police.  He pointed to my laptop and a black Q laptop and said that he bought them together, so he thought maybe the Q was one of ours.  It was not.  We were also instructed to look through two other computer bags for our computers.  A Dell!  False alarm.  Not Peyton’s Dell.  Along with the laptops there were speakers, a DVD player, and anything else of worth they happened to see while pillaging the seller’s house.  He was able to produce receipts for some of the goods and thus the police could not prosecute any further.  Since the seller decided to cooperate with the law and promised to turn in the man from whom he bought the computers (Jimmy), he was released and the police took him and all of his belongings home.

Thus the waiting game began.  We sat for an hour or so at the police station awaiting this Jimmy character when John Isaac realized he had left his office unlocked in Goma with his laptop inside.  In lieu of having to later search for yet another missing laptop, he decided to go lock up his office, and we would reconvene an hour later.  While he was gone, Rogers decided that we were all hungry and it would be more pleasant to wait for Jimmy at La Corniche, a restaurant near the lake, than in the bare police station in the middle of town.  Anna, Peyton, Innocent and I piled back into our little gold Honda Accord and Rogers and his body guard led us in the police truck over potholes the size of bathtubs until we reached the Congolese border where we turned around and continued on to La Corniche and had a feast.  We ate rice and pasta and ground beef and roast beef and curry chicken and greens and French fries and avocados and salad and fruit salad.  We spent 3 hours or so hanging out at the restaurant and became fast friends with both John Isaac and Rogers while we waited for Jimmy to arrive with our laptops.  Apparently John Isaac knows 8 languages and had his first experience with covert operations as a ten year old in the Congo.  He was forced to swallow an important piece of paper and board a bus to Uganda to deliver the secret document.  Every once in a while, during a lull in conversation, Rogers would make or receive a phone call and offer us more information.  After one of the phone calls, Rogers asked if we were missing any pens, which we were.  Peyton’s favorite pens.  The person on the phone had claimed that he would return everything, even the pens.  Apparently Peyton and Anna’s computers were in Congo but on their way to Gisenyi.  We also found out that while John Isaac and the seller were both in police custody post-arrest, they had each received a phone call on their recently confiscated cell phones.  Rogers answered both calls:  one from John Isaac’s father and one from Jimmy.  He pretended to be the phone’s owner and probed Jimmy enough to get some important information but not far enough to raise any suspicion.  He then gave Jimmy’s phone number to another officer to call him to interrogate him.  Jimmy promised to cooperate with the police and to turn in the person in Musanze from whom he bought our goods.  After hanging out at La Corniche for three hours or so, we finally got the go-ahead to go meet Jimmy in Gisenyi town.

We all piled back into our cars and drove back near the police station.  Jimmy did not want to meet at the police station for fear of arrest, so we met him on a side street.  The seller himself accompanied him.  They came to our window and started pouring random cords and electronics into Peyton’s lap.  We acquired the Dell laptop, the wireless router, a flash drive, some other random cords, Peyton’s headphones, and one of his beloved pens.  They left with the promise that they would return the rest of the things to Musanze the following day.

At that, we were finally free to head home in full hopes that everything that had been stolen would be returned and that the thieves would be caught and brought to justice.  We dropped John Isaac off at Peace Land Hotel and headed back down the road to Musanze.  We dropped Innocent off at his house and then followed Rogers back to our not so humble abode where we recounted the craziest day of our lives to our housemates.

To be continued again...

A Fateful Day in February...

If you want to be remembered after you die, do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.  Wise words from Julius, a fellow English teacher at Sonrise High School.  I believe I have done something worth writing about, and hopefully this will be worth reading.

It all started early last Thursday morning.  I woke up to a conversation between Anna and Peyton in the living room.  I heard bits and pieces like, “I’m going to KILL Christian!” and “they’re all gone” and “the backdoor is wide open.”  I realized what was going on, and after Anna said, “I would call the police, but they stole my cell phone charger,” I emerged, cell phone charger in hand.  After a brief inspection by the three of us, we found that we were missing 4 laptop computers, an additional computer monitor, wireless router, iPod touch, Amazon Kindle, a basket of random cords, an entire backpack which contained a camera, a rain jacket, and some checkbooks, and season 2 of 24.  We ran outside and tried to communicate to Christian (our substitute guard, who is a little slow) that we had been robbed, but with his extremely limited English and mental capacity, he had no clue what was going on.  We called Museveni, our much-loved day guard, to come interpret and Eric, our typical night guard, as well.  We knew that we would need a legitimate interpreter to get to the bottom of things, so Bob called Bishop John’s son Andrew to help us communicate.  In the meantime, upon further examination, we discovered Peyton’s Bible and journal lying in the grass and the basket of cords and the wireless router box in another corner of the yard.

Andrew showed up and could not get any information out of Christian and said we must call the police.  The police came and Christian still claimed to have no idea what was going on.  The investigation then commenced.  We took the police on a walk through the house to show them where all of the missing items had been located and made them a list of everything that was missing.  The police took pictures of each missing item.  Then they went outside and got out a measuring tape to measure the distance from the front porch to where the basket of cords was found (after we re-placed the evidence).  Sitting in a chair in the living room was a large rock that the thief was apparently going to use as a weapon should anyone have entered the living room during the incident.  The police said that they could do nothing with it since we had touched it.  We informed them that we had not touched it, so they asked for paper to remove it from the chair.  Anna handed the police a paper bag for the evidence, but they still needed a sheet of paper with which to lift the rock.  Andrew informed us that they would do nothing to the rock, but we were well aware of the fact that the police were just trying to appease the Muzungus by taking every precaution they could possibly think of.

Once the initial investigation was complete, the police took all three of our guards in for questioning.  Anna and Griffin also went to the police station to file an official report of our theft.  Peyton and Bob went to the bank to cancel Peyton’s checkbooks.  The weekend came and went with much ado about gatekeeping.  Several of us went to Kigali to pick Tom up from the airport, but Bob and Peyton stayed home to make sure the house was always occupied.  We borrowed Sonrise Primary School’s guard for the weekend and hired a temporary guard for the week.  We spent the whole weekend wondering about the status of our sweet, innocent day guard, Museveni.  The rest of us returned Sunday evening and found Museveni back in action at the B2R house!  Anna and I ran to hug him and apologize profusely for the trouble he was put through.  Our poor, sweet, innocent Museveni spent two nights in prison but was released on Saturday with the mission to go find the missing laptops in town.  After our reunion with Museveni, we settled back into the house and started the week like normal, minus laptops (which, I must say makes life as a teacher with no books for my classes as it is, much more difficult than it was already).  While we still have a glimmer of hope that we will get our things back, we all realize that this is indeed Africa and the odds are not in our favor.

To be continued...

Flexibility

There is a running joke at our house here in Musanze about my lack of flexibility.  I cannot bend over and touch my toes; I can barely even reach past my knees.  Kat tries to help me by making me do yoga and ballerina stretches when she is in town, but my basketball body can’t help but laugh when she tells me things like, “Now put your forehead on the ground.”

Oftentimes when I walk from the high school to the primary school, I pass Sonrise’s huge garden full of hardworking women, many of who have babies tied on their backs, all of whom are bent over, folded completely in half like lawn chairs.  Their flexibility astounds me.  Who needs yoga when there is a garden to tend?

While I am not very physically flexible, Rwanda is teaching me to be flexible in other ways.  For example, I spent all last week preparing Powerpoint presentations for my English classes on Monday.  They were beautiful, if I do say so myself!  I left my house at 6:45am and hopped on a moto-taxi thinking I had plenty of time to get to school and get everything set up before my 7:30am class.  I arrived, checked out a projector from the IT department and took it to S1C where I was informed that they had no outlets in their classroom, so I could not use the projector.  So, I had to scratch those beautiful Powerpoints and revert to the ol’ chalkboard to teach my kids about sentences.  And you know what?  Those kids learned about sentences.

This kind of flexibility comes no more naturally to me than physical flexibility.  My natural inclination is to be fifteen minutes early, always.  I love to make plans, and I get frustrated when they fall through.  It is only by traveling around the world that I have acquired this new skill.  When meetings are scheduled for Monday morning, it is my newfound flexibility that has allowed me to show up to that meeting on Thursday afternoon with a smile on my face.  Or to happily eat really tough chicken when the restaurant has run out of beef and fish before we have arrived.  Or to teach someone else’s class with one minute’s notice because things are “unsettled.”

Rwanda is stretching me as much as Kat, my yoga instructor, stretches me.  Hopefully by the time I leave this beautiful place, I will not only be able to touch my toes, but also to truly keep having a positive attitude when things don’t go quite as I had planned. 

Stop and Stare

Being a white girl in Rwanda puts me in some interesting situations everyday. 

Several mornings a week, I wake up early and go for a run around my neighborhood.  (I used to go run through villages and cornfields, but after busting it twice because of my unstable footing on the rocky terrain, I have decided to switch to paved surfaces.)   Running for exercise is uncommon around here.  And by uncommon, I mean nonexistent.  So you can imagine the stares I get by being white AND running through the streets with no destination in mind.  I typically run with my iPod so as to tune out the incessant shouts of “Muzungu! Muzungu!” but the stares are impossible to ignore.  My running time often coincides with many children’s commute to the local school, and thus I typically get a little posse of followers trying their hardest to keep up with me as I scamper down the street.  The children aren’t the only ones who stop and stare; my running is also entertaining to adults who often stop everything to watch and sometimes to emulate my lanky lope.

While I work predominantly at the high school, occasionally I end up at Primary to do projects where I get stared at by THE cutest kids on the planet.  Today I was sitting in the business manager’s office working on her computer with Anna with quite the audience.  She tried to shoo them away unsuccessfully and informed us that they just wanted to look at us.  Earlier Peyton and I happened to arrive at Primary at break time where we were swarmed.  Some kids keep their distance and merely explore us with their eyes, but others are too fascinated by my hair to keep their hands to themselves.

The stares are much fewer when we are at hotels or in the car.  These are places we Muzungus are expected to be.  However, when walking down the road and shopping in the market, it is as though the Rwandan eyes are magnets and we are refrigerator doors.  It has come to a point where I am surprised when people don’t stare at me.

I wish I could share a photo with you of the jaw dropped, blank stare I receive hundreds of times a day, but it is rather difficult to snap a candid picture of someone whose eyes are piercing your soul.  I hope you will understand.

In all of these situations, it never fails:  I ALWAYS find myself singing OneRepublic’s “Stop and Stare.” 

“Stop and stare

You start to wonder why you’re here, not there

And you’d give everything to get what’s fair

But fair ain’t what you really need…”

Being the center of attention everywhere I go sometimes makes me wonder why I’m here, not there.  While it may be flattering, it’s also disconcerting.  Is it fair that my pale skin draws so much attention or raises so many assumptions? But maybe fair ain’t what I really need…