The one where Tim thought lightning was gunfire

Dear All

Time has come around to write another blog – yes, we are the end of yet another chapter of our travels…

Burundi – well life here is slightly more unpredictable than anywhere else we have been in Africa!  We have about 6hrs of power a day or night (if we’re lucky) and we don’t have running water during the daylight hours and in usual African style, the internet works when the provider wants it to…found out yesterday that our internet works by fibre-optic cable from Dar Es Salaam – no wonder there are faults in the line! Having said that, our living conditions are great – we have been living with a new friend called Olivia, her house-mate Connor, a cook who makes all our meals for us and a day guard who does the washing – it’ll do… ;)

And this is a relatively light load on a bicycle!

Country life

Elegance country style

More loaded bikes

This guy has a bed strapped to the back of his bike!

Our decision to come to Burundi was not really planned before we started our African adventures, but it has evolved into the place that we should be right now! As most stories go, a friend (Simon Guillebaud) of a friend (Rob Peasgood) put us in contact with a contact of his (Olivia Perry Smith) about this organisation called Great Lakes Outreach (www.greatlakesoutreach.org). The organisation itself is a supporter of about 5 smaller organisations involved in making Burundi a more stable and less corrupt place! All the projects are Christian and promote the use of Christian values in the work place and the education of what the Bible says about what these Christian values are. Many pastors here are un-educated and often just make things up that they preach at the front of church. A popular preaching is of the 'prosperity gospel' i.e. believe in God and you will be rich. If you are poor, you're not a good enough Christian. Such a lie, but the corruption here is far and wide so pastors make a lot of money that way by having their congregation give them money. So the organisation that we are working with is a theological college. And of course, as God would have it, they needed 2 people just like us, just as we arrived.

Daily drive to work along Lake Tanganyika 

The tall building in the church and where Tim teaches, the smaller one on the right is where I teach.

They were going to have to employ an IT guy to teach Word and Powerpoint and the English course for 1st Years was starting at the same time and they really appreciated having a native English speaker. So after years of Tim constantly saying that he isn’t in IT, Tim succumbed to being an IT teacher as did I teaching English. It’s funny how God makes us do things that we weren't planning on doing!  Both courses only run for 4 weeks and it more or less fitted in with our visa…when I say more or less, I mean that the Burundian government have a weird way of sorting out the male and female passports differently and so my visa says I could stay til the 12th Nov and Tim’s til the 9th Nov even though we arrived on the same day. This sucks because it meant that we would have to leave 1 day before our courses finish…booo…and that we need to skedaddle well quick out of the country on the 9th and hope that they don’t say we’re cutting it too fine!

Tim's class working hard on their powerpoint presentations

My class working equally as hard on a game!
A Christian version of Snakes and Ladders,
called Prophets and Pythons (a la Alli Blair)!

Teaching English has been challenging. I feel that I'm so ill equipped to take on the English language as a teaching subject - its so bloomin’ difficult! And as with all things, its not all about the content, its the people. And they are just wonderful. Tim has found teaching harder than he thought – realizing that he needs to plan what he’s going to say rather than just a rough idea. I’ve tried to encourage Tim that its normal to need to plan things a little more thoroughly in the early lesson days, and that its ok that some people will look bored! Overall, it has been fantastic - we've learnt, they've learnt and we feel really good that we've been in the right place at the right time using the right skills :)

In my first class we talked about what our worries were - some of the answers were health, future, children etc, but one person said 'war'. Then we discussed how we can take action on our worries, like drinking clean water and driving safely to protect their children etc, then with the war one, my student said 'hide'. It just made it all so real for me. In general Bujumbura is safe, and the problems that have been here that were spilled over from the Rwandan conflict are almost no more, but of course there are always rumblings. And scars from before. One of my other students was telling me about what she did - she is a volunteer in the trauma recovery service as she had received counselling from the group last year and now she wanted to volunteer. This same day, Tim said that he saw the flash of gunfire in the air. We later realised that it was the daily lightning storms…!

Red sky at night (not gunfire!)

We’re glad that we’ve been here. This was a vision of ours - to learn first-hand about these things. These daily trials that are so different from our worries at home. But we feel that the challenge for us is that if/when we return home, how will these experiences shape the way we live at home. There's no point in seeing these things, sharing in experiences and then just going home as if nothing has happened or as if nothing is happening here. So whether that's just making different choices about where we live, the projects/jobs we get involved with, i don't know...hopefully time and prayer before we return home in December will help us shape those ideas.

To celebrate our first week of work, we went to a beach on Lake Tanganyika for Friday and Saturday (we work Monday – Thursday 6-9pm) But as Burundi is the most expensive country we have visited in East Africa, we stayed in a tent. Rather large one, but a tent nonetheless which meant that at 7am on Saturday morning we awoke to ‘ahhhh we’re dying in the hottest tent in the world!’ Tim’s first thing to do was to travel the 50 metres down to the Lake – bliss. Weird to think that hippos and crocs live in there…but actually its ok because they don’t like where we were swimming…not sure why… The 2 days were blissful – I read loads and Tim was pretty sure he’d solved the world energy crisis by creating perpetual motion (I won’t bore you with why it turns out it won’t work – I’m sure you’ll be able to see the prototype that he will no doubt attempt to make when we get home). Am slowly working on my tan as my September visit home made people question that I’d been in Africa – I plan to be beautifully bronzed by Christmas. ;)

The biggest beer in the world.

Our tent!

Dinner

Breakfast!

Church later that weekend

During our time here, Olivia has shared with us a couple of highlights of Bujumbura and highlights of being a missionary. Settlers of Catan, Dominoes, Downton Abbey and amazing banana chocolate bread made with dried milk and weird African margarine have been our home treats…and outside of the home, we saw the famous Burundian drummers and the ‘Living Museum’ or hands-on zoo…

Just before an impending rainstorm

Drummers!

Not fussed about the 10 ton weight on their heads!

Jumping!

Crazy amounts of drumming!

Timmy having a go!

La musee vivant!

Having a moment with Tina

Tina having a moment with me!

Tina checking Tim's pockets for treasures!

Nothing!

Tina checking out Olivia's toes

As I took my bottle of water out, she found hers, asked for a refill and had a drink...

Then she went to find the lid to her bottle, screwed it on and saved the water for later.

Green house snake

Olivia having a go - I opted for being photographer!

Scary type of viper.  I think they bite.

Olivia holding the tail of a massive croc!

A vervet monkey checking Tim for lice in his arm hair.

And now checking for nits...

Settlers by candlelight with a torch from the light fitting!

In conclusion we have LOVED Burundi.  The friendly people, the beautiful landscape and the good friends we have made.  We will be sure to return and can recommend this beautiful country to anyone who wants an adventure.  We haven't seen as much as we would have liked but we are really happy with the work we have done here, so what a good excuse to return!

From here we are heading to Kigali, Rwanda on Wednesday. We plan to spend some time learning about the conflict and hopefully seeing some projects that we can learn about, sadly we won’t have enough time to get stuck in. After there, we will travel through Uganda, again hopefully visiting a project or 2 which is in the right direction for going to Kenya. We're speaking at a conference with Pastor Timothy (see previous blog for details of this great man!) on the first weekend of December. From there we plan to have a bit of down time in Mombasa before flying home on the 14th! So really time is flying! Please do pray for all of the above - God only knows what's really going to happen in the next month or so!

Love to all,

Tic Toc xxx