Ndishimye

It’s been over two weeks since my last blog post. Man how time flies, and we have about 10 days left here at the Center. 10 days before we have to say goodbye to the kids we’ve been building relationships with and learning about for the past 3 weeks. I’m not really looking forward to leaving. These kids have had such an impact on me. They’ve taught me patience (thank you annoying primary school kids), determination, hard work. They’ve taught me that even in the worst circumstances God is good and has a plan, I’ve really seen His love since I’ve been here and it’s been amazing.

One night after Bible study I was talking with one of the boys about how God has a plan for each of us if we choose to follow Him. I told him that I know for sure if I wasn’t a Christian trying to follow God I wouldn’t be in Africa right now. That got me looking back on all the things I’ve seen and learned since coming here, there’s so much. It got me thinking about little things that have happened that I didn’t even acknowledge was God working. My walk with God isn’t perfect, it never has been, but I think that God’s teaching me a lot about Himself and myself that is helping to bring me closer to Him.

Now some of you (however many that is that still reads this) are probably wondering what the title of this blog post means. It means, “I am happy”, and really I am happy. I love being at the Center and I love being in Rwanda (pronounced Gwanda by Rwandans). So while the idea of leaving the Center makes me want to say Si shimye (I’m not happy), I am happy that I even had this opportunity and I will never forget about my time here.

So now you’re probably wondering what have I actually been doing with my time here. In my last blog post I talked about a typical day here, well that has changed. After the first week we individually met with Carrie and talked about our job titles and the things we wanted to do here. For me that meant giving nutrition presentations to all the catch-up students, as well as corresponding with an NGO called Orphans to Ambassadors on them starting a project here in May. When I first started emailing with O2A we weren’t sure if they would be able to do a project at all because their budget was already set for this year, but now they seem pretty confident they’ll be able to. This is so exciting because the Center really needs it. God put an opportunity in front of us and we jumped on it and it’s really working out to our benefit. This passed week was very busy. Rae joined us as a new intern and she’s going to be doing gardening so the boarders can have vegetables in their diet. So Wednesday and Thursday were dedicated to getting the garden ready so we wouldn’t miss the season. We frantically hoed, weeded, and planted, and by Friday the garden was looking good. Again it was evident that I am not cut out to be a farmer, but it was really great to be a part of something that would benefit the Center so much. Now all we have to do is pray that it will grow (since I’ve worked on it it will really take a miracle for those plants to grow) and wait. Unfortunately we won’t be around to see the fruits of our labor but I’m excited to hear about it and see pictures and come back and visit one day.