Rwanda Part I: Missionary Life Learning

Oh, June…
The month of June was crazy busy for me… actually the months of April, May, and June. The short amount of time I had to rest between taking Jennifer and Mary Beth to the airport to fly home for furloughs and my trip to Rwanda was spent trying to recover from utter exhaustion. I’ll begin with Rwanda. Rather than writing a blog of epic length about Rwanda, I decided to break them up. For the first I will focus briefly on the missionaries we met. I’ll write about what we did while there in the next.

After a full day on a bus from Kampala, Julie, Kimberly, and I arrived in Kigali, Rwanda on 12 June sometime after 7pm. We had contacted Murphy Crowson before leaving Mbale. The Crowsons graciously opened their home to us when we arrived and cooked dinner for us, even sharing some precious American goodies. Another family also graciously opened their home to us allowing us to stay there even though they themselves were out of town. (Actually we had met them along the way when we spent a night in Kampala. They were on their way to Jinja for a visit.) Although we didn’t sleep in the Crowson’s home, they were wonderful hosts to us and helped us arrange anything we wanted or needed to do while in Kigali. We met several kind missionaries while there. The Koonce family is on a team with the Crowsons. Both families served many years in Togo before moving to Rwanda earlier this year; they are currently working on language study in Kigali before moving to another city in the northwest. We spent an evening worshiping at Sam and Nancy Shewmakers home along with several other missionaries and a visiting group of Pepperdine students who were being led by some of our teammates from Jinja. I very much enjoyed meeting the missionaries there, some of whom will remain in Kigali to serve and others of whom will move out of the city eventually. I wish we could have spent more time talking with the Koonces and Crowsons, but we had to return to Uganda. Despite being such a short time, I learned much from these missionaries.