Butare.

Hello everyone!

Sorry that it has been so long. I am also sorry if this blog is short, but we don't know when the internet will cut out, and the power has been going off every five minutes. I can say we are definitely in rainy season now - we are all losing our tans and making sure our ponchos are always on hand! Rainy season, means monsoon season. If it rains, it pours!

Our second week in Gisenyi was good, we made trips to the hospitals (it was very moving this last time) we worked with the church, we went to the lake and local basketball courts just to simply talk to the locals of the town and over the days we built up relationships. We also worked in a doll shop, somedays we didn't have a translator so we jusst sat and smiled at the women (it sounds like nothing - but smiles have started to communicate a lot here!) but the days we had testimonies we answered their questions about our lives and asked them about theirs. It was great - and we are going back to them after our weeks here in Buatre.

While in Butare I also experienced that bed bugs are very very real!  I woke up one morning to over 50 bites all over our body! It was/still is awful! I feel like I have chicken pox, they are soo itchy and they itch for days and days and days! So bad! I really hope they don't scar, I have them on my face, arms, legs, stomach, back - you name it and it's there! Whitney has been great, lathering me in cream before I go to bed - basically  all over my body. I also feel like a child as people yell "Lauren!" in the middle of their conversation with someone else because they see me out of the corner of their eye scratching like mad. They said the next step is a straight jacket. Just hoping they don't scar, especially those on the face!

We met a woman named Joy who told us her account of the genocide. She went into a lot of detail which was difficult, but necessary for us to understand. As she told her story, we saw her mutilated hand fly back and forth as she loved talking with her hands, soldiers had cut off her finger when she refused to tell where people she was hiding were. I have the written account which I am bringing home, and it would take a few hours to even tell you everything - but she is one of the bravest women I have ever met, and she still has a joy inside of her. She has been raped, beaten, hurt, her family killed infront of her, and when you meet her you would say that she has the brightest smile in the world.

So we have been in Butare for a week. We are working with the sweetest old woman ever - she is 81 years old and full of life. She is hilarious! She reminds of a mixture between Betty White and my own grandma - I am going to be so sad to leave her. She is a widow, when her husband died she decided to leave everything she has and move to Rwanda to help the orphans and widows here. She has opened a workshop - an amazing workshop, which is where we have been working. In this workshop work orphans and widows who are paid for everything they make. Whether it be dolls, jewelery, bags, uniforms, wooden sculptures or even working in the fields. Right now they don't have any orders so she is struggling to provide them with income, but we have been helping fill up their stock with jewelery. I have a new found respect for beaded bracelets! When i show you when i come you - you'll say thats nothing, because really it is. It is sad how many hours it took us to make one tiny bracelet. It is so intricate, and our eyes would be burning after an hour. They laugh us a lot as we poke our fingers with needles every five seconds, and hand the tangled mess of string and beeds over to them to fix. Literally one girl just laughed at me for an hour because everything she moved her attention to something else for the smallest amount of time I would make a mistake. You need to remember we are learning how to make these bracelets and things from their little little little knowledge of English and our little knowledge of Kinya-Rwanda. We laugh, they laugh, we sigh, they sigh - it all works out.

This coming week will be spent with Monique continuing to work in her workshop, we will be teaching both French and English classes and I think I heard something about making bird cages.
Then on Friday we are going back to Gisenyi for the long 6 hour bus trip through the winding hills. We will do our debrief there by the lak, then next Friday we head back to Kigali to get on the plane to fly to France! It will be another long trip with a stop in Brussels but soon we will be able to have hot showers! Yay!

<3 i love you all, and you have no idea how excited I am to see all of your wonderful faces