Kibimba

     Sunday is the Lord’s Day, set aside in my life for church. This Sunday, we attended church in Kibimba, the town where Vickie spent much of her youth.  She goes by her maiden name there, and it was immediately obvious why: her parents are well known, well loved people. Mr. and Mrs. Young, if you’re reading this, I assure you that your friends in Kibimba have forgotten neither you nor your daughter, and many, many people were delighted to see her.  We attended a beautiful cross-shaped church where all of the worship singing and instrument playing and dancing took place in the center, where the four separate ends of the cross meet.  We, as we were with Vickie Young, were treated as honored guests and were seated on the stage directly behind the pulpit. 

     It was a long service.  Despite the ever-present language barrier, it was in many ways a very rich service.  It was also a bit rough in a few ways.  I have not been sleeping as well as I could be, so I have been running on less energy than I am used to having.  Mornings are rough for me when I sleep okay, so when I’m not sleeping okay, they’re even harder.  That fact, partnered with the fact that the service was three and a half hours long made it difficult for me to remain fully alert, and during the sermon, I admit that I dozed off.  My fellow world travelers were eager to suddenly awaken me, though, using any means at their disposal.  This includes the flash on a camera.  Thank you very much, Christopher.

     Don’t think, though, that I didn’t enjoy it.  Sure, it was a bit difficult for me to endure, but trust me when I say that these people have a love for God that is unbelievable.  I only wish that I could show my love as readily as they.  So many groups performed songs of praise with dancing and instrumentation that simply blew me away.  It was truly amazing, and I’d go back in a heartbeat.

     Then we toured the hospital at Kibimba, the second best one in Burundi.  It was very difficult to see people in various states of sickness in a place with no air conditioning or an extraordinary amount of privacy.  What little privacy there was was lessened by the eagerness of Samson, our guide, to show us how much they can do.  I’m told that we didn’t infringe as much on this tour as the group did that went two years ago, but it was still, by American standards, unbelievable. He showed us into a room where a woman was listing her symptoms to a nurse and then spitting up into a Ziploc bag.  Outside of that room, J.D. got an unwanted eyeful from a woman who decided to show him her bandaged-up left breast.  He had wanted to get a picture of the women sitting behind her and was readying his camera, but after she did that, he just let it hang from his neck and avoided eye contact with her.  She stared intently at him, seeming to want something.  None of us, however, speak enough Kirundi to have asked her what she was doing.  By the time anyone who could speak with her was around, we just wanted to move on.

     Around the corner stood an African man whose feet were gray and rough.  They looked like gravel, as though he was petrifying from the feet up.  Daniella, David’s eldest daughter, went over to him and talked to him for a short while.  His voice was high pitched, as though he was speaking in falsetto.  When she rejoined us, we all asked her what the problem was.  She told us that the man said that the doctors didn’t know what was going on with him, but that he was in pain.  I almost cried.  For an infection to look that inhuman, to be in pain, to have come to the second-best hospital in your country and told that the doctors didn’t know how to help you; I can think of nothing more terrifying, and he’s been on my mind since.

     From there, we walked by the maternity wards, where, Samson told us, a baby is born every four minutes.  It was hard to believe that even here the rate is that high.  By the time we got back to where the tour started, we were all very ready to go back to the THARS campus and unwind.  We huddled together and watched How to Train Your Dragon in the yard behind our guest house.  I had left the DVD in my computer from when I decided to watch it a few weeks ago.  It turned out to be just the thing we needed to recover from the day’s stress.