Kwibuka and Independence Day

 

     Today, I learned that David and Felicité are truly amazing people and that our God is very powerful.  We visited Kwibuka, the village where David was born, married, lived for many years, and where he had three of his four children.  It is also the place where he was fired at and almost killed.  He was teaching at the boarding school in Kwibuka, a class of both Hutus and Tutsis, when a truck of soldiers drove up the road and fired at them.  You can read the whole story in David’s book, Unlocking Horns.

     It was unbelievable to see the real place that it happened, and more unbelievable to hear David and Felicité tell the story.  It was almost as though such horrible things had happened to other people, with the way that they told the story.  I’ve never known Felicité to look troubled, but I was amazed to hear and see her tell us about how she thought that her husband was dead with part of a smile on her face.  You can’t even imagine the joy she expressed when she told us about the moment she found out that he was still alive.  It was truly a magical sight. 

     The true magic, though, was in the way they told us about burying the reeking bodies of David’s dead students with almost the same demeanor as when they showed us their first house or the church where they were married. These are truly people that God has healed, and they are a testament to the true healing that can happen, that they are trying to instill in others.

     That is the true purpose of this trip: to educate Burundian counselors to be able to guide their patients through the same amazing healing process that David and Felicité have undergone, to show them that there is hope for healing, even from something as heartrending as war or genocide.

     Today was also Burundi’s Independence Day, July 1^st.  We went to a stadium in the center of Gitega proper where, it seemed, all of Gitega turned out to walk in the parade, leaving only the city government and special people to watch it.  We qualified as the latter, and we sat for five hours as every child in the school system, public and private, and every professional in the city walked around the soccer field holding a banner that said what organization they belonged to.  It was not the most exciting thing that we’ve done here, but it was a very cool glimpse into the culture of the city that we would not have gotten otherwise.  I was talking to Daniella, David’s eldest daughter, and I asked her if she was in the parade when she was in school.  She said she was, so naturally, I asked her if it’d been fun.  She responded with a prompt and emphatic no, there was too much waiting and rehearsing and such.  I could hardly blame her, in fact, that was the answer I’d expected.  Such is the way of those types of things, I suppose.