I love my job!

It's been two weeks since we left Belgium. (Funny how one measures time from dates of departure in a life like this). It seems far away, for sure.

I spent last week at our favorite conference center in Rwanda with all of our Seed team reunited for the first time since the beginning of April! (Mark spent it in Kinshasa.) It was a special time to be back together with our little "family", and Serge and I were very pleased with the success - no drama, good conversations, everyone got along, we fit all of the meetings in and got to sleep some too!

Our current supervisors, Area Directors Ben and Beth Weisbrod, joined us for a day, and Ben took some really great photos, such as this one.

Beth said I was like a proud mother hen watching Ben take the picture, trying to get everyone to smile. ;) Seven out of eight is pretty good, right? (It's not the first instinct for most Africans to smile for photos.)

Thank you to those who prayed for our travel and for my health. I was feeling awful last Sunday and stressed, knowing that I had a very full week of long workdays. I was feeling better by Tuesday mid-day, and I enjoyed swimming in the lake a few times, too. Here's Ben's good work capturing Serge and me in the bright sunshine with the photo lens.

Some highlights were a really deep conversation about the fine line between generosity and corruption, a really fun TALENT SHOW in which I yodeled and the guys did a skit about the Seed interviews (and all of our challenges with skype and with language), and a boat ride + hike out to "Napoleon's Hat" island in Lake Kivu. Here's my picture of the team at the top.

I've got a lot of work to do after all of the conversations we had. Loose ends to tie up, conversations to follow up on, emails to write to ask questions or remind people of various tasks, etc. Serge is on vacation for two weeks, so I'm leading the charge here in Eastern Congo.

I'm also looking forward to our church retreat next weekend. A retreat where I get to be just a participant.

I've got a post brewing about why we're here, why I'm doing this, but it's not ready yet, so I'll just leave it at that. This week, I loved my job.

Back in the swing in Congo

We're quite happy to be back in Congo, and the adjustments have been pretty easy, praise God. We were really blessed to have both water and power on Monday night when we got back to our apartment Congo home (after a 6 hour bus ride during which we sat above a sack of dried fish that "don't smell as bad as they could"). One of our Seed participants had thoughtfully prepared a meal and bought us some essential food items (like milk for my Tuesday morning coffee! Yay!), and we felt very loved.

Since then, it's been jumping headfirst back into work for both of us. In French. We're both feeling so content with the improvements that we've made, and it's really good to feel pretty confident speaking French, even though I know I still make a lot of mistakes, but I'm essentially understood. And I have the guts to speak in French. So that's a great answer to prayer, too!

Mark also feels very happy about the fruit of our French school. He really feels a difference in how much he understands what people are saying. He's been doing a lot of work to try and figure out what his future work will look like, especially considering that everyone pretty much agrees that elections won't be happening here anytime soon. He's heading to Kinshasa for 10 days, leaving Sunday, and he's excited to show off his new French skills there, too.

Another difference I wasn't anticipating coming back is that I feel reinvigorated for the work of peacebuilding here on a systemic level. I'm preparing some sessions for our Seed retreat next week (Development, Non-Violence, Women in Conflict, and Issues in Conflict Transformation), and our program really uses a good approach by building relationships with locals who are agents of change and encouraging them, while at the same time developing our participants and challenging them to be reflective peacebuilders who can use these experiences in their future, wherever they are! I'm getting to use some of my strengths as I organize this information into presentations and collect educational resources that will help our participants be more effective in what they're doing. And I'm looking forward to being on the lakeshore again.

And the temperature here is still pretty perfect.
And Mark has a new hand drum "ndjembe" from Senegal that he's crazy about.
And I start an online course in Restorative Justice in a week and a half!

And if you're interested in the political situation here, we just finished three days of national mourning for a massacre of around 45 people in Beni territory (far north of Bukavu and Goma). The main thing I noticed was the 5 minutes of mourning, starting at 12 noon, during which everyone makes a lot of noise. (African mourning is very different from North American mourning.) Here's an interesting article a friend posted regarding the events. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/drc-pope-francis-slams-shameful-silence-international-community-light-beni-massacres-1576261

Written on the plane coming home to Congo

Things we’re looking forward to going back to Congo:

Our friends, colleagues and church family

The gratifying work

The view from our balcony

Fresh fruits, tasty bananas, avocados

The nice weather

We’ll miss the parks, the consistent electricity, the ease of transport, the access to unlimited internet, and our French teacher.

But God has been answering prayers for help during the transition. (Thank you to our praying friends!) The day of departure, I woke up very cheerful, not stressed, and as soon as we were in line at the airport for our flight to Kigali with many Africans, I was feeling so excited to be returning to Africa. I’m so thankful to know where we’re going and what we’re getting into, it makes the transition a lot easier because there’s no reason to be scared about the unknown.

Back-to-Congo prayer requests

Dear Friends and Family,

We're entering our last week of classes in Brussels! The time has passed very quickly. Many of you are getting ready for back-to-school, and we're getting ready for back-to-Congo. Please pray for us in this transition.
Pray for:
- our relationship with each other. Transition is hard!
- leaving well, with a good plan to keep learning French and thankfulness for this time of respite (when we could go on lots of nice walks in lovely parks without being conspicuous as white people!)
- confidence in the call and ministry that God has for us in Congo.
- wisdom about Mark's job situation. Wish our supervisors, he'll be entering a couple months of re-evaluating his post doing election monitoring in Kinshasa.
- that I would find joy in the small things throughout the day and understand more deeply God's grace in my life.
- that we would quickly and easily plug back into our community in Bukavu, especially our church.

And here's another picture of the Alps to enjoy.

Mark's Alps pictures

Alps, take 1

Mark felt like it would be unethical for him to be this close to the Alps and not go see them, and I couldn't refuse a good hike, so we took a quick weekend trip, and it was definitely worth it!

Here are pictures from my phone. I'm sure he'll post more from his soon.

Mark eating like a European. Just brie and ham on a baguette. He loved it.

In case you're not sure, this was a live animal. It apparently was not afraid of people.