A Bit Of Excitement…

First, thank you so much for your comments. We sit around every morning reading them as a group. The “righteous” one cracked us up. Mollie, sorry for misspelling your name.

Today we did not go to the orphanage; instead we had a meeting this morning to decide which projects we should tackle. We decided to paint the new dormitory, both in and out, and run the electric wiring. Zach is going to do a mural for us to paint as well.

We didn’t have a ton of time left so Gabi (Father Gabriel) decided to take us to the church that his sister is getting married in on Sat. It rained a ton last night and the roads were especially bad as most of the trash piles had turned to mud. Luckily we were riding in a 4WD Land Cruiser and were able to make it through, but we did have some difficulty in spots.

The church is embedded in one of the poorest sections of Limete and seeing a jeep full of white people turned out to be something. They treated us as celebrities along with reaching in the jeep to touch us and talk to us. Most were commenting about the car full of Chinese people as they had not seen many people of light skin. There is a significant population of Chinese here that are doing business and Gabi says all light skinned people look alike to the Congolese (Love the irony). There was one lady that got it right and said “look at the whites on holiday.” School had just gotten out as we approached the church and a lot of kids were being drawn to us.

On arrival a young man came up to the van and saw that Julius (one of the passionists) was riding in the back and said that he was happy to see whites and black together as we are all brothers.

We toured the church – it was very nice. We heard an amazing choir, with only a set of African drums for instruments, practicing for the weekend. I’m looking forward to hearing them on Sat. for the wedding.

As we were getting ready to go, a lot of the school kids had filtered into the parish through the gate and were beginning to gather around. Doug, Christian, Zach, and Shannin started dancing for the kids and then Christian decided to take a picture with a flash. As innocent as that sounds it sent everyone into an uproar. We noticed that flash photography is a very new experience for most Africans and they got very excited at seeing it.


Some of the adults promptly tried to calm everyone down and shoo the kids away. As we were leaving we were mobbed by little kids. The road was terrible in this area and it prevented us from going anywhere quickly. The kids were so close to the jeep we were afraid that someone might get hurt. We thought they were singing us a beautiful song until Julius told us they were chanting the name of a white vegetable. Gabi and Julius got out to walk alongside the jeep to keep the kids off of it. Gabi thinks we should walk in next time as it will draw less attention.

We’re glad to be back at the mission. Here’s a pic of Zach taking his bucket - white vegetable fits doesn't it?


And yes, we had fish for dinner. Paul’s getting a little tired of taking one for the team as he’s getting tired of eating the fish.