Rwanda Trip Part 1

Emily has been gracious enough to give me a few days to talk about the trip I took with some people from our church to Rwanda. Our church partners with a group from Kigali called Africa New Life Ministries (http://africanewlife.org/). I will probably have a separate post about ANLM and the ministry that they have in Rwanda. This was the third time that people from our church have gone on mission in Rwanda, but my first. It was really an amazing, life-changing kind of trip.

We arrived in Kigali late at night and met the Rwanda IMB missionary and our contact with Africa New Life. As an aside, we didn’t really do a lot with the IMB missionaries this time, but look forward to helping them with future projects with later trips. They are really making great strides in church planting as well as buildings and agricultural development/training for various villages around Kigali.

We arrived at the ANL Guesthouse, where we would spend our nights and eat our meals. I roomed with our missions director, which ended up being nice because we got one of the best rooms.

This is the guesthouse where we stayed

Our bedroom in the guesthouse



The wonderful view of the sunrise over Kigali. I got to look at this every morning!

There were three teams from our church on this mission: youth/evangelism, medical, and leadership. The leadership team led a conference for Rwandan pastors, some of whom drive as long as 2 hours every day to join the conference. At the conference they received instruction on pastoral care, English language, Biblical leadership principles, and Christian family counseling. One of the speakers even led a dinner banquet for Kigali young business professionals on one of the nights where young churchgoing businesspeople from Kigali had to bring at least one unchurched friend to dinner to hear about Biblical leadership principles. Of course the Gospel was presented at that dinner as well.

This is the only picture I have from the pastor's conference. You can't see him well, but the translator in the front of the room, Moses, was actually with me on the remaining clinic days.


I was, of course, on the medical team. Our first day was spent in preparation for the medical mission trips. On a previous trip to Rwanda, the medical team had bought all the medications beforehand. They ended up not getting them until the day they left, but found that it was surprisingly easy to get all of the medications they needed from local pharmacies. So we just took care of purchasing and starting to divide up the medicines that first day. We also did some touring of the facilities at the Kigali Dream Center (the main headquarters for ANLM), and attended the start of the pastor’s conference.

The next day was spent at the Kigali Dream Center ministering to the “street boys.” There are an estimated 3000 street children in Kigali, and another 4000 or so in the rest of the country. One of the ministries of ANLM is that every Monday and Thursday, they provide food for these street boys and a church service like time where they can sing, dance and hear testimonies from other street boys. We set up a clinic where we treated the boys for any wounds that they may have and then each boy got a worm medicine as well. ANLM is working on building a clinic at their Kigali campus which would allow for them or mission teams to treat for other things as well.

Everyone keeps asking me what my favorite part of the trip was, and that is a very difficult thing to answer. But if I am forced to answer just one specific time, it would probably be this day ministering to these orphan/street boys. They just wanted so much to be loved, that they would actively seek us out to hold our hands and give us hugs. Holding hands is a sign of friendship throughout Africa (I am told), and it is not uncommon to see two grown men walking down a street holding hands. This is merely a sign of friendship. These street boys were eager to hold my hand during the festivities. Some were just interested in touching me. They had likely never been this close and personal with a mzungu (white person) before, and they were interested to feel my hairy arms and curly, different hair. By making sure I held each or their hands if they wanted it, I was able to really form some sweet bonds with some of the boys. During the music time they would bring us out to dance. This became pretty exhausting, dancing for 15-20 minutes at a time, but it was hard to say no. Thankfully there are no videos of these “dances” that I am aware of. Sadly, since I was so involved interacting with the boys, I didn’t get any pictures on my phone with them. I know some other members from our team got some, and I will be sure to post some as soon as I can.

This is the room where we had clinic for the street boys, and the site of my horiffic dancing later in the day.

This is one of our team members with a sweet little boy. I will try to get pictures of me on this day sometime and post them on here

I am planning on having just one more post chronicling the trip, and then a final post talking more about Africa New Life Ministries and ways you can support them. I hope you find it interesting.

-Matt