called by name

I tell you what…the days here are crazy long but the weeks seem to fly by! I realized (from the questions of a number of dear friends) that I had not written since I began teaching! Well, I believe God heard the prayers voiced in my last blog post because the very next day I started teaching. It was certainly a slow slow start with a painfully floppy schedule at first but each week it gets better. For the last three weeks I have been teaching S2 and S3 students and it has been a lot of fun. The lessons have been kind of random since these are not going to be my permanent students (once the S1 students return on the 7th of Feb I will shift to teach them full time). Basically I have just been choosing random topics that I thought were interesting or fun to talk about and practice different kinds of activities. So far we have covered question words, letter writing (Emma and Tess can get excited since they have about 100 letters coming their way), advertising, futball vocabulary, a story called Police Chase and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Its been fun and I am starting to feel more comfortable in my position as a teacher. It is always difficult to find the balance between being friendly and fun with the students and being strict and authoritative, I think I am starting to find my stride. It will certainly be nice, however, when I have my own students so that I can start building my units, establishing procedures, and knowing students names etc.
Rukara is wonderful, it is starting to feel more and more like home. We are entering the hot, dry season which is a bit painful, and we have had a rude introduction this week with incredibly high temperatures and no water in the whole village.
My house is now all decorated (painted some scrap wood from a construction pile with sunflowers….I am so predictable sometimes) and I have a bed and bookshelves and a table which beats the heck out of having piles of stuff on the floor.
Today was the first meeting of a new club called G.L.O.W. club, it stands for Girls Leading Our World, which is VERY exciting. I am really hoping this club can be a safe place for girls to blossom. In Rwandan high schools there are far fewer girls than boys so as my training director in Nyanza liked to say the girls who are still there are the survivors who have resisted family pressure to drop out to work at home, have children or get married. Girls also fall behind boys in performance in school and it is just clear that they are (as a whole-obviously there are those standout girls in every class) more insecure and shy in class. As many of you probably know I LOVE WOMEN and that means I am super pumped at the prospect of encouraging, challenging and getting to know in a personal way the teenage girls in my village! I gave the girls a long speech about the purpose, method and ideology of the club and summed it up by saying the club is about fun, learning and serving i.e. its going to be a blast. My good friend and neighbor Floflo is going to help me with the club which is SO EXCITING! She is a lawyer and an orphan and is just an incredible example of a powerful, smart, independent woman who is quickly becoming a dear friend! She is not very involved in the Rukara community even though she has lived here for a year and she thinks I am way weird for the way I am always moving and talking to people but she puts up with me…hahaha. BUT she asked if she can be apart of GLOW! I about cried with joy!
Of course I am bubbling over with ideas but God has been faithful to give me patience to just be with people before I even begin to try and problem solve or implement my ideas. And for once in my short little life I am ok with that. I am actually having so much joy in taking it slow.
I used to say at Furman that I was trying to do so much that I was not doing anything with excellence but merely half doing everything. Well right now I feel I am in a season where I can actually do things with excellence because life is slow and I am surprising myself by really finding joy in the slowness.
My language skills are coming along and I am starting to feel like I have real friends here. Its also funny because my friends are real adults. Haha After being in school for so long is kind of funny to suddenly find that my natural community is adults-lawyers, secretaries and teachers. ☺
The people here are slowly starting to recognize me as a person rather than just a Muzungu, and the hollers of "Muzungu!" are slowly being replaced with calls of "Ket Ket" (their interpretation of Caitlyn) or "Gasaro" (my kinyarwanda name which means rare bead).
Isn’t it funny how there is just something about being known that just changes everything? It seems as though this desire to be known is one of the core, inescapable characteristics of human kind. It is why we have blogs and twitter and facebook. It drives our friendships and shapes even how we view ourselves. It seems as though people are scrambling to be known by any means necessary. But why are we scrambling? The Bible has told us that God has called us by name. We are known by him-completely and deeply known. This truth has become more meaningful to me in the last month. My heart leaps a little every time someone in my village calls out my name and not just muzungu, and yet the God of the universe has called me by name and I am his! I am blown away and humbled by this powerful truth and I pray that I would be more and more moved by this everyday. If the God of the universe has called me by name, whom shall I fear? Why should I scramble to be known or understood, accepted or proven worthwhile by worldly standards? I have been called by name. It is a journey and a process to really internalize and live out this truth and a joy that we get to do this journey in community.
I hope today you feel in your core that you are called by name-that you don’t have to scramble, that you are loved and that you have been counted worthy on his account. That truth frees us to love deeply and encourage one another on to good works for his Glory and not ours☺

Much much love and shalom
cg

Staying connected

Some other Peace Corps Volunteers and I opened a BP box where you can mail me things...not going to lie, a snail mail letter or care package can be soul reviving! So if the spirit should take you and you want to write address your letter/package as follows:

Caitlyn Griffith/Peace Corps Volunteer
BP 47
Rwamagana
Rwanda

and believe it or not thats all it takes!
letter take about 3 weeks and packages can take about two months to get here via US postal service.
I promise to write you back:)

much love to you all

cg

in the small things

Most of the wisdom I have to share comes from something I have read. A few days ago I read something most timely and thought I would share. Compliments of Ms. Katie Shultz, I have been reading the book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. Yesterday the devotional included a small anecdote about a lay brother named Brother Lawrence from the 17th century who learned to integrate passion for Christ into the mundane and ordinary tasks of washing dishes and keeping the kitchen. He challenged others to “do our common business wholly for the love of Him.”
Right now, my life is a bunch of common business, a collection of mundane and frankly frustrating at times, tasks. I must learn to live the small moments, do the menial tasks with great passion and zeal for Christ and his kingdom. Glorifying God in the small things. I mean when you get down to it, I guess that’s what its all about. Oswald Chambers writes a lot about the challenge of being a disciple in the in-between times. The human spirit is resilient and can get us through the tragedies and “big moments.” Its being radical in the small things and living it day in and day out through the small moments that is what really defines our disciple status.
Today is my one week anniversary of being at my site, my small village of Rukara. It’s hard to believe that I have over 100 more weeks here. I truthfully have not been in one place that long in over 5 years!
This week has been packed and the days have been long. There have been so many minutes both high and low and the emotional whirl wind of trying to get my head around what I am doing here has left me on the brink of tears more than once. A few highlights from the week have been: my craft projects as I have been making my two concrete rooms into a home (its coming a long….my favorite projects being the transformation of my metal trunk into a padded bench with fantastic Rwandan fabric on top and my makeshift pantry made from cinder blocks and scrap wood from the local carpenter that I painted bright orange and green); I cooked for everyone in our little row house (about ten people) Mexican fajitas and they loved it (or were really good at acting like it-highly possible because Rwandans are not too keen on new food); I have tried to go on long walks every day to talk to people and introduce myself and that’s been really fun and a big test of my Kinyarwanda; I made (sort of) kettle corn and had a movie night with my neighbors and 6 girls ranging in age from 3 to 30 climbed into one bed to watch Prince Caspian as I tried to (fairly unsuccessfully) translate for them; I have found a great running route that goes through a lot of very beautiful, very peaceful farmland; AND I had a wonderful visit with the nuns I stayed with last time I was here and I am going to go over there twice a week to teach them English, do crafts (and eat food with them-they have an oven!!!); also I have a new friend named Magnific who is six and practically my shadow-haha. Peace Corps recommended that we not let kids into our home but on day one that proved impossible as she made herself right home among my things and just kept saying over and over “ni munsi mukuru, ni munsi mukuru!” which means “it’s a holiday, it’s a party!” hahaha and she has barely left my side ever since. Sometimes I guiltily lock my door to get a little privacy and keep her out. The funniest part is that she seems to be under the impression that I am fluent in Kinyarwanda and therefore has a constant stream of words coming out of her mouth at a low mumble so that even the words I know I can’t understand! Hahah it doesn’t keep to bother her that I just make little ”mmm” and “ooo” noises instead of actually responding.
School started(ish) on Monday which was certainly noteworthy day even if not especially meaningful. Apparently school here only fake starts on the day it is publicized to start. We were warned about this but its just so much more frustrating to experience it! I showed up a few minutes to 7 (starting time) on Monday and found myself alone with the headmaster. He informed me I might as well go home and he would call me when things started happening. And slowly slowly kids started trickling, their mothers behind them. About two thousand of the 6 thousand showed up the first day. Now I think of myself as a pretty savvy muzungu-you know I have been to east Africa, I know how things work, I am used to being stared at and yelled at and answer pretty patiently to the name “muzungu” and the kids who charge you to shake your hand. But let me just tell you, two thousand kids charging you and screaming at you is another story entirely. Frankly I was terrified. I mean kids were getting run over and trampled! Madness. I now know I have to go around the primary school and not through it to get to the secondary school if I don’t want a high intensity, near death experience at 7 in the morning.
Second surprise is that the grade I am teaching-Senior 1-doesn’t start until February because the Ministry has not yet finished grading their exams from last year. So for the next month I will just be stuck in random classes to teach random, disjointed lessons. (does my tone let you know how I feel about that) and observing Rwandan teachers. Also I will be starting an English club, creative expressions club, teaching English to the other teachers, and teaching the nuns in theory in the next month but things just kind of move on their own time so who knows when these things will actually happen. I am learning, however, that I don’t have to wait to be radically loving and justice seeking until my official “job” starts. I am trying to be radical and passionate in the way I love the people in my row house, in the way I treat and talk to the umukozi (house help who cleans the other houses) and respond to irritatingly forward men in the town. There does not have to be this big divide between your Job and the rest of your life…in fact their shouldn’t be! I am here to serve and love people and hopefully make their lives better in the long term by my existence here.
Well Magnific is getting antsy watching me write this so I am going to go and take the (sort of ) chocolate chip cookies I baked in my makeshift dutchoven over to her aunt’s house to share them☺
So the moral of the story, team, is be radical in the small things, talk to your neighbors, talk to the town crazy, be kind in unexpected ways, make things beautiful-especially things that aren’t usually beautiful like concrete walls and sidewalks!
Much much love to you all and a happy, shalom filled and sought new year!