Mana Mfasha for the Townsends

This LST mission project has offered a flood of experiences that God has used and will continue to use to mold and shape us and hopefully shine a little more of His light in a world that needs His peace and love. Monday morning was no exception as Dana and I visited "Mana Mfasha Pour Les Enfants," the pre-school operated by John, one of my readers.

I shared the remarkable story of John and his school in a previous blog entry, but now the story has flesh on it and is even more compelling. It's one thing to listen to John talk about the children with obvious love and compassion. It's quite another to:

• See their infectious smiles in person
• Hold their hands and have them curiously rub my hairy white arm
  
• Observe 3- and 4-year-olds sit quietly after getting a chocolate cookie from Dana, waiting until everyone had been served. Only after saying in unison a prayer of thanks did they eat the cookie and drink their "milk tea."
• Encourage the 3- and 4-year-olds as they wrote the numbers 1-10 on a chalk board and pronounced them in English
• Witness 24 five-year-olds singing the ABCs song while crammed into a room no bigger than many American walk-in closets
• Watch six-year-olds from one of the poorer neighborhoods in Kigali spell/write the numbers 1-10 in cursive and count to 200 by 2s, 5s, and 10s
• Hear those same six-year-olds recite in English from memory a poem about animals in a zoo
• See the homework booklets into which the teachers painstakingly copied each assignment... by hand, for each child. The same is true for exams - the teacher writes each copy by hand
• Listen to John explain the help they offer children who have parents who can't read or speak English and therefore cannot help their child with the homework assignments
• Have over a hundred children swarm around me and press ever closer while I play the guitar, then start dancing and laughing joyfully when I play a raucous blues lick
• Laugh with them as we teach them how to sing "Father Abraham" with all the actions
• Hear 112 children recite John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 in English

These were the best behaved school children we have EVER seen, and they are pre-schoolers! The teachers had complete control despite children packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the small classrooms. These children are learning and will enter primary school with a tremendous advantage over others. It was a wonder to behold. The morning was capped by a delicious meal cooked by John's wife, Alphonsine, on two small charcoal stoves in their "kitchen," which is the ground outside their back door.

In one our reading sessions at Christ's Church in Rwanda, I taught John about "mixed emotions." Our visit to Mana Mfasha left us with mixed emotions because the school and John's home will be razed at some point in the not-too-distant future. One part of "progress" in Kigali consists of knocking down small homes and shantys to erect mansions for the wealthy. John's school will soon have huge homes on three sides so it's just a matter of time before he is forced to move his family and his school. Likewise, the many poor homes below John's where most of his students live will be destroyed and the residents displaced. But that doesn't seem to discourage John or keep him from dreaming big. He already has a plot of land picked out that he wants to buy to use for recreation now and then rebuild his school to government specifications so they can't condemn it like they will his current location. There are so many hurdles to overcome that many of us would lose heart and want to give up. But even the $8,000 price tag for the land pictured to the right does not deter this man who recently had to cut in half the daily per child milk allotment because he couldn't afford the $10 cost.

To address the cost of milk, John dreams of owning a dairy cow - a dream Dana and I will help come true. We are going to buy the cow for him, but there will be other expenses until the cow can produce milk and alleviate the daily expense of the milk for the children. If you're interested in helping, send me an email.

I titled this blog entry "Mana Mfasha for the Townsends" - God's Help for Harvard and Dana - because God is teaching us so many things from this experience. I may be the "worker" and John the "reader" in LST parlance, but God has used John and the children he serves to teach us far more than I will ever teach him.