I will forever find inspiration recalling the laughter, innocence and perceverance of the children of Gisimba...

The last days with my kids at Gisimba were so warm and heartfelt – I began to realize for the first time just how hard it was going to be to say goodbye...It was a week of exams, even for the five year olds!

I helped the teacher prepare the drawing for the "parts of a plant" exam, using the banana tree picture I had taught them earlier in the year. During their exam, I sat with a few of the kids who were struggling figuring out where on the paper to write their answers. I realized by sitting with them individually that they could indeed name the parts of the plant (leaf, flower, fruit, stem, roots) but just did not know where to write the answers. I got approval from the teacher to go ahead and write the answers if they knew them properly. One of the girls, Agape, was nearly in tears because she didn’t know where to write the answers. I called her over, sat her on my lap, and gave her exciting “great job!!” responses when she got each one right. I was so thrilled to see how her mood improved dramatically. Such serious young students! The kids were doing another exam to test their ability to form letters and had to make the letter E with clay. I was assigned the exciting task of walking through the kids and assigning them their score: excellent, very good, or good. :-) It was exciting to be playing such a role in their final week.

There is a really quiet girl, Rita, who I realized just sits mostly by herself during the recess break after their breakfast. One day the last week I sat next to her on the ledge and put my hand on her back. She looked up at me, smiled, put her hand on my leg, and we just sat there watching the other kids play. This lasted for only a few moments due to the other children finding an easy opportunity to jump on the teacher, but for those few minutes, I felt at such peace with this small, innocent little life...These are the quiet moments that make life worth living...

Thursday I began making paper hats for the end-of-year school party the teacher was going to have the following Friday. I folded five different versions of a paper hat for the teacher to select one. I proceeded then with 37 copies of that hat! We drew pictures and colored them to get them all decorated. We also worked on cutting out 37 pairs of paper eyeglasses. What a crazy fun party I am sure this was on Friday, which I had to miss!

Last Friday was my last real day to spend with the kids at the nursery school. Wanting to leave something special for each of them, I decided to make some certificates for them, each with a phrase as to why I loved their presence in my class. I spent an entire evening cutting, gluing, writing and stickering each one. For each of my teachers, I wrote a letter and gave a chocolate bar. For Jean Paul and Kharim, I wrote each a special note, trying to reinforce the importance of persuing goals and believing in yourself and working hard for that which you believe. When I exchanged my note with Jean Paul, he gave me a folder of beautiful necklaces made there at Gisimba and a short but sweet note thanking me for me time there. For Kharim, I decided I would read it to him to ensure he would actually understood it all (considering I was teaching him how to read). It was really challenging for me, and I found myself trying so hard to fight back the tears. I told him how proud I was of him and that I hoped he could learn from this experience that anything is possible if you work hard enough at it. I hoped, too, that he would be able to continue learning English after I left...You see, I have had this fear that my time there with him may not end up having any long term effect if he doesn´t keep trying to learn. I just have to keep hoping and praying that he will find the strength to believe in himself and to keep pushing himself forward. Some of these kids have their own internal discipline whereas others live simply day by day and plan little for their future. Kharim had fallen into that latter category, but with some of our talks, I hope he can change his perspectives...he sat there as I read my note to him and hugged me and told me he would never forget me...it is true that he will always have a special place in my heart. I think if I could have adopted a 16 year old child, I would have brought him home with me! We spent that afternoon reading a couple of books. He gathered some of the other kids together with whom he had taught some singing and dancing for other visitors and they sang for me. What beautiful voices from heaven...I was so very thankful for my camera to be able to capture such moments to treasure them for years to come. I played some foot-stomping and hand clapping games, too, with some of the other girls. It was so adorable because I had yet to figure out how one actually wins at this game and how they know what clapping pattern to have and when to put out their foot. It became evident to me that for the first time they were actually trying to teach me how to play instead of just laughing with me! :-) And by them doing this, I actually finally learned the point! Only took me three months!

So, although I was prepared for Friday to be my very last day, when I reconfirmed with my teacher, she asked that I come back on Monday. Little did I know at that time how little time I would actually have on Monday to spend with the kdis...when I did arrive after a long morning at the local police (that story will be explained below!!), I discovered that the teachers wanted to make me an African outfit! Anna-Marie took me to the local market to let me pick out a beautiful African batik. Returning to Gisimba, my measurements were taken and I realized I had to return the following day – my very last day in Rwanda – to pick it up. It was so beautiful, but more than anything, I was so moved that they wanted to do something so special for me! I went three months at Gisimba wondering if I was really bonding with the teachers and it wasn’t until my very last day that I realized just how much I was going to miss them, too! They kept joking, asking me to stay just a little longer. It made me feel so special and really touched my soul...

...and how my spirit has been forever shaped by the children at Gisimba....Gisimba is such a well-funded orphanage by the Belgiums that they tend to have a lot of visitors coming through to greet the children. It seems that these kids are so used to having visitors around that they do not necessarily need the attention and love of the visitors or volunteers. They always seem so independent and rely heavily on the house mothers and the older orphans for all their concerns and needs. Having spent three months there, it was evident that there were some kids who had become accustomed to my being there, but even so, it seems that they are so used to saying goodbye and letting people go that saying bye wasn’t so difficult for them. On my last day, for each hug I shared with these kids, I held on just a little longer...I love them all, each for their own unique charm! It was certainly much harder for me to let them go than the other way around. And not being able to share in English exactly what I was feeling, I did the best I could to keep my tears hidden....As I write this now, it is safe to say I am shedding more tears now than I did that day. Getting ready for my departure I was full of so many contradictory emotions. But now, as I sit here, just remembering their smiles and their laughter and their innocence, I cannot help but have a longing in my heart for them. I know they will all be fine. It is crazy how, as a volunteer, you enter into such an experience wanting to enrich the lives of these children and show them the unconditional love that you think they may be lacking. However, by the end you begin to realize just how much it may be more the other way around. These children have really taught me something about life and love and caring and what it means to truly overcome challenging situations. Their energy and enthusiasm and love for life are all incredibly contagious.........

After my emotional goodbyes, my final weekend I spent traveling to Gisenyi with two other volunteers. This town is in the northwest part of the country, boarding Goma in the DRC. Just at the northern tip of Lake Kivu, the views and beaches were to be incredible and would be a great way to end my stay in Rwanda...It was an exciting weekend, but was full of more rain storms than I would like to remember....little did I know that just 48 hours before my departure, there would be more excitment to endure.....

Returning from the weekend in Gisenyi, our volunteer group of seven decided to meet at a restaurant we had been to for so many other volunteer farewell dinners. After waiting for an hour for the other volunteers to meet us in town, we placed our pizza orders and I was so incredibly disappointed to learn that there was no spinach for my favorite spinach pizza!! From the exhausting and draining weekend, I was so disappointed. After about five minutes thinking of what else I felt like, the woman taking our order came to me and told me not to worry – she was going to the market to buy me some spinach! I couldn´t believe it! This is how life in Rwanda is. No other customers in the restaurant so their goal is to satisfy those that are there...it was so incredibly sweet! I was thinking to myself how I needed to get a photo with this woman when we were done with dinner...

Since the place was pretty empty, we had been storing our backpacks at the booth behind us. After placing the order with the woman, there was only one person who was serving our table; a young man who seemed to care little for the real comfort of his customers. I hadn´t thought much of it until immediately after eating, I went for my camera to get a photo of my new friend, and discovered my camera was missing. It was extremely apparent, although we took a lot of time giving him the benefit of the doubt, that the young man who was our server was the guilty party. Searching for two hours through every employee´s lockers, coats, pants, and cook line, the bar, everywhere, I began to outright accuse this young man of taking my camera. It seemed that the woman who found my spinach was also a bit suspicious of him. He continued to deny and told me that only God could judge him. What if some how I was accussing the wrong person?!

I was so incredibly emotional! I had been downloading photos to my jump drive throughout my stay, but the memory card on my camera contained all of the video and photos of my farewell with the children at Gisimba from that Friday. We tried numerous times to tell him and to just announce in the restaurant that if suddenly the memory card just appeared on the counter, we would leave and be fine...the camera was of little importance; it was all of the pictures on the card that were so meaningful and would be sorely missed...Nothing happened. By this time, the entire staff was helping us look. They called the manager who showed up and with whom we went through the same questioning. After a little longer, he decided to go pick up a couple of police officers and bring them by to help us solve the problem. As hopeless as it may have seemed, everything in Rwanda is about making guests feel comfortable. It was obvious, since no one else was coming or going, that someone on his staff took the camera, and he wasn´t going to just forget about it. After another hour or so with the police (four hours in total just looking and questioning and accusing...), they took the young man to jail to hold him overnight. I was to return at 8am the following morning to give my official statement.

Waking up the next morning, I felt incredibly hopeless. What incentive did this young man have to turn over the camera?! Another volunteer came with me to the station and thank goodness she did! It was over an hour wait of watching and listening to random prisoners before I was able to meet with someone and recount all of events from the previous night – how exhausting that was! I kept thinking that I was just wasting my time. I would have rather been at Gisimba trying to capture new photos of all my kids to try and replace those that had been lost...but I only had a few hours to get there to do it, and here I was filing a report for a missing camera...who was I kidding?!

After an interesting questioning session, they decided to go and see if the guy was still behind bars and to ask him a few more questions. It wasn’t long before he was out from behind bars, telling me he didn’t know what to say, and turned to my friend asking in French if he could speak with her separately. It ended up that he had spent the night in that holding cell and began questioning his life; what he was going to do about his job, his university, his family, and he realized he was sorry. He wanted to take us back to the restaurant to retrieve the camera if we would tell his boss we made an error and he could keep his job. After making a quick statement with the police that I had made a mistake and no longer needed the help of the police, we headed back to the restaurant with the kid´s identity card in my pocket – something so important to him that we could trust he wouldn´t run away on the walk...

The short of it is that I was able to get my camera back. Having been sitting in the bushes all night in the pouring rain, the camera no longer worked, but the memory card was saved! When it came time to talk to his boss, instead of telling the boss that we made as error, we told him the truth...we wanted the manager to forgive him as we did. And I did forgive him...I had been asking myself for the previous 12 hours why this was happening to me; that I had spent three months here contributing to the children in the country, helping a complete stranger sick on the road just days prior, and this was going to be the thanks I get?! It didn´t make sense. I really believe that things happen for a reason and I wanted to believe that something good could come from this entire episode. From this whole experience, if this young man could re-evaluate his priorities and perhaps change his mind about the type of character he wanted to be, than I would feel so much better about the whole thing. But when we sat with the young man in front of this boss and looked him in the eye telling him this was his chance to tell the truth, he sat there and looked at his boss and told the lie he thought we had shared. My heart sunk...I wanted so badly to believe that he was truly sorry...but lying for him in order for him to keep his job was not the right thing to do. He needed to actually apologize not just to us, but to his boss and his colleagues for the horribly long night that he caused for everyone. In the end, he lost his job and the boss made him tell his colleagues what really did happen. I want to believe that the humiliation will make him think twice in the future. I suppose I will never know what comes of him, but I can certainly pray that he will be shaped into a more honest person from having had this experience and that he can learn how telling the truth can truly free him.

Being back in the states, I have a new found appreciation for some random things: hot running water; vegetables; non-polluting vehicles; flat roads; the ease of our emergency response system.......I will forever be amazed by the incredible strength of Rwanda women and moved by the innocence of children...