Beauracracy Day

Today we started at 6am with breakfast to be ready for a 6:45am departure.  Our first stop was MIGEPROF.  We waited a few hours for an important piece of paper which was necessary to obtain Josiane's Rwanda passport and to finish the US visa immigration paperwork at the US Embassy.  After that 3 hour wait, the women went to the US embassy to work on the visa paperwork while the men went to the Rwanda Immigration office to get the passports printed.  After 3 more hours, at 1pm (just in time for the early Friday office closures here), we got everything we needed to move on to the next step in this process.  As I type this, the men are out on a "Man Date" as they call it, having some kind of fun, and booking our tickets to Nairobi, Kenya in the meantime.  Sunday evening, we will be on our way.  We do not yet know how long the process in Kenya will take.  What we know for sure is that we have a medical appointment on Monday, which is a routine procedure for obtaining a visa.

I have to back up a bit to write about our trip outside of Kigali to a village yesterday.  We drove through the area where many people hid by the river and in the jungle during the genocide.  Again, I have read much about this period in history, so it was a bit surreal to see it in person.  Our trip to the village was as expected.  Poverty here is extreme.  We know that the children in the orphanage are cared for better than 85% of the children in this country in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and education...basics.  When we arrived, people started showing up from everywhere.  This was similar to our experience at Esperanza in Nicaragua.  The only other thing I can share on here about the experience is that it is clear we live in a very broken world.

Tonight, we have plans to celebrate the FINALITY of our paperwork in Kigali with a meal at Zen.  Tomorrow is the monthly city-wide community cleaning day, so we cannot really leave our hotel until 11am.  This day is set aside every month for all members of the community to work together to clean the streets by sweeping and doing light landscaping.  I think it's a great idea and we might participate for some of the time and I'm looking forward to it.

After the streets reopen, we will go around the city, seeing the places from which our children came.  Along with that, we will hear each child's story of how he/she came to Home of Hope.