I love Canada, Rwanda, and the US!! (...england, ierland,the philipines, and italy too)

So everytime I get used to a place, it's so easy to stop writting as much down and taking as many pictures. There is so much though that i want to take in, be able to remember, and really share with people at home. I'm not sure where to start with the past few days. This past weekend was alot of fun. On the fourth, one of the volunteers, Becky, from canada, had a "Canada Day" party....umm on the fourth of july..so we were celebrating the wrong country. I went over early to help her get ready. We decided to get the neighborhood kids to help us decorate the door to her gate with chalk. Becky decides to draw a sunshine to show the kids that they could help too and draw others things. When i turned around there were about seven sunshines on her gate. hah eventually, they started drawing different things, but there were about anotherseven "I <3 Rwanda and the U.S." (my contribution). But the rest of theparty was so good. Becky is amazing and always opens up her house to everyone.



After "Canada Day" we went to a restaurant up the street. I was not expecting one of my favorite nights in Rwanda. We had a really good dinner. I had fish bruchettes (fried fish on a skewer), ibury (amazing potatoes), and a fried banana(im really starting to like them). At the end of dinner we went to go dance. The band was playing traditional Rwandan music and everyone was doing the cow dance. It sounds corny, but its actually really graceful and so much fun to do. One guy came up to me and asked if I knew why everyone was so happy...he explained that the song was about Rwandan heroes. He and about 3 others there thanked me for "trying" to dance lol...i guess they appriciated the effort. Also, at dinner I got to meet two other VSO volunteers, Epy and Jahno. Haha so yes basically my favorite night here so far. (minusthe fact that i woke up with a stomach ache (too many fish bruchettes)


So yesterday, we had training on the Mission, Vision, and Values of FH. It was the same training that we had in Phoenix, but its really good to get to be a part of it again. It helps alot to refocus in my heart, the point of the internship. The mission of FH is "To walk with churches, leaders, and families in overcoming all forms of human poverty by living in healthy relationship with God and his creation."And the vision is "God called and we responded until physical and spiritual hungers were ended world wide." Anyways the training went through alot of scripture when explaining the values that the organization wants to hold. Grace and stewardship really stood out to me during the day.

During the training I started to think about how I only understand the very surface of everything here (the culture, the people, what they went through and go through) and i only understand such a small part of what FH does and why. I know that there are things that God put in me to want to do this and be here, but that is such a vaugue understanding. I've really been wanting to put more knowledge, intelligence, and understanding to my faith and the things that I'm doing. Theres a verse in Peter that talks about this. It says "But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-controll, to self control perserverence, to perserverence godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love." C.S. Lewis talks about adding intelligence to faith too. He talks about how God values good intentions, but he also wants us to use the intelligence that we have to put thosegood intentions to the best use. hah he says "..God will not love you any less, or have less use for you if you happen to have been born with a very second rate brain.

hah im not good at ending these posts...but im done :) i miss everyone