Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday – what better excuse to get dressed up in traditional Rwandan clothes and go and spend three hours sitting in them in church?! Munyana Joy, pictured here with Amani Justus and Pam, took us shopping last week to buy the material and get it made up in the traditional way. Munyana and Justus are both off school at the moment for the Easter holidays, and Justus is staying with Pam as he quite often does in the holidays. Munyana is staying with her uncle, but has spent everyday with us – taking us to the market and teaching us how to dance! Next week they will go home to their families, who live on the way to Gisenyi, but they usually spend some time with their Musungu mother in the holidays first! Justus makes us laugh a lot because he is a typical sixteen year old, disappearing off for the day and when we ask him where he has been he always says “around”! He has friends in Ruhengeri so its nice for him to be able to stay more central and see them all.

Anyway, I digress…traditional clothes. Here are the three of us in our clothes:

And for those of you who have been so desperate to see the progress on my hair growth, here is a close up!!

And someone else requested a picture of Nathan, so here is one of the four of us standing outside the house of Mama Nathan.

We went here for a fantastic lunch after church. It was lovely to see all the Rulinda family again – Nathan is the seventh of nine children, so whilst he is the Head of the family he is certainly not the oldest. We have met al nine of them now…but please don’t ask me to recite the list! We know Emmanuel and Eben probably best as Eben helped us in Kigali to collect our passports, and Emmanuel is at school nearby so we see him quite a lot. We have also been to see Joyce at school and Charlotte is her twin. Peace is the older sister, and Stephen has been doing some painting at T-house. So that leaves Nelson, the oldest, who lives in Gisenyi and has the two small children, and Johnson who came with his wife and very sweet five month old baby - Joshua.

Wow, I am sitting outside on the outside porch step and I just heard a tremendously loud buzzing, and a bee the size of a small sparrow has just flown over the house! In the sky above my head there are at least three birds of prey circling – I think they are kites…though I’m not very good on African birds yet! And by my feet there is crawling a Nairobi fly…perhaps my least favourite of the wildlife around here! Oh, and then of course, there is Dachanger Clive…