September 2002

Dear Friends:

I arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, last May and was very warmly received by the Rev. Dr. Elisée Musemakweli, currently both the president of the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda—Eglise Presbytérienne au Rwanda (ERP)—and the dean of the small seminary where I will soon be working. Kigali is not large by any means, having only one movie theater, two bookstores, but quite a few restaurants and numerous small boutiques. On my various errands around the city, I drove several times by the legislative building, abandoned since the war of 1994, and still marred by the bullet holes that riddle its exterior walls. I lingered here for a few days before finally determining that the many containers that I had sent by air freight would not be coming soon. It was in fact another month before all my things arrived, having been delayed inexplicably in Nairobi. So Elisée and I drove together to Butare, Rwanda’s second city, and the location of the seminary: La Faculté de Théologie Protestante de Butare.

This is a mountain country, and there are no polluting factories that I have seen, and so the air is clean, and one can see multitudes of stars at night. The people also seem to be very concerned about keeping the country clean. In other African countries that I have visited, there is often open garbage in the cities, and even outside the cities along the roads and in the villages there can be a lot of unsightly trash. (In Sudan people joke that the plastic bag should be the national flag since they seem to flutter in the breeze off of every fence and lamppost.) But in Rwanda, people can always be seen along the roads sweeping and collecting trash.

Rwandans refer to Butare as a city, but by any reasonable standards it is little more than a large village. There is one major road that runs through its center, one tiny shopping area, one very small bookstore, and three hotels of note with as many restaurants. There are no cinemas, parks or noteworthy attractions. Just outside the city, however, there is a small museum that features Rwandan cultural artifacts. And the city is also the home of the national university: L’Université National de Rwanda. I’ve already signed up to teach a year-long course in American history, which I’ll be doing in my spare time, probably beginning this November. The students are supposedly all bilingual, so I will be teaching in English. I’ve been told, however, to be prepared to respond to questions in French.

With only 45 students, la Faculté de Théologie Protestante de Butare is a very small school, but it has tremendous growth potential. It has a campus of about ten acres, with four substantial brick buildings, which include a chapel, library, student computer room, administrative offices, a hall for general assembles, and several classrooms. The buildings are neat and clean and very modern, and the grounds include well-manicured lawns, plenty of trees, and a volleyball court. Though the students all speak Kinyarwanda, instruction is entirely in French. This is necessary because the books do not exist in the local language that would allow professors to teach theology, philosophy, history, or virtually any other subject one can think of that would be necessary in a seminary education. Since I arrived in May, my principal occupation has been translating all of my church history lectures into French. This turned out to be more of a monumental task than I had originally imagined, as I eventually ended up with 419 pages of single-spaced text—a nice-sized book!

The college has made a house available to me just across the street from the campus. It has running water and electricity, but it lacks a phone line, and it has a small problem with rats, which I have not yet been entirely successful in overcoming. I’ve hired someone to do the cooking and cleaning for me (at a cost of only $50 a month), because cooking in a village is a full-time job. The cook often arrives at the house with live rabbits or chickens with which to prepare the week’s meals. Though the cook is a village person, she is apparently afraid of killing chickens. Once I heard clamorous, frantic squawking coming from the kitchen, and ran in to discover that she had decided to slaughter a chicken by trapping it in a bucket and pouring scalding hot water on it. Since that incident, I’ve been slaughtering the chickens myself in the backyard. (I haven’t yet discovered how she’s been killing the rabbits!)

As classes begin again this October, please keep the faculty, administrators, and students of our college in your prayers. By African standards, the students are well-educated, speak French fluently, and seem to me to be quite dedicated. The task before them, however, is enormous. Rwanda is one of the poorest countries in the world, and it is still very definitely living under the pall of the 1994 genocide, the trials for which are just now beginning. We will be doing our best to prepare them to minister to a broken nation, to sound a message of hope and reconciliation in Jesus Christ, who alone provides the foundation for the justice and healing for which most of the nation seems to be so desperately yearning.

Peace and grace,

Michael Parker