Trip to Kibungo and beyond

This past week, I accompanied Philbert Munyankindi, who works at Bethel in the Kingdom Hall Construction Office, on his trip to some place with a long name (as are most), where he was to conduct a pre-construction meeting with the servant bodies of two congregations regarding remodeling of their 17-year-old Kingdom Hall. This village is located in the Eastern Province, close to the border of Tanzania.

I had actually asked Philbert, who does these kinds of trips frequently throughout the country, if I could go with him because I knew he would be passing through a town called Kibungo. The significance of this is, I had heard that my former Bible student, Liu Xin En, who went to China over a year ago and never came back to Kigali, was living in Kibungo. So this was my opportunity to perhaps locate him again.

This would be a three-hour trip each way from Kigali, plus all of Philbert's stops at various places such as ongoing Kingdom Hall construction sites, vacant plots for possible purchase and building, etc. Anyway, eventually on the way back we did make it to Kibungo in the afternoon. It turns out that there is a hospital operated by Chinese there—of all places—which is somehow related to the hospital in Masaka, the one I visited over a year ago that is close to Kigali. We were told at reception that the Chinese all left at 11:00 a.m. and returned home to their compound (bankers' hours?), and that the only Chinese person left was a lady doctor. So we went to see her, had a nice discussion, and left some magazines and a brochure. She said that there are 10 Chinese doctors at that hospital. She had never heard of my Bible student, Mr. Liu.

So we went into the main part of town and asked around. We ran into two other Chinese doctors in a store. Aside from the 10 Chinese at the hospital, apparently there are no other Chinese people living or working in Kibungo. So even though I was a bit disappointed, Jehovah knows that we tried. We did manage to leave some literature with these doctors, and who knows what the result may be.

It was nice to see the countryside once again, even though it meant my getting constantly stared at by villagers. Even the dirt roads in Rwanda are not bad, at least compared to other places in Africa I've been; it's just that this is late August, the end of three months of dry season, and the air is choked with red dust. So every time we encountered a vehicle going in the other direction, we had to close our windows to keep the resulting massive dust cloud out. We couldn't complain too much, though, because our truck was creating massive dust clouds behind us. The dust is on everything: roads, vehicles, clothes, people. Even the leaves of the matoke trees! (the "cooking" banana). So we are anxiously awaiting the rain—any rain—to clear out all this dust and make the air fresh again.

Pre-construction meeting

Kingdom Hall to be remodeled

Pumping water at a well

Kingdom Hall construction site

So this means that I have now visited the Western, Southern, and Eastern Provinces, but not the Northern Province, which has the gorillas and a famous national park. Oh, well, I guess the touristic stuff will have to wait....