Burundi-versary

by Rachel

Seven years ago this Thursday, our team first arrived in Burundi.  As a team, we're trying to intentionally take time to celebrate as a community and remember the things God has done for us, so this seven year mark is worth mentioning!  It's been interesting for me to reflect on these past seven years and what has happened.  I wrote this on our blog seven years ago as we prepared for arrival:

"We will face challenges that we expected, and we will face totally unanticipated challenges.  It will not meet our expectations.  It will be harder than we thought it would be.  But it will be better, too, because this is the land and the life to which we have been called."

I think of all that has happened and all that has changed here since 2013.  Many of you have walked that journey with us.  We arrived with 16 people and by my count we have welcomed almost 70 people as teammates, with close to a dozen interns as well, not to mention probably hundreds of short term visitors.  We have built 12 residential buildings and countless hospital buildings/renovations/improvements.  Patient numbers and surgeries have more than doubled.  There are over 300 new doctors who have graduated from Hope Africa during these years.  Kibuye Hope Academy is about to start its 8th academic year.  So much.  So much blessing, so much change.  I even laughed as I went back to those early blogs and saw that the internet was so terrible that we had to email the blogs in text form to a friend who would upload and post for us, and how much time later I spent painstakingly downsizing photos...and how today I'm listening to music on youtube while I type this and uploading full sized photo with abandon. :) 

It's so much easier to count these tangible things, but I find myself reflecting on the intangibles as well.  How have we each changed?  My global views, my understanding of the culture and people around me, relationships, friends.  How have we as a team touched each others' lives, our neighbors' lives, our students' lives?  How many times have I thought I knew what was going on, only to realize that despite all these years here I have barely scratched the surface of language and culture?  How many times have I doubted and despaired and become easily frustrated with the "slow pace" of change, only to have a repeat visitor open my eyes to the breakneck speed at which the hospital is changing?  

But through it all, our eyes are on the Lord.  Even this week at family worship, we read the verse in Psalm 127: Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.  And then in verse 2, "he gives to his beloved sleep."  In the French translations, that passage literally says that the Lord does good things for his beloved while they sleep...in other words, we can rest knowing that the Lord is working.  He loves us, and He gives us good things, helping us to remember that the work does not rest on our shoulders.  I hope that in 7 more years I'll be writing another blog like this to celebrate our 14th anniversary here.  Only God knows.  And we have come this far because of His hand, so I know that wherever we go from here, we will always continue to rest in His hands.

We want to thank all of our supporters, prayer and financial, for being on the long road with us.  We want to also thank our gracious national hosts for standing by us as we blundered (and still blunder sometimes, more often than we care to admit) through life.  We want to thank all of the hospital staff for working alongside us and shouldering the majority of patient care burdens.  It's been a community in the most beautiful of ways.

So to close, some photo fun... Oh how the years go by.