The rumors are true. We did make it back from the Congo alive!

I'll try to summarize what we did, where we went, and a few other interesting details.

We left on a Thursday night from Nairobi at about 7:30 pm and rode a bus all night long. We were in a city called Kisumu at about 1 am and I got off to stretch my legs and go to the bathroom. When I got off the bus I believed I was the only one of my traveling party (which is one American and 4 Kenyans) getting off the bus. I was on the ground for about a minute when suddenly, BAM! The door slammed shut and the bus took off very fast!! I was absolutely terrified because I had nothing with me, no phone, no money, no passport; they were all on the bus! I turned to sprint after the bus but a guy stopped me with his arm and started speaking to me in Swahili (and I'm sure he had a good laugh later about how terrified I must have looked). I was pointing to the bus, when I saw that Mike was also on the ground with me. This gave me a feeling of comfort because I thought, well, if I'm stuck in Kisumu at 1 am, at least I have someone else who is stuck and lost with me. We found out later that the bus was just going to refuel. It really took a while for my heart rate to slow back down after that experience.

We arrived in Kampala, Uganda around 9 am, then Kigali Rwanda at about 6 pm. We stayed in Kigali to rest a day before moving on to the DRC.Sunday morning we left Kigali and rode another bus for 6 hours through the most beautiful scenery I've ever experienced. And part of the trip was through a tropical rainforest. This was a dream-come-true for me! Ever since we studied tropical rainforests in fourth grade I have always wanted to visit one and I was finally able to do that!

We crossed a bridge and were then officially in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Entered in the city of Bukavu and then went to the village of Katana. Here is where we had a week of CHE (Community Health Evangelism) trainings. Essentially these are community empowerment trainings. The trainings were very successful and many people even experienced a sort of paradigm shift in their thinking about community development. Shifting from an attitude of, "we're helpless and we can only wait on outsiders to come in and to the work for us" to "we really can begin address our own issues, with our own resources, because we are the ones who know our community the best." This is exactly what CHE teaches and it was great to have such a good response.

Here is the class that graduated from the trainings.

The day we left Katana we traveled back to Bukavu in a taxi. Poor planning led to a fun little adventure there. Our taxi took us to Bukavu and as we got into town we realized that no one in our taxi knew where we were going. So the driver dropped us at a roundabout and left. This will be easy to fix though, the other taxi will soon be coming and they'll see us standing here, right? Wrong. That's ok, we'll call them to come get us, right? Wrong, none of us have a phone that works in the Congo. That's ok, we'll use a pay phone to call, right? Wrong, we don't have any contact numbers. Here's a good idea, how about we just stand here on the roundabout for FOUR hours until the sun is long gone? Well, we didn't have many other options so that was the one we took. Were there street lights? Of course! Were there working bulbs in the street lights? Yeah right! After overhearing a conversation of some guys who were planning on grabbing one of our bags we decided to huddle under the light of one 60 watt bulb on the side of a building. By no small act of God we were finally found, and we made it to the house we were supposed to stay in that night.

We woke up the next morning beside the beautiful lake Kivuu and we were eager to begin our six hour boat ride to the city of Goma. We were aware that there were three classes tickets and we had budgeted for the $20 tickets. When we got to the boat and found out that the only tickets left were the $5 tickets it was still ok. They can't be that much different, right? Well, if you can see clearly in the picture, they were a little different. We spent 6 hours in the luggage compartment/kitchen/animal transport area. I began the trip sitting on a suitcase with three GIANT charcoal stoves on my left, more luggage and people on my right, a goat at my feet, my feet were resting on gerry-cans of cooking oil, there were drums of diesel right next to the stoves and the engine room was a few feet behind me with no doors. It was definitely a fun experience!!

The next week of CHE training was in the city of Goma. We had another good week of training with many people coming to the realization that they can make a change in their community.

In 2003 Goma had a volcano erupt and it buried most of the town and we got to go to the place where the lava began flowing from. At night you could see a red glow coming from above the volcano.

I got sick for the first time since coming to Africa in January. And I was only sick for a day, so that was good.

On the return trip we stayed in Kigali, Rwanda for a day of rest. During that time we were able to go to the genocide memorial. However, it wasn't an ordinary day at the memorial. We happened to be there on the annual, week long, memorial week. It was a very sad place to be since they were having burials, 14 years after the genocide. They said that new mass grave sites are discovered all the time, either from discovering them when starting a construction site, or from people confessing to knowing where the people are buried.

I learned new interesting information while I was there. I had previously thought that it was strangers from one tribe who killed strangers from another tribe. But I was told that wasn't it at all. The people who killed each other weren't strangers, they were neighbors and even friends.

Overall, the trip to the Congo was a success. One of the objectives that Mike and I had was to return alive. We completed that objective and a few others as well.

For more pictures you can click these links.

Congo Album 1
Congo Album 2
Congo Album 3