Dear Friends,

As I write this, I have just returned from a visit to Rwanda to celebrate 100 years of the Anglican Church’s
presence there, as well as visiting some of the projects we have supported over recent years. There is so
much to celebrate:-
 On our first Sunday there I had the privilege of preaching to a congregation of around 800 people at
a service that marked the end of a Youth Festival attended by some 950 young people in their late
teens and twenties!
 We visited the Compassion Project at Kigeme that I know some of you support – it was a joy to see
how well run the project is and the great impact it makes on the lives of those involved.
 We saw new churches being built according to the new Government requirements using some of
the funds we have raised.
 We visited the new market place built with the help of funds raised in Brockenhurst for the refuges at
Kigeme Refugee Camp (some 24,000 of them mainly from the Congo) to replace the market place
lost to fire a couple of years ago and we spoke to those refugees about how the church has, and
continues to, welcome them and help meet their needs.
 We spoke to Pastors who have been trained, using funds we have given, to the Diploma or Degree
level now required by the Government and learned of some in their 50s going back to Secondary
School to begin the educational journey they need to go to continue as a Pastor.
 We were welcomed so generously with dancing and singing and piles of food in communities that
could afford little.
 We marvelled at the beauty of a country that begins in elevation where ours ends and is called the
Land of a Thousand Hills.
 We heard of a church that is deeply ingrained in serving the very real needs and development of the
wider community – working on issues such as poverty, teenage mothers, health, education, child
abuse, environmental deterioration, malnutrition, and drug addiction and prostitution in creative and
strategic ways with the support of the Government.
But what did I take away most – what did I learn?
Perhaps two things:-
Firstly, what a privilege it is to be involved in such partnership projects and how in giving and supporting we
actually receive more than we gave.
Secondly, how fragile communities are, and how we take community adhesion and our common life
together at our peril. We visited a couple of Genocide Memorials during our time in Rwanda and they are
truly horrific – one million people killed in one hundred days in the Spring of 1994 – most by machetes,
clubs and stones! The roots of this Genocide go back to colonisation when the Belgians divided the
population into Hutus and Tutsis according to how many cows they owned. Further division and ‘othering’
was encouraged to control and manipulate the population which eventually ended up in 1994’s terrible
genocide and which still rumbles on today in The Congo.
Rwanda is a lesson in being beware of that which seeks to divide us, and of those who give easy, popular
answers, to complicated and difficult situations!
Yours in Christ
Simon