On Saturday 15th February Rev’s Richard Hall and George Heinz joined a districtdelegation travelling to Rwanda. The other members of the delegation included our chairof district Rev Rachel Parkinson, district youth rep Reuben Peterson and Rev RachelDeigh who will be chair of the new West Midlands district.
The visit was an opportunity to visit projects that have been supported buy the district aswe begin to look forward to what the partnership might look like under the new district.

Unsurprisingly, the visit was a busy one as district team sought to maximise their week inthe country. The tone was set when, only a couple of hours of landing from an 8 hourovernight flight, Rachel Parkinson preached at Gikondo Methodist Church in Rwanda’scapital, Kigali. The afternoon was spent in the company of a local scout group.

Obviously, the events of the 1994 genocide cast a large shadow over Rwandan society. Inorder to gain an insight to those events and to pay respects to those lives lost, a visit wasarranged on Monday morning to the powerful Kigali genocide memorial. All members ofthe team were greatly moved by this experience. After this, the team visited PHARP(Peace building, healing and reconciliation programme) who have run, and continue to run,projects aimed at reconciling different parts of Rwandan society. They discussedPHARP’s work in the past as well as the current challenges facing them and Rwandansociety as a whole. It was a reminder that thirty years on there is still much work to do.

A journey to the north of Rwanda took the team to the city of Ruhengeri. In the shadow ofthe volcanoes of the Virunga national park, the team heard about the work of the FreeMethodist Church in the area. A visit was made to the new church being built atRuhengeri and discussions were had with local pastors about some of the challengesfaced by the the church at the moment. One of the major issues facing the church inRwanda is the closure of many of its buildings following the introduction of strict newbuilding regulations by the Rwandan government. There is hope that a solution can befound that will enable churches to reopen soon. We were privileged to take a gift from the Methodist Women in Britain group of Wolverhampton & Shrewsbury to the women of the Ruhengeri Conference.

On Wednesday the team headed westward to Kibogora on the shores of Lake Kivu. The journey was broken up by visits to schools in order to deliver footballs that had been takenover from the UK. Education is a priority for the Free Methodist Church and while inKibogora, the team had the opportunity to visit Kibogora Polytechnic which has links withthe Queens’ Foundation in Birmingham. Books were donated by Queens to the library atKibogora, which the team were happy to hand over during the visit.

Over the course of the Rwanda partnership, the district has been involved in raising fundsto help the church run hospital at Kibogora where the district team were given a tour of thefacilities after they had joined the staff of the hospital in their daily act of worship.

The morning before the team flew home saw them running activities for over threehundred children back at Gikondo (they had planned for sixty!).

The district delegation unanimously agreed that the visit had been a useful and productiveone which gave plenty of talking points for how the relationship can be moved forward.

This will be the subject of the next circuit forum meeting in April.