Love's as hard as nails

Our sweet little Jule left the hospital a month ago.  We didn’t even know he was leaving.  A distant Aunt came from Kigali to take him home to live with her, since his paternal grandfather doesn’t want to support him due to the uncertainty of his paternity.  The mom is gone.  Jule is the little guy we fell in love with, and whom we would LOVE to add in to our family.  We had been talking with the social workers about this possibility, yet one morning, when we went to visit him, we discovered he had left with his Aunt at dawn.  We didn’t even get to say good-bye.  Talk about heartbreak!

The contact number the Aunt left with the hospital didn’t work for almost 3 weeks.   That’s what happens when a phone runs out of airtime here – it just doesn’t work until the owner buys more airtime coupons and enters the little scratch off number into his phone.  Finally, last week, the social workers reached the Aunt.  Guess she’d scraped enough money together – the actual cost is less than $1 USD - to buy some phone time.   (To give my American readers some perspective on this, please see my next short blog explaining cell phone usage in Rwanda and Kenya (and perhaps the other countries on this continent as well?)

They discovered that Jule is actually living, temporarily, fairly near the hospital.  We were so excited to know how to find him!  Yesterday, Ruthie, Sam and I set off with the social worker, Frederick, and our driver, Recundo Jean de Dieu, in hopes of finding Jule and checking in on him.  Even if we couldn’t adopt him into our family, we at least longed to say good-bye to him, to tell him we loved him, and to give him one last hug before he moved with his Aunt across the country. 

Until the Aunt gathers enough money to take the bus back to her home, which is about 7 hours’ drive from here, she is living with Jule's grandparents in a home about a 1/2 hour's drive from the hospital.

(For a description of this bus ride, see Janet Stewart’s blog post, here: http://janetinrwanda.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/blogapalooza/.)

We drove to a nearby town, about 20 minutes’ away, then turned down a road I’d never noticed before.  We bounced and turned and heaved and lurched for quite a while (but only actually covered less than 1 km distance) until we came to a “bridge”.  This bridge looked rather rickety, and stretched over a small chasm, about 25 feet high, with a small stream and plenty of large rocks at the bottom.  When I say bridge, I mean random wooden planks of various sizes and shapes, placed rather precariously across two wooden poles  (sawed down thin tree trunks).  It provided much scenery of the rock filled stream down below – both between the planks, and on either side of the poles.   I did have a few cautionary thoughts about trying to cross this bridge, but brushed them aside, as we’ve crossed many other questionable bridges in the last seven months, and they’ve always held up just fine. 

Evidently, our driver had a few cautionary thoughts of his own, because he slowed down to a crawl before we ventured out onto the structure.  He is normally a rather fast driver, so his slowing down caused me to first take notice of the bridge!  We inched out onto the structure, but he stopped abruptly when we heard some planks under our tires snap and break. followed by the splashy sound of some of the “bridge” under our tires hitting the creek below us.   At this point, according to Sam and Ruthie, I started screaming, but I don’t know if I believe them.  I don’t remember it (aka, I think I blocked it out!), so I will choose to believe that I was the picture of calm and faith!  J  Thankfully, we weren’t far into our attempt, and Recundo was able to throw the truck into reverse rather quickly.  The tires were spinning under the wet dirt road as he “put the pedal to the metal”, and I thought for just a moment that we were a goner for sure.  However, the wheels found the traction they needed, and soon we were off the bridge, safe and sound.  Whew!  At least we couldn’t say we’d been bored!

Next, the driver, Recundo Jean de Dieu, wisely put our little truck in park, right in the middle of the road.  I guess we all knew no one else would be trying to cross the bridge in a motor vehicle, anyway, so it didn’t matter if we were blocking the bridge! 

He turned off the engine, rolled up the windows, locked the doors and proceeded to start walking across the bridge, with Frederick by his side and us three wide-eyed muzungus obediently following them.  We traversed around a winding trail up a mountain, and somehow ended up finding Jule’s house.  If I were a betting woman, I would not have made money.   As we walked, picking up more and more children as we hiked along the goat trail, I was sure we would not find Jule or his family.  No way.  But, I was wrong!

Suddenly, even though Frederick nor Recundo had never been to Jule’s house, nor even this neighborhood, we found his house!  We were at one of the nicest homes on the mountain, and Frederick was confidently knocking on the door.  I just stood there, dumbly, thinking, “This couldn’t be where Jule lives!  Why is he so malnourished if he lives here?!”  After a few minutes, the door, which was only attached to hinges at the top, opened rather unevenly and uncooperatively.    A young child, about 8, shyly asked what we needed.  The door closed, and a few minutes later, a nicely dressed woman in her late twenties came to the door.  She invited us in to the living room, where there were two plastic chairs, a cement floor and walls and nothing else.  Ruthie and I were instructed to sit in these chairs.   After about 5 quiet minutes, the front door opened again.  A neighbor brought in a wooden chair and placed it next to us, motioning for Sam to have a seat.  Five minutes later, another neighbor came, with another wooden chair.  This happened again just a few minutes afterwards.  Now we all had a place to sit.  I thought perhaps Jule would come in next, or some other people at least.  But about ten minutes passed by, with us sitting in the cement room in silence.  The unstable front door was pushed open one more time, and this time, the first neighbor came in again, carrying a rug, or a grass mat, with her.  She placed it carefully on the floor, and rearranged it a few times to find the perfect geometric arrangement for its best appearance.  The room had been transformed since we’d arrived!  NOW, it was time for the hosts to arrive.  In a few more minutes, a newly bathed Jule walked into the room and immediately wrapped himself in my arms, snuggling in my lap.  He was warm and smelled of soap.  I was dumbfounded and honored to think they had quickly bathed him when they realized the Muzungus had come to visit!  (Bathing is more difficult here.  For a hot bath, like Jule obviously had had, judging from the steam coming off his clean skin, you must make a coal fire outside, then boil water that has been hauled up the mountain from the stream under the rickety bridge below, then add it to some colder water in a small plastic wash basin to make the right mix of a temperature, then strip down outside, behind your house, and take your sponge bath from the bucket of warm creek water.)  At least now we knew what had taken so long! 

We’d brought some token gifts to give.  It always feels so silly to give these things to people who need so much more than what we are handing out – yet it still seems to truly bring happiness and also to communicate our affection for them.  As we handed out foam shape stickers to everyone, plastic rings and bracelets to the girls, moto-cars and paper airplanes to the boys, a calendar and combs to the moms and aunts,  a fancy tie for the grandfather, and a brand new football (soccer ball) for Jule, I was once again struck by the severity of the financial chasm that separates my life from theirs.   

What would barely pass for favors for a kindergarten birthday party back home, which would be lost, broken or discarded within an hour, transforms into unspeakable treasure merely by giving the same gifts to different children across the Atlantic Ocean and over the Mediterranean Sea. 

Not to sound like a communist whiner, but it’s times like these that I can’t wait for Heaven, when we will finally ALL have enough, when life will finally really be fair and just, when no one will feel hunger or thirst again. 

This post is getting too long!  Here’s the highlight of the trek and visit to see Jule.  Frederick went outside to speak with the Aunt privately.  He asked her if she was willing to raise Jule, or if she would like for us to adopt him and raise him in America.  She immediately said it would be better for us to raise him, that she would like for us to take him.  I was so surprised!  She obviously really loves him, even though she has only known him about one month.  But I guess she understands that we could feed him and provide for him much easier than she can.  That is true love! 

A part of me hates to take him away from these beautiful people and this extravagantly, gorgeously landscaped-by-God country.   If we are blessed to get to add him into our family, I will have a goal that Jule will grow up knowing about and often visiting his birth-country, of always knowing that he was born in a very special place.   We went home sort of in a happy fog, not really believing that this little boy might be able to truly be ours.  The hardest part of saying goodbye was hugging and waving goodbye to Jule at the little bridge.  He looked so sad, and when we asked Frederick what was wrong, he told us that Jule had misunderstood, and had thought he was coming with us today.  He didn’t want to go back home to his grandfather’s house; he wanted to come with us.  This is pretty unusual, as many children are afraid of the Muzungus.  It was so hard to tear ourselves away from our little one, and to walk across that bridge to our truck.  We promised we would come back soon.