Are We Having “Pfunda” Yet?

"Sometimes we must look outside our own backyards to realize how big the world is and how blessed we are".

- Eugene Nathaniel Butler

Today we continued our streak of consecutive blessed days! Every step we have taken on this trip has held a new blessing shown to us by our loving God. We traveled to the other side of Gisenyi this morning to meet with two cooperatives at once - Twitezimbere and Twungurene. The 20 women in each group received $50 microloans last January from AWHI and our amazing donors.

The changes in the appearance, demeanor and life situations for these Rwandan sisters were evident! Their clothes were beautiful; their smiling faces and joyous expressions of gratitude were a pleasure to behold. And, the stories of changed lives ... breathtaking!

As we always share God's word with our cooperatives, Liz shared her teaching on the Armor of God. Heidi gave an inspirational message and shared a copy of a prayer to help them understand each item of God's armor and a prayer to help them gear up each day.

Then began the testimonies of change. Several women stepped forward to tell us about their businesses and their success! Most reported that, before the microloan, they were totally dependent on their husbands for the money they need each day. Some reported that their children were unable to attend school due to unpaid fees. And some said that breakfast, lunch and dinner were never a certainty! Imagine that...

But now, after a little more than a year and three cycles of microloans, the women have the income needed to buy clothes for their families, to make meals a surety rather than a hope, and to ensure their children can remain in school!

Not a single member has missed a payment and all reported paying their cooperative savings amount and having weekly personal savings after all the bills are paid. The AWHI team and these ladies praise God for the way He is working in their lives!

After lunch with our friends in the church, we purchased some products from them and made the long walk back to our van and a special treat. After many years of longing, Heidi and the team got to tour a tea factory!

The Pfunda Tea Factory is nearby and the experience was pure pfun (pun intended)! Our tour began in the fields where the tea has been grown since 1974. We were dressed in the appropriate garb, given baskets for the harvest and taught to pick the Pica and the Bhanji parts of the tea shrub.

Our guide, Selgious and his assistant Arias, told us that pickers work 10 hour days, 6 days a week and are paid according to the weight of their harvest. Senior pickers can gather about 120 kilograms per day. At .042 cents per kg, they make about $5 per day. You should see Arias working to harvest ... his hands are a blur!

Supervisors tell the pickers where to harvest on the 2000 hectare property and keep a close watch on the quality of the harvest. From the fields, the workers bring their haul over to a central weighing station where their efforts are measured and recorded for monthly payments. It is an incredible process! The tea then is transported to the factory, the next stop on our tour.

Our factory guide was Guerschom, a senior manager and tea master. He walked us through nearly the entire process of preparing both green and black tea to be shipped all over the globe! The process requires several steps including drying the tea at 120 degrees centigrade (about 250 degrees fahrenheit)!

The tea is sorted by size and packaged in paper sacks of approximately 70 kilograms each and then moved by hand by a team of 10 men to the shipping docks.

Work begins at 7:00 am and tea testing starts at about 10:00 am each day. It is conducted every hour to ensure there are no problems with the product. Testing (for appearance, infusion and taste) is performed religiously even though quality problems are indeed rare. And, we all got to try our hand at tea testing!

This was truly another blessed day in the mission field in East Africa! We are thanking God each day for the miracles He is showing us and the wonders of the culture here.

-Stephen (Cyuzuzo)