Congo Trip, part two -- Kikwit

So, after spending two days and three nights in Kinshasa, we traveled to Kikwit to visit Edgard and BTEDE.

Now, last time I went to DR Congo, we flew to Kikwit. But now, with the highway paved between Kinshasa and Kikwit, not as many people fly there anymore and therefore, there are less flights. So, to travel on a Saturday, we rented a bus.

The distance from Kinshasa to Kikwit: 525 km.

The time it took us to get there: 12 hours.

We blew a tire on the way.... thankfully we were travelling uphill at the time, and had just arrived at a village. Here are some photos I took there:

These two women were visiting and laughing-- it totally made me smile!

We arrived in Kikwit after dark and settled in at the Catholic House hostel.

The next morning, Edgard came to pick us up for church. Well, we actually attended two services. The first one was at Edgard's church...

I love that they have three choirs!

One:

Two:

And three:

This last one is Edgard's choir. He's the second one on the right.

After introducing ourselves to the congregation (& getting a great reaction when I greeted them with "Mboté!"), we left to go to Papa Boma's church, where Konrad would be preaching. We drove part of the way there...

And journeyed the rest of the way on foot, uphill.

Here's a couple of photos of Papa Boma's church. Konrad said that last year, there were no walls.

And inside, we sat at the front on plastic lawn chairs. The women's choir was preforming...

And then the congregation sang, accompanied by these drummers:

At one point, people came forward to give money to buy bricks for the walls. When they did, these boys banged on their drums in celebration of their generosity. It made me wonder if people back home would give more if there was a little more celebration involved. ;)

Then, Konrad got up to preach. He spoke on Matthew 11:1-6 and I thought it was very good. Of course, he had to pause a lot for Delbert to interpret for him. But it was personal and relatable. He made sense of what Jesus said in verse 6: "blessed are those who do not fall away on account of me." This verse hadn't made sense to me before, but now I understood it.... blessed are we who still follow Jesus, even when _____________________ (we get sick, our prayers aren't answered, things get hard, He doesn't make sense to us, etc.) We're blessed when we trust Him regardless.

After lunch at Papa Boma's (we were offered rice, chicken and fried caterpillars, but I just had bananas and peanuts), the walk back down almost seems longer, but I think we ended up taking a different route. There were some pretty nice views though...

After we got back in the truck and made it back to the Catholic House, we packed up to go to the Health Zone of Mungindu, which I'll share about in its own post, most likely tomorrow.

Thanks for looking!