Those of us in Rwanda are seeing God's hand at work in ways we never anticipated and we are blessed to be part of God's purposes for this nation. There is obviously growing support for our application for our mission organization. We have been developing good relationships with officials and their input has been extremely helpful, from the mudugudu (zone), cell, sector and district level offices. We are also having to make changes and do rewrites of some of our documentation to fit the requirements of the different departments. We are making good progress however.
One thing we have become convinced of in the last three weeks of pursuing our Africa Transformation Network registration is this: We will not get the registration approved by our local district until we start work, until we have a physical location of an office and work space and until we demonstrate that we are actually doing what we listed in our plan of action. From the beginning we were under the impression that we needed the registration in order to have permission to begin. But in fact, we must begin in order to secure the registration. So... let the work begin ...
One of the major decisions we made last week was to bring Charles Kabeza on board to work with us full-time as an administrative assistant. He will begin his role with us on July 1. Charles graduated from university last year with a degree in economics. He has recently, on his own initiative with encouragement from some of us, begun a ministry to genocide orphans which demonstrates that he is a man of faith and compassion. (See http://www.christianchronicle.org/article2158310~Ministry_to_help_orphans_in_Rwanda ).
A second decision was to find and rent a property to serve as a center from which to work and to house our ATN offices. In addition to what already is being done with Extra Mile ministries, we have the resources to begin two or three of the projects in our plan of action. We need to get those projects up and running as soon as possible.
Personally, I feel both excited and challenged. Decisions that were made in our meeting last week have pushed us to a new level. I believe it is going to take a higher level of commitment and a greater degree of faith for all of us. It is a little like walking on water; we are not sure about the water, but we are sure about the God who called us and is faithful to sustain us.
The budget we formulated and presented to Kicukiro district is for $94,960 in our first year. We only have 30% of the budget raised at present (half of that committed by ATN founding members). But we trust that God will provide the funding that is lacking.
