Greetings from South Africa! After two overnight flights and a 10 hour layover in London, we arrived in Johannesburg and were transported to the Amahoro gathering site. There are people from Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, D.R. Congo, Swaziland, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Burundi and South Africa here…there are “Western” leaders here to learn and converse and support from the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada and the UK. We will unfold more specific stories in the weeks ahead (when we have a bit more free time and more internet access), but we wanted to give you a brief introduction to this time. (Pictures will come later too but we don’t have quite enough bandwidth to upload them yet.)
The most incredible thing for me has been having deep conversations with Africans like Muhindo from the D.R. Congo. He lives in one of the most troubled regions of the world and has been a refugee. He eventually went to university in Uganda and now wants to work in international diplomacy. I have also enjoyed speaking Portuguese with brothers from Mozambique. The names of most everyone here carries great meaning and we have spoken a lot about names and identity. Claude Nikondeha, the president of Amahoro-Africa shared some of his story and what brought about the Amahoro movement. He recounted meeting a girl named “Nazina” which means “nothing.” It was the name the parents gave because the baby came when they had nothing and they were sure the child had no future. Knowing his deep connection to this child in Jesus, it was part of what led him to lead Amahoro-Africa. You can listen to Claude’s talk on the Amahoro website here:
http://www.amahoro-africa.org/
I wrote a song about Nazina and was able to share it with the group yesterday. It was very special. I will post an audio recording and lyrics soon!
Thanks for sharing your experience of Amahoro on your blog. There were so many people there that we couldn’t meet them all, but by sharing our experience of these meetings we can meet more of the people, even when we are now scattered.
You can find a list of blog posts on Amahoro at Notes from underground: Amahoro Gathering.
Please consider adding your Amahoro posts to the list. You can find out how to do that by clicking here.
In that way we can continue the convesation.