Day Number One With A Bullet

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I stepped off the plane onto sovereign Burundi soil. I think it was something like a blast of heavy air in the face and a sandy haze hanging over the landscape. Something like the cinematic renditions of the continent with lush vegetation teeming and children running alongside the plane. I was expecting the environment to be the thing that ushered me into Africa for the first time. Instead, it was a uniformed man holding an automatic weapon.

Pause!

Right about now, several people who love Karri and me very much are wiping the sweat off their palms. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. We are very safe and we are very comfortable and we are blessed to be where we are with the people we are with. Please bear this in mind while reading the rest of this post. (Especially our mothers!)

Aaaand we’re back.

The drive from the airport to our new home consisted of two checkpoints, one official and one impromptu, a larger-than-life picture of the current president, some rally-course driving by our host and new friend Trina, and a road that could mildly be described as bumpy. When you’re living in a country ranked in the bottom five for development on the entire planet, you find that there are more than just poor people at issue. In the first two days we were in Bujumbura, we learned the merits of locking car doors (people will pull your door open and grab whatever isn’t bolted down), keeping your hands in your pockets (if there was an Olympic sport in pick pocketing, Burundi would medal), and the difference between thunder and a grenade blast (a grenade is louder, incidentally).

There’s a bizarre certainty in knowing the unstable situation you find yourself in every day. It’s almost as if the tenuous balance we encounter as white people in Bujumbura is so present, it’s a security. I’m never going to be caught off guard here, because I will never be off my guard. There’s never a fear of bandits and thieves, because you know that you have no real control over their absolute existence. The only thing you have control over is your own awareness, and that’s actually rather comforting. If you enter into your environment every day with the reality of life in the city at the forefront, and the appropriate precautions taken, then you will be the safest you can possibly be.

And there’s also a trust in Christ and His providence that you can’t find in the States. We just finished a year in one of the most violent cities in the country, and we never feared for our security. Not once. But here, there’s a release to the Eternal One that I’m finding myself leaning into. I know that He is leading us, and I know He has our best in mind. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” There’s tangible weight in those words in my first days in Burundi. I’m secure in the Good Shepherd being mindful of me, not in blinding me from the dangers of my surroundings, but in assuring me that His arm is not too short to save. So today I walked through the streets of Bujumbura, and He restored my soul.

Not that this is the valley of the shadow of death, mind you. But AK-47s make me a little nervous!