Apparently my faith is very small

One small story Sarah didn't get to in the previous blog post was the one of the "Betty Crocker Nuns of Gitega".

So there is this interesting convent in Gitega. The Roman Catholic church is pretty strong in parts of Africa, especially in the more rural areas, which Gitega most decidedly is. Anyway, the nuns who belong to this convent must dedicate their lives fully to prayer, and part of this vow is that they won't leave the convent. So they don't go outside. Ever. Never ever. Apparently their commitment to God involves agoraphobia. The convent itself is this severe-looking concrete building with huge green doors with no door handles. The doors only open from the inside.

In order to finance this operation, the nuns bake cookies (although this is consistently translated into English using the British word "biscuits") and sell them to the community. They pray all day, and in between praying, they bake. The inside of the place must smell heavenly (pun intended), all the time. I can see why they wouldn't want to leave. I imagine if you leave the convent you are immediately blacklisted and can't buy cookies for the rest of your life, which is a fate no one would want to subject themselves to. Anyway, these biscuits are thought far and wide to be the best cookies in all of Burundi, maybe in all of Africa.

If you want some cookies you must approach the convent with proper reverence (which Sarah and I, as you can imagine, mostly failed to do). Then you must ring a bell next to a barred, closed window. We had to ring it a few times (customer service isn't a spiritual discipline of theirs, apparently), and a slat will open and a very sun-shy nun will answer. They have the reputation for being very grumpy nuns, which I imagine I would be too if I never got any fresh air. Our nun was rather pleasant though and said she had been there since 1995 - thirteen years inside the same building. We were impressed.

Anyway, we got the cookies, which were not as divine as we had hoped, and we thought we would give you a bit of a snapshot of how random life can be in the middle of Africa. Honestly , I can't imagine doing something like that myself in the name of my faith, so hats off, I suppose, to them and their discipline! And maybe next time...a bit more sugar in the cookies.

Ron with our friend Freddie, who started the orphanage we visited