Monthly Archives: November 2011
On Monday, October 31st, we travelled from Kigali to Kimonyi Village once again. Through Prison Fellowship Rwanda, The Word for All Nations was able to deliver ten industrial “Singer” sewing machines that will be used by a women’s co-op at Kimonyi Village. The villagers met us in the same field where they like to perform, and Gerrit was able to officially hand over the machines and pray a blessing on their use in the community. In addition to the delivery of machines, WordFan donors also provided for six months of training on the machines at Kimonyi Village. Our prayer is…
Prison Fellowship Rwanda posted a great blog about Gerrit and Thabo and the filming of “Dancing on a Thousand Hills.” They write: This week was a particularly busy one for the PFR staff as we welcomed two very important visitors: Gerrit Wolfaardt and his son Thabo, both born and raised in South Africa and now living in the United States. Gerrit has an incredible story that led him to Rwanda. Having grown up as a white Afrikaaner during Apartheid he was taught by everyone around him, his school, his church, and his parents, to hate ‘the Blacks’. Read the full blog…
UPDATE! See video about the Reconciliation Village recently posted. click here. Wednesday, October 26th. We got to go to Kimonyi Village for the first time. We filmed the dancers and singers performing as well as a community lunch afterwards. Thursday, October 27th. We returned to Kimonyi to shoot scenes around the village. We also had some time to film our first interviews – with an ex Hutu rebel (one of the lead dancers in the Kimonyi Reconciliation Village Dance Troupe), and his Tutsi wife, as well as with an elderly lady who lost her husband and nine children in the…
On Monday we traveled to Mukono where the school children have to walk two miles twice a day (5am and 4pm) down a mountain to get buckets of water. Fils, Safali, and I accompanied them on the trek at 4pm and we shot incredible footage. It looked like it was going to rain the whole time, with wind picking up but, miraculously, the clouds rolled around us. Click on photos to enlarge and click again to make smaller On Tuesday morning, we got up early to film the students leaving for water and returning with their heavy containers up…
We are back in Kigali after traveling around a good portion of the country for the past week and it has been quite incredible… My son Thabo (a filmaker for Los Angeles) and I left for Byumba last Saturday where we stayed with Bishop Emmanuel Ngendahayo and his wife Vicky in the Byumba Diocese. The church was having a special event for the community in honor of Reconciliation and Unity week and my son filmed it. The highlight of the event was the hand-over of cows and goats to impoverished but responsible locals. Various officials and army officers took turns…
