#// hey so i found out i could talk to spirits when my parents died brutally

[thanatologie]

since it was mentioned elsewhere but...consider the fact that emmrich sees shit a lot that no one else can, he talks about it a lot in his ambient dialogue.

[dontshootmespence]

Supernatural AU: Episode 2 - Phantom Traveler

Part 5

Through the curtains at the back of the plane, Dean watched Amanda get the co-pilot to come out of the cockpit and follow her. “We’re up,” he said softly.

Seconds after he stepped through the curtains, Dean punched him in the side of the head and knocked him to the floor while Bobbie pulled Amanda in with them and closed the curtains.

Sam pulled out the holy water and started dousing him in it. The sizzle and scent of burning skin almost made Amanda pass out cold. “Oh my god. What’s happening? What is-? Why? I thought you just needed to talk to him?”

Technically. Kind of. Maybe not.

“Calm down,” Bobbie said. “If you freak out then everyone else goes on high alert and we can’t do what we need to do.” 

“What do you have to do?”

“I don’t have time to explain,” Bobbie said sharply. “Please, trust us and just wait outside the curtains and make sure no one else comes in.”

Amanda turned green, on the verge of throwing up everything she’d eaten in the past week at the sight of what was going on before her. She had no idea who any of them were, but she recognized the man on the phone as the one she’d spoken to and it was clear they knew something she didn’t.

The second she left, Bobbie knelt down beside her brothers and the thrashing co-pilot, using every ounce of strength she had to hold him down with Dean while Sam covered his mouth with duct tape. Even with two of them holding him, the demon was still ridiculously strong. “Sam, go!”

“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica. - ”

With each word, the demon bucked harder and harder. Every muscle in Bobbie’s body ached as she tried to keep him pined to the ground, but he managed to get his hand free from under Sam’s knee and punched Dean out of the way before kicking her back into the wall of the plane.

Peeling the tape to the side, the demon grabbed the collar of Sam’s jacket and spoke in the most gravely, icy tone any of them had ever heard. “I know what happened to you’re girlfriend,” he growled. “She must’ve died screaming.”

Sam panicked, staring the man down in astonishment before Dean got back up and knocked him out again. “Sam!”

“Ergo, omnis legio diabolica, adiuramus te... cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum propinare... Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciæ, hostis humanæ salutis... Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei. –“

Bobbie came to just as the co-pilot thrashed violently in Dean and Sam’s grasp. His neck arched back and his throat contracted like he was going to get sick. Instead, a thick cloud of black smoke slid out of his throat like a snake and into one of the vents in the body of the plane. 

So that was the first part. 

Bobbie tried to stand up but found herself wobbling as the plane was wracked by violent dips and waves. As the plane dipped toward the ground, the passengers started to scream and cry, some frantically moving about to help their children or elderly parents with oxygen masks. “How the hell do we get it now?” Dean screamed over the chaos, body glued to the wall in terror. 

Sam went to grab the journal with the necessary incantation but it slipped away. He tripped down the aisle trying to get it and finally managed to touch the edge of the leather with the tip of his fingers. Over the earsplitting cries of the frightened passengers, Sam yelled out the last of the incantation.

“Contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine... quem inferi tremunt... Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos.”

When the last of the incantation slipped off his tongue, the plane was brutally hit one final time; there was a flash of light and then it all leveled out. Bobbie felt her heart in her throat as she pushed up off the ground where she’d been frozen in fear. Sam was covered in a sheen of sweat and he looked dazed, but otherwise he seemed okay. Her head snapped toward the back of the plane where she’d last seen Dean. “Hey, hey,” she repeated, grabbing her little brother by the chin. “Are you okay?”

“That depends,” he said. “Are we dead?”

“No, we’re alive.” 

“Okay. Good…did I crap myself?”

“Again, no. You’re as fresh as a daisy. Although you do reek of fear.”

“What and you don’t?” Finally, he cracked a smile. They’d gone against werewolves and vampires and spirits and now a demon, but seeing him plastered to the side of the plane was probably the most frightened she’d ever seen him. With one notable exception.

Sam found them both at the back of the plane and pulled them in. His long arms wrapped tightly around them, his head leaning against Bobbie’s as he at long last released some of the tension sitting in his shoulders. “We did it,” he breathed. “It’s over.”

This was. But Bobbie was pretty sure it was just the beginning.

-

Back on the ground, the plane’s passengers milled around talking to authorities about what happened. Only the Winchesters and Amanda Walker truly knew what happened. The co-pilot that had been possessed didn’t remember a thing. “I don’t even remember getting on the plane.”

Bobbie, Dean and Sam were shaken, not only from the near crash but the coming up against a demon – the first, but not the last. “We did good, boys,” Bobbie said with a smile. “All of these people are alive because of us.”

“I almost crapped myself,” Dean said again.

Sam laughed under his breath. “But you didn’t.” And Bobbie was right. He didn’t want back into this life, but now that he was here, he couldn’t deny that this is what it was all about. He made eye contact with Amanda who was standing across the room with a member of the TSA. “Thank you,” she mouthed.

Nodding, the three turned to leave. Sam lingered behind, his mind unable to focus now that everyone was safe. “You okay Sammy?” Bobbie asked.

“I just…it knew about Jessica.” He swallowed back against the dryness in his mouth and closed his eyes. “I don’t know how to handle that. What to do with that information. I’m-“

Bobbie placed her hand on his shoulder as Dean slowed up to ensure his brother was okay. “Demons lie,” he said. Sam glanced between the two of them.

“I was going to say what he said. He said what would affect you.”

“Well it worked,” he mumbled.

Bobbie squeezed his shoulder and began walking again. “We still have the beer from before. Let’s go back to the motel, celebrate and forget all this for a couple hours.”

Dean raised his eyebrows and turned back toward her. “I think we’re gonna need more beer for that.”

“You’re probably right.”

-

After stopping at the convenience store down the street from the motel for even more beer, Heineken for Sam and Blue Moon for Bobbie, in addition to the Bud for Dean, the three of them went back and cracked open the cold ones to toast to a job well done. “Can I ask you something?” Sam wondered as he looked at his sister. When she nodded, he continued. “When you came back before to tell us about Chuck’s plane, it looked like you’d been crying…are you okay?” 

“I thought we were supposed to be drinking and forgetting,” she replied dryly. The last thing she wanted to do was bring this up, but then again, she was the one always bitching to the two of them that this family didn’t communicate, so she would lead by example. “Fine, I’m okay now. But I wasn’t���I called Dad.”

She wanted them to be a family. Bringing her disappointment in him up to her brothers would only push them apart further, but she couldn’t keep it in. “I was…am, I am so angry with him.”

“He may not be able to call,” Dean said. “Something could be wrong.” He was ever their father’s defender, even though deep down, Bobbie wondered if Dean wasn’t even angrier with him than either she or Sam.

“I know. But if there’s nothing wrong, than he’s ignoring us. Like part of him training us to do this on our own or something. Don’t deny he could absolutely do something like that.”

Dean and Sam shrugged and took sips of their beer.

“I basically said I was tired of his bullshit and hung up the phone.” She wasn’t about to tell them that she’d bitched about being John’s sounding board and their mother. She loved her brothers more than anything in the world. She’d die for them. She’d kill for them. But she didn’t want to guilt them and the point was she shouldn’t have had to become this way at such a young age. “I threw the phone to the bottom of the floor in the car and went to grab beer. When I came back, it was ringing and at first I thought it might’ve been Dad, but that was when Jerry called.”

“Gotcha,” Sam said, handing Bobbie another beer as soon as she finished her first. “I think we’re all mad at him…and yet I miss him.”

“I do too.”

Dean finally chimed in again after opening his second drink. “Family is weird.”

“I can drink to that,” Sam said, lifting his bottle in another toast. “Now how about forgetting?”

Bobbie picked up the remote control and searched through the channel until she found what she wanted. “Drinks and zoning out in front of Scooby Doo.”

“Perfect,” Dean said with a sleepy smile.

-

Thankfully, Jerry was okay with waiting to thank them until the morning. Everyone was just too damn tired to do anything but drink and sleep, and in their case watch Scooby Doo for two hours.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find the right words to thank you,” Jerry said, extending his hand toward each of them. “Other people might not know what you did, but I do and I’ll never forget.”

As he walked them to the Impala, Bobbie reveled in the peacefulness of the morning sun. The sky was awash in oranges and yellows and pinks that reminded her of when she was really young, before any of this happened and her innocence had been lost in the gray, swirling wings. It reminded her of a time when her mother was alive and she wasn’t angry with her father.

Dean opened the door for her, but just as she was about to get in, a nagging thought raged toward the front of her mind like a freight train. “Jerry, how did you know to call me? I’ve only had this phone for a couple months.”

“John told me.”

“You spoke to him?” Sam asked.

“Well, no, but when I called his voicemail it said to call Bobbie or Dean in case of an emergency.”

With all the answers they were going to get, Sam, Bobbie and Dean slipped into the Impala and told Jerry never to hesitate if he needed them again.

Before getting on the main highway, the siblings pulled to the side of the road and attempted to call John one more time, this time on the phone he used strictly for other hunters. “If this is an emergency call Bobbie or Dean.”

“Damn,” Dean muttered. “Where the hell is he?”

Sam mumbled, kicking the dirt from the ground and watching it swirl into the air in front of him. “I don’t know. But I’m with Bobbie. He better have a damn good reason for not calling us back.”

“Do we go after him?” Dean asked.

How? They had no idea where he was. When John Winchester wanted to be left alone, he would be – not even they could find him. “No, we have no way to. At least right now,” Bobbie replied. “For now, we just work and keep our eyes open. We’ll find him. And if he’s not dead you two will get a front row seat to me beating the shit out of him.”

Dean grimaced and watched as she headed back to the backseat of the car. “Sam, as long as you don’t mind, I’m gonna nap back here.” They’d barely woken up a few hours ago, but anger wore her out more than hunting sometimes.

“That’s fine. I’ll take the front.”

As the Impala pulled onto the road, Bobbie drifted off. For at least one more day they were safe. In this life that was all that mattered. The day to day. The pinks and yellows and oranges managing to cling to hope, not fading to gray among the monsters that surrounded them.

@remember-me-forever-silent-angel @gaylemonshark  @marveldivergentouatdctvfangirl @lalirang @averagekansan @addsomesalt @stusbunker @sebba-hiddles @fanfictionrecommendations-com @hoppy519 @thatwrestlingfan91 @extremeobsessions101 @spence-imagines @bettercallsabs @whaaatthefuuuuck @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked @your-imagination-runs-wild @cryinglots @steggy01 @gigilame @sedulous-mind @a-unique-girls-heaven @just-antiyou @rmmalta @original-criminal-fanfics @ties-n-suits @veroinnumera @eurusholmmes @fanficienjoyedreading @astridstark13​

[sol1056]

Your posts on clone Shiro have been really interesting - I hadn't considered why the Black lion would lead Keith to the clone when it knew where the real Shiro was (unless maybe it was thinking that Shiro's spirit needed a new body and hey, that one's close enough!). But also, since Kuron had all of Shiro's memories from the time he first escaped back to Earth thru the end of S2, does that mean Haggar's been spying on them via Shiro's arm from the beginning?

Judging from my inbox and comments on other posts, you’re not the only one asking that question. A few examples:

The saddest thing about Kuron is that he wasn’t even actually bad. ... He is compassionate when there are no witnesses. Haggar yells at him to stop resisting when she possesses him, and his screams of agony make it clear that the process is nonconsensual. 

i can’t see any [clone resolution] scenario being handled well. the worst one would probably be if keith (maybe lance) has to kill him … the only thing that could be even worse is if they have the clone commit unambiguous suicide. they can’t do that any justice.

If Kuron had wanted to kill the paladins from the beginning, all he had to do was NOT intervene when they were being destroyed in S4E1. It seems like he was a good guy who got brainwashed into doing evil against his will, so it wasn’t even his fault.

I was really disturbed with what happened to Shiro and clone. Do you think they’ll even address this in the future?

A clone plotline – like a brainwashing/personality implant plotline – will inevitably raise heavy-duty questions about humanity, individuality, personality, and how great a role memories play in who we are. Going in unprepared will result in a story crumbling under that immense philosophical weight – or alternately, providing so many conflicting messages that the readers react with a variety of concerns like the ones quoted above.  

So, let’s talk science, philosophy, and metaphor.

Behind the cut: cloning vs SF make-believe, the ethics of cloning, the question of souls, fictional metaphors for souls. I’ll do a follow-up that gets into the clues in VLD’s text, how a cleaner metaphor could resolve the clone storyline’s plot holes, and what tweaks could’ve unified the metaphor.

The only way to avoid these reactions is to think through the ramifications, and give the narrative a very clear opinion on the answers. You’ve got to do the worldbuilding and decide whether this story’s world is essentialist or existentialist, and how that will change the consequences. It helps to pick a metaphor, but it must be relatively simple (so you don’t need exposition hell to explain), and it must be consistent. The instant the narrative starts waffling on its opinion of its ‘truth’, audiences will sense this and suddenly all those philosophical questions are going to come down, hard.

real cloning vs SF make-believe

In 1885, Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch produced the first viable clone: a sea urchin. In 1902, Hans Spemann cloned a salamander embryo. It wasn’t until 1996 that anyone managed to clone something other than embrionic cells, when Dolly was closed from adult somatic cells. And now, in 2018, biotech company Stemagen has come up with a process that uses an adult human’s cells to create the embrionic material needed for an actual, human, clone. It’d still need to be implanted in a womb, and from there on follow regular human birth and growth, but yes. It’s a human clone.

A clone is not born full-grown. A clone has no memories of anything that gave it genetic material, any more than you remember a parent’s tenth birthday or first kiss. A clone is no more artificial than a baby created by in vitro fertilization. The only difference between Dolly and other sheep was her method of birth; in all other ways that matter, she was a normal sheep. She grew up, had kids of her own, and died. Once the person (or animal) is born, they are their own person, with their own experiences and memories.

A cloned being does not automatically look like its genetic parent; you can still end up with a crapshoot in terms of appearance. Sometimes genes switch on and off, as a body grows; even identical twins are not truly and perfectly identical. Also, injuries (including scars) do not convey. On a glossy level, what’s stored in the DNA isn’t the injury but the body’s need to create collagen to repair that injury. Think of it like a band-aid: even if the body records the need for that bandaid, the clone’s lack of injuries would prompt the body to dismiss the bandaid. 

ethics of cloning & the question of souls

Once you recognize you’re talking about a living creature, the ethics simplify into being the same as what you’d raise for any other living creature. Banks and banks of post-birth clones, even in stasis, are as much living creatures as any other. Slaughtering them is still murder. Enslaving them is still slavery. Brutalizing them is still abuse. Cool clone, still murder.  

Where things get sticky is when the issue of clones runs up against religiously-based beliefs, most of which lack a solid framework for this modern concept. (Some religions have addressed in vitro and cloning birth technologies, but the specifics aren’t really relevant here.) Since this show is American-made, I’m going to stick to Western concepts, since that’s the most likely influence on the various creators involved in VLD. But to discuss souls, first we have to talk about the two theories on how personhood develops.  

essentialism vs existentialism

In essentialism, essence precedes existence: the person’s essence comes before all other things, even the spark of life itself (or alternately, the essence is the spark that kicks life into being self-aware). Spirit, soul, whatever word you use, it’s some inherent and inviolable thing that forms the basis of the individual’s personhood. It maps roughly to the nature half of the nature-vs-nuture debate – but it’s bigger than that.

Essentialism, at its extremes, is a position of seeing that originating spark/soul as the entirety of a person’s truth. When you reduce someone to their gender, or their race, or some other facet of their birth, that’s essentialism; when you declare that someone born X at birth can never be Y, again, that’s essentialism. When essentialism mingles with religious beliefs, you get a concept of a soul that exists before birth, and continues after: the person’s true essence, for which the body is only a thing to put it in. It’s the ultimate Cartesian separation between the mind-that-is and the body-that-experiences.  

Existentialism is the opposite, and maps more closely to nurture-over-nature. Existence precedes essence: personhood is the culmination of all our experiences, our memories, our interactions, our successes, our failures. Everything you’ve ever done, known, said, thought, or dreamed: these are your interactions with the world, and they are the entirety of what has shaped you into who you are. If there is an essence in play, it is formed out of your existence, rather than informing it. We are each born a tabula rasa, and there is no division between mind as objective observer and body as the vehicle of experience. These things are basically one and the same, in existentialism.

This perspective can also be taken to extremes; at its worst, it’s been turned into a kind of AI-like philosophy, where culture, genetics, family, can be swept aside – along with any future paths. Nothing is true; everything is permitted – a phrase whose roots are deeper than any video game, in a murky muddle between François Rabelais and Hassan-i Sabbah (by way of Vladimir Bartol). If you’re curious, this is the best short explanation I’ve found. 

fictional metaphors for souls

I bring up those competing paradigms because for most religious worldviews, ‘what brings life’ can be hugely important. If the process of birth is defined as a soul exists, the body is created, the soul enters thus making life, does this change if a body is created intentionally? What SFF likes to ask is whether a creature could be only as the shell, lacking that pre-existing substance. (Existentialism bypasses all of this, of course – but that would make for a boring story. It’s just one more individual who is born, lives, and eventually dies.) 

The hitch lies in our real-world metaphors mapping to computers. I’ll walk through a metaphor based on real-world computing rules, and hopefully it’ll become clear how this contradicts with the Western religio-spiritual assumption of a pre-existing, unique, 'soul’.

The mind-body separation exists in the basic metaphor. Hardware is the body, which can run with little oversight; the software (the mind) can usually be updated without disturbing the hardware. Sometimes the hardware ages out and this impacts the software; extend this metaphor and you get the SFF premise of transferring to new hardware so the software (the mind/soul) continues to run. Sometimes the software demands too much and burns out the hardware. 

Overall, the computer-based metaphor plays neatly into the Cartesian system where the two (mind and body) are separate but co-influencing. Note that part about 'transfer to new hardware’ – this is where this metaphor breaks down. 

Remember that Cartesian (yes, 'I think, therefore I am’ guy) posits a separation, and lends itself to an essentialist view where the mind can exist separately and objectively from the body. The same is not true of computers. Ask questions about pre/post life and the computer metaphor swerves into existentialism.

To illustrate: let’s say you have a laptop running a Unix OS, and one day you uninstall Unix and install Windows. It’s now common enough to do fresh installs that the average audience-member will grasp the metaphor: the laptop is now Windows. There is no more Unix. If there is a ghost in the machine, it’s a newborn with factory settings. If you were to reverse your actions and go back to Unix, the original system doesn’t pop up out of nowhere; you now have a newborn system that just happens to be Unix. Unless you took other precautions, the original is gone.  

I mention precautions because there are real-world alternatives in the process, and those impact the metaphor. The first is ghosting to an external drive: that entire Unix setup was copied over to a secondary home, broken away from the hardware. It’s no longer interacting; it’s in stasis. 

Yet, from the perspective of the laptop, it’s now Windows and must start over. The computer has no knowledge of once being Unix. Its self-knowledge begins with its 'birth’ as a Windows machine. If the computer is then wiped and the ghosted Unix is returned to the hardware, the re-installation would have no record of what happened in the meantime, because from the OS’ perspective, there’s no break in its experiential record. It was Unix, it was in stasis, it woke and was still Unix.

The alternative is an OS split into two; memory (the database) and personality (the OS). This paradigm gained strength with the rise of large external drives for long-term storage, while the laptop acts like a terminal, storing little and retrieving as-needed. An uninstall/install will produce artifacts: tiny footprints of a previous OS. (In an archive moved from Mac to Windows, you can see this in the .DS_Store files in every folder.) You could say that the newborn Windows system arrives with clues to its hardware’s previous existence, but in this metaphor, those 'memories’ may make no sense to the current OS. Windows has no idea what to do with a .DS_Store file; it doesn’t need it, and can’t even read it.

the narrative needs to be certain of its opinion

Given those variations in the person-as-computer metaphor, it’s imperative that a story know exactly how its world works. Without that strong and settled opinion, a stray remark within the narrative can mislead readers into thinking they should be following a different version of the metaphor. 

If your story will stand or fall on the concept of a ghost in the machine, you’d better clarify that there’s a backup copy somewhere. If you want the memory without the personality, you’ll need to bring in the concept of external memory paired with a new OS. Otherwise you risk readers kneejerking at the notion that the unprepared, unsaved, and uninstalled Unix OS is just floating out there in the ether, waiting to return. You’ve broken your metaphor.

Next post: the clues in VLD’s text, fixing the clone-created plot holes, and some minor tweaks that would’ve unified the metaphor.

[elevationproject-blog]

Day 7 - Kerryanne

Hey, Kerryanne here, so happy to share this incredible day with all of you. So we were supposed to wake up at 7:00am, however even though I was far down the hall, Rhys woke me up at 5:45am with his passionate "sleep singing." Anyway, we were all a little groggy at breakfast but we had delicious fresh mango so that helped wake me up.

Today was different because we had no camp, which was a little sad cause we love those precious children and their hugs, but it was also nice to have a break. We were able to relax a bit more after breakfast until 8:30am when we loaded into the monkey bus (our driver hangs a monkey stuffy from the mirror) with the sun shining and blue skies in sight. We then drove to the genocide memorial in Kigali.

We got out of the bus and walked under the archway where we went through security. Guys got screened with hand scanners, while then the girls had to get our bags checked and some got patted down. I honestly was quite nervous heading into the memorial. I'm definitely quite an emotional person so I was worried about how it was going to affect me. When we went inside we were greeted by a host who gave us a brief description of the memorial. Our team, plus other tourists were then led to a room where we watched a very heartfelt intro video of some survivors’ stories, personal experiences, and how they felt about the memorial where some of their family members are buried.

What I found very heartwarming is that they don't charge for you to come in, they just ask for a donation if you can and anyone is welcome to come in and pay their respects.

We then walked down a set of stairs outside to the next section, which was the museum part. There was a downstairs section that was all about the history of Rwanda and how all the hate and anger built up to eventually a genocide targeted towards the Tutsi and moderate Hutu, in which approximately one million people were tortured and killed – often by people who were neighbours or people they thought were their friends.

There was so much information to absorb and it was so interesting to read all the signs and watch the videos of survivors. There was actually a lot of people in there so it was a little squishy and hard to try not to block other people who were reading. There was this heartbreaking dedication room where they have strings on a wall under a spotlight and then people affected by the genocide are able to hang photos on there of people they lost. Every display was full of photos, and they had little stools so you could sit down and pay your respects.

The next room was a very tough and even more emotional one. Human skulls and bones that were found in mass graves that were not able to be identified. I immediately started crying, you could see the fractures in the skulls and some had a single bullet hole. I thought that would be the toughest room... I was wrong. The next one was displays of clothing that were found in the graves and hung up. There was a blue kid-sized shirt that had a heart on it and said, "Ottawa Canada" on it. I had to sit down and grab my tissues from my bag.

That finished off the downstairs tour, but there was a whole other floor still left. I didn't know if I could handle it, but then I felt ridiculous. The discomfort and sadness I was feeling, was nothing in comparison to what these children, teens, parents, and grandparents had to go through. I owed it to them to hear their stories and keep going. I'm really glad I did, too.

The next section was actually about other genocides that have happened in the world. Did you know there was a genocide in Turkey? And several other countries that we never hear or learn about! Partly because big countries won't admit that they actually happened. The main one we learn about in school is the Holocaust and then a only a tiny bit of info on Rwanda’s. I had never realized there have been so many more people in this world affected by genocides.

The next room was by far the most difficult and several people on the team couldn't even walk through it.

The children's dedication room.

There were about 10 big memory pictures of certain children and then a plaque telling us things about them such as their age, favourite food, favourite person, last memory or words, and then how they died.

The youngest in there was 9-months old, another only 15-months. The oldest my age: 17. Also several siblings. All suffered brutal deaths. Struggling trying to read the plaques with blurry eyes, that travel pack of Kleenex came in handy. Random strangers walked past me it was a bit awkward because as I was crying and sniffling trying my best to calm down.

Last but not least there was a moving forward section talking about how Rwandans are united as one group now and the country efforts for change. I ended up being the last one of our team to finish, so I quickly went and walked around the garden where thousands are buried.

What was incredible was leaving there though and going back through Kigali and just seeing how much the country has transformed in such a short period of time. Since we've been here I've never once felt unsafe or like there's hatred here. Quite the opposite – I see Kigali as a city of love, and the people are just so full of the Holy Spirit and spreading God’s love here.

In the afternoon we went and visited the Rwamagana campus of Kigali Christian School, and then went out to dinner at Lake Muhazi Resort and watched the sun set overlooking a lake. Now we are staying the night at Dereva Hotel, but not for long as we leave at 4:30 am to head to Akagera for our safari day!

 Hope all is well! Goodnight!