Can anybody lend me a TARDIS?

Upon entering Burundi I get a visa at the airport. As with most countries the visa is limited to 30 days. If I want to stay longer I can renew it at the immigration office in Bujumbura which, because I usually stay for around 6 weeks, I always do. I am more than ably assisted in this by an Anglican Chaplain to the police, called Pastor Alfred, who knows just about everyone in the Bureau de Migration, including the boss. This year there was an entertaining mistake.

The new visa was prominently stuck onto an appropriate page in my passport. It clearly stated that it had been issued on 24^th February 2026. It also clearly stated that it was valid from 21 May 2024 until 21 June 2024. Apart from borrowing a TARDIS from Doctor Who, I was not entirely certain how I was going to comply with the conditions of this visa. Naturally I pointed this minor problem out to Pastor Alfred and he took my passport back to the Immigration Office to sort the matter out. The next day all was sorted out and I did not even have to make an urgent call to that other Doctor.

Pastor Alfred told me when he returned my passport that he had to wait up to two hours in the Bureau de Migration for the problem to be sorted out. Not only because the boss was somewhere else but also for the whole file related to my visa application to be searched and corrected. Page by page, each page on which the error appeared re-written, by hand. Burundi is not a high tech society. People do have computers, which are often old and slow. There is internet access, of a sort. To be honest it is painfully slow and often highly unreliable. Sending even simple things, like this blog, becomes a challenge.

Internet access is more than an inconvenient frustration for to those of used to the all fibre systems available in most towns and cities in Europe. In these days in which most business, even those global mission links so vital to the work of CMSI, happens over the Internet and just about everyone relies on some “cloud” service for storing and sharing information, an unreliable and slow connection is crippling to the Burundian economy as is the fact that most administration is carried out using outdated technologies. It is just one more hurdle faced by Burundians as they try desperately to carve out a life for themselves in what all too often seems like an uncaring world.

As I write this, all eyes are, of course, turned towards the conflict in the Middle East. None of Burundi’s problems are in the news. They are chronic rather than dramatic and instant, and we all too easily lose them in the clamour of the dramatic and ‘get-it-done-today’ world.

Yet it is for the least of humanity that Jesus expresses a deep concern. He is present in those ignored or deliberately neglected and it is with “the least of these” that he demands that we exercise our ministry, with the “least of these” that we stand in solidarity. When, and only when, we stand with the least of the world, the people who are not seen and whose problems go unheard, we stand on the side of Jesus and take part in the mission of God.