Blogs from Arusha, North, Tanzania, Africa - page 56

We spent an hour or so in Arusha's town before the drive to Kenya. Here we had a rather surreal experience of sitting in an internet cafe next to a Masai warrior in the usual full dress. And we were also there when our new friend Laura found out the extremely welcome news that she's about to move to New York. So Congratulations for that, Laura. At the Kenyan border the tourist-tat sellers were perhaps the most persistent and aggressive we've come across. For some reason, Ed's parents bought us a stick of Skegness rock each for Christmas and surprise surprise we hadn't got round to eating them yet. So we had a bit of fun trying to trade this rock for a bit of jewellery because - obviously - these Masai women weren't familiar with ... read more

A very welcome lie-in this morning as we weren't going anywhere in the truck today. The majority of our group left at 8am to go to the Serengeti for a day before we were scheduled to meet up with them tomorrow evening at a place called the Ngorongoro Crater. After a late breakfast we caught a Dala Dala into Arusha, 26km away. It's quite strange being cramped into these little vehicles, and today we got to share one with a fully-dressed Masai warrior with bits of old car tyres strapped to his feet as shoes. We had a frustrating attempt at internetting but the connection was lost, so we headed for a bit of a change of scenery to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It's a secure building, obviously, so we had to ... read more

After a longer break than planned for in UK we were fully recharged for more travelling and a new continent for the both of us - AFRICA! It was nice for a change to stay in the same bed for more than 3 days. A very average British Airways overnight flight from Heathrow (which saw only minor delays amazingly) arrived early morning on the 23rd January in a tropical (aka vely hot!) Dar . Again San's star performance on accommodation research came in and like old hands we grabbed a cab, negotiated the hell out of the poor guy, grabbed two tickets on the way to Arusha for the following day with the better of the coach companies in Tanzania (Scandanavia Buses) and pitched up at the Safari Inn in downtown like regular guests. The place ... read more

Here are a few pictures from this week in Monduli and around Arusha... Last week... I made my first trip to Monduli, to go along with Shasta on a few studies there. We went and visited an older "Mzee" Man who has been baptized recently to see how he and his family were doing... Then met up with Innocent, the preacher in Monduli who went along with us through the day. The older man and his grandson, Paul decided to go on the studies with us... and we think that Paul may be very close to following in the example set by his grandfather. He was asking lots of good questions and listening with his whole heart... There were 9 people at the first home we studied with... and 19 at the 2nd home... It was ... read more

It's already almost half way through the month of January.... 2007 and we've just completed the first seminar of the year up at Kioga...There were 2 baptisms and over 100 present for worship on Sunday morning in this small mountain side building which usually runs around 40-50. The church is growing daily here in Tanzania! This month Brent will be going to language school out in Usa River, starting Jan. 15th. He will be taking a 3 week intermediate course in Ki-Swahili.... improving on his language skills. Tonight during dinner, our dear friend, Moses called from up at Kioga and I sat and listened to my husband talk and have a compete conversation in a different language and I thought to myself, wow. How life has changed in the last 4 months since we have arrived ... read more