Blogs from Tanzania, Africa - page 312

What can I say, apparently life is never going to be boring here!!!! I guess I should start from last Sunday, and my church invite. I was invited to the church by Joakim (project coordinator), so that he could introduce me to the community (and I was introduced as principal of course!). I took a few other volunteers along with me - Sally, Jenny & Nicki. I managed to fill 5 pages of my journal for the time in church alone so I'd better summarize a little bit. We are all glad we had the experience of attending the church service (all 4 hours of it), and it is definitely something I will never forget, but it was very emotionally disturbing, traumatic even. The church was really small & the floor was just regular gravel. ... read more

Currently just a few children left who NEED SPONSORS We had successfully covered all the origional 31 children needing help, and then there have been some new students come in and the teachers forgot to add a couple to the list of students! Now the school has 63 STUDENTS TOTAL... as of July 18th ~Thank you for everything you are doing to help! After seeing a need we wanted to help! If you and your family would like to help support one or more of these sweet children to attend Hannah's Nursery School for the year let us know and we'll contact you with more detailed information. This is a Pre-school/Kindergarten level education prior to attending Form 1 in the Tanzanian schools. The cost would be $50 for the year, for one child Let me ... read more

We spent the night at Dar Es Salaam on our last day with the truck, on a campsite at the beach. The weather was very hot and humid and so I upgraded to a banda (beach hut) because I couldn't be bothered to put up my tent! There were two other trucks from the same company there with us (and they stuck with us in Zanzibar as well) so we had a big party on the beach with all of them. The next day we got a ferry from our campsite across to the main ferry port, and then a ferry over to Zanzibar Island - it was a very rough and choppy crossing, and a few people were seasick. When we arrived we travelled straight to our accomodation at Kendra beach near Nungwi, where we ... read more

Well, we have just finished our week with the vet school at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania (about 3 hours by road west of Dar es Salaam). Since Andrew didn't talk about it, I'll briefly mention our trip in from Dar- on one of those buses that you really ought not to take- by then we were pretty desperate to get on any bus due to a 3-4 hour late arrival in Dar. We did arrive intact though, and it wasn't as sketchy as I thought it would be (I was just happy to get here). Morogoro is a bustling little town, at the foot of some mountains, which makes it picturesque. The people here speak mostly swahili (it's not a tourist town quite yet), so we've been trying to pick some up, ... read more

When you decided to become a Christian, what did that decision cost you? Earlier this week I had another Bible study with an elderly woman that I've been studying with over the past several weeks. This woman lives several hours away, near the coast, but she has been staying with family here while having some medical needs addressed. This week we covered "Counting the Cost." One of the concerns that this woman has is her ability to worship once she returns home. You see, there is no New Testament church anywhere near her home. Also, this woman is not able to read, so she cannot study the Bible independently. She seems determined to become a Christian, but she understands that there may be some difficulty involved as a result. Another scenario - Jenny recently studied ... read more