Hi Ho Silver

I’m in the Kilimanjaro airport waiting for my flight to leave in about 2 ½ hours. I probably won’t have a chance to post this for another day or two: I can’t connect to wifi because it is too weak. But I thought I would put down my thoughts while they are still fresh in my mind.

Arusha is about an hours drive from the airport and you don’t want to rent a car, so I needed transportation. Daniel set me up with a taxi driver, Mr Mwanga, a friend of his. He is a lovely man,  a Muslim, who is married with three sons. He picked me up at the airport and drove me to my hotel in Arusha and on Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon he showed me around town. We went to the Tanzanian Cultural Center where they have many fabulous wood carvings and a great store. On Sunday he took me to the Masai Market where I bought a few souvenirs. Mr. Mwanga’s picture is below.

                                    

My flight doesn’t leave until 9:10 pm so I was able to go horseback riding at a stable I found on the internet that is midway between Arusha and the airport. I hired Mr. Mwanga for the afternoon so he drove me to the stables and waited for me. Likini was the person with whom I rode from the stables. I rode Phoenix, a good horse with some get up and go.
Below is a picture of Likini with Phoenix.

                            


We started around 3:00 pm. After walking a bit, he asked me if I wanted to trot which, of course, I did. After trotting he asked if I wanted to canter which was a definite yes.  When he determined that I knew how to ride, we did a lot of cantering. About a half hour into the ride the skies opened up and poured on us. So we headed back early and cantered almost the whole way in the driving rain. It was really a blast. It was also fun to be riding in the African bush and see different kinds of antelope and some gorgeous birds. There is a large and beautiful polo club about a mile from the stable and when we hit the edge of the field we cantered the whole way across it.

When we returned to the stables we were both soaking wet—literally. I had to dump water out of my shoes. Fortunately, I had put all clean clothes including a towel I had brought in a sack so that I could clean up. I am really glad I brought the towel. My passport was quite warped but fortunately still usable.

Mr. Mwanga drove me to the polo club for a soft drink after the ride because it was too early to go to the airport. What an incredible view of Mt. Mero, a miniature Mt. Kilimanjaro. From one side of the polo club you looked across the grass playing field and looked at Mt. Mero, and the other side you looked across another playing field and could see Mt. Kilimanjaro on a clear day. I was told that they play polo every Wednesday and Saturday night and every Sunday morning.

Sadly we had to leave that beautiful and peaceful place. We headed for the airport that took us about 30 minutes. I paid and thanked Mr. Mwanga (“Asante” in Swahili) and we parted ways. What a great day, what a great trip. I am so thankful to God for the privilege of coming to East Africa, participating in such an awesome partnership with WVU, meeting with Daniel from WVT, and having such a delightful day today.

A Few Days in Arusha

My confusion about the weather has been cleared up. As I mentioned in a previous post, I thought that this would be the dry season as it is Uganda. But it is rained every day that I have been her, and yesterday it rained for about 12 hours straight. It turns out that the transition to the rainy season normally happens at the end of February, but this year due to some influences in the Indian Ocean, it arrived a month early. It caught the farmers off guard because during February they prepare their fields for planting. So many of the farmers hadn’t prepared their fields and are now playing catch up.

My host from World Vision Tanzania is Daniel Muvengi. He is in charge of the spiritual nurture/development of nine eastern African countries: Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somaliland (Somaliland is the northern part of Somalia that has it’s own government and is fairly stable). I am here to see if there a way that I can help support World Vision staff here in some fashion that will work for WVT. I have supported staff in Uganda over the last several years and was wondering if there is a way that I can serve WVT. I thought that we had a productive meeting and am looking forward to more discussion and hopefully another trip here to meet with more staff to help flesh out how this would work. Below is a picture of Daniel, Shalom (on the left) and Fadhili

On Sunday Daniel took me to worship with him and his two sons, Shalom 12 and Fadhili, 8 (Fadhili means “mercy”). His wife, Christine, and daughter, Hope, 15, were in Nairobi so I was not able to meet them. I enjoyed the service and the singing which lasted 2 hours and 45 minutes. During one of the songs, five elementary age students danced in the front of the stage. They were having a good time and I enjoyed watching them. The church was small so I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures during the service. I would have loved to videoed them, but I think it would have been too distracting. Below is a picture of the front of the church.

                                   

Afterward, Daniel treated me to lunch with his sons. The lattes were good. He then dropped me off at my hotel and we said our good-byes. I taxi driver that Daniel knows well then took me to the Masai Market not far from the hotel where I did a little bartering for some souvenirs. All in all, it was a good day.

Odds and Ends

We were assigned two drivers for our time in Uganda, Bright and Santos. In a way they are the unsung heroes. We spent a lot of time with them and they were great drivers. They had servant hearts and added greatly to our good experience. We would talk on our drives and they would ask us questions about the US and we would ask them questions about their life in Uganda. I actually have learned a lot about Uganda and what ordinary life looks like from the drivers I have had. They see it as their ministry. Bright has five children and his wife is now pregnant and the family lives in western Uganda. Bright is assigned to Kampala. He visits them on the weekend every other week. He gets on a bus at the end of Friday and he takes a five our bus ride to his home. Sunday evening he makes the trip in reverse. Santos is able to live with his family in Kampala. I think Santos has four children. Bright is the one on the left and Santos the one on the right.

Irene was our host for the trip and she did an excellent job. She along with another woman, Charlotte, replaced Rachel Tumwine who visited our church last year. This was her first time leading a tour and she was incredibly good. She was organized, prompt, helpful, and when glitches happened, she was right there straightening things out. It was fun getting to know her better. Irene is the one on the left.

Below is a picture of our team with Irene standing beneath the sign at the national headquarters.

I continue to see progress in Uganda in so many ways since I first came in 2008. Two years ago the government started a campaign overseen by a highly paid government official to beautify the country, primarily by cleaning streets and sidewalks. As far as I can tell they have been successful and Kampala is so much cleaner. I also noticed that in Kampala there were more traffic signals and that they worked. Gulu has a ways to go. The streets are in bad shape and while it definitely is cleaner, you still see a lot more trash on the road. I am greatly encouraged by what I see.

Even More on St. Thomas Moore

In the previous post I showed a picture of a physics class I attended. After some of the initial introductions and speeches, we broke up and went to four different classes: biology, math, English, and physics. Everyone was impressed with what they experienced. As I mentioned as the caption of the last blog, I was not expecting the quality of the teaching and the focus of the students. The teacher was teaching on molecular forces that I had long forgotten. His English was excellent and his presentation was clear. I complimented him after the lecture was over.

After attending the class, we were given a tour of the campus, walking to each building we had funded in chronological order. Then we were treated to some dancing in which some of the students performed an Acholi dance in costume. It is the one they have always performed for our visits, and I never tire of watching. They have so much fun doing it and the student body loves watching. They performed around the time that the primary school across the street had lunch break, so many primary school students in their purple shirts stood at a distance and enjoyed the performance.

As usual I was the guest speaker to address the students. My message to them was that they should be grateful for their school and the improvements that have been made.  I asked Alex to stand next to me and told them how fortunate they were to have a headmaster like him. When I first came to northern Uganda, I informed them, I visited a number of very needy schools but decided to focus on their school because of their headmaster. I then presented him with a tie I had brought for the occasion. In addition, I told them that they should be grateful for their teachers and the parent organization and their total commitment to improving the school. I mentioned Alphonse and Isaac the two leaders of the parent organization who have always been there since I first visited. Gratitude, I told them, is an important virtue that honors God.

The other second part of my speech was the usual message about how important education is and their need to complete it. I always emphasize how important it is for girls to receive education and I was able to refer to Robina’s testimony as an example of what I meant..

Alex then presented the church with a lovely framed picture out of banana fibers of village life, approximately 12 X 8 inches. After that, the girls chorus did this amazing choreographed dance and slowly gave us gifts. All for of us stood in the center to receive the gifts that slowly they gave to us: four chickens and about eight small bouquets of flowers.

 I think someone else from the team that went took pictures and even a video that I hope to share with you after we return. After we received the gifts, the girls slowly danced and sang their way out of the center and Alex, myself, Charlie, Steffi, and Joan danced our way behind them. The students got a big kick out of it.

It must have been around 2:30 when we broke for lunch. I was struck how different that was from the way it used to be. We went to the administration building and had served ourselves buffet style. Until recently there was no place to do this so we ate outside. There was nothing wrong with this; my point is that even this pointed to some of the progress that the school had made. There was a different feel to lunch.

The last thing we did was play a game of volleyball with some of the students. Charlie, Steffi, Patty, Larry and I were on one team with one of the Koro-Bobi staff. The students laughed and laughed when we made mistakes which was frequent. I am only going to say two things: someone needs to teach Charlie how to serve, and the next group going over is going to practice volleyball :-)!

More on St. Thomas Moore

At last I have some down time to do some processing of the week and to catch up on blogging about the day we spent at St. Thomas Moore School (STMS).

We arrived at the school around 10:00 am and I was surprised to find no one to meet us at the turn in and accompany us down the road to the school. This was the first time that happened. In all previous times we were either escorted by students or by women in the adult learning program by singing and welcoming us as we arrived. I learned a little later that the school has just returned from school break and they only had four days to prepare for our arrival. In addition, S-1, roughly speaking the ninth grade, was not there because they don’t return until this coming Monday.

The picture is of Alex, Patty MacDonald of WVUS, and myself.

As I mentioned in the previous blog on the school, it is amazing how different it looks physically from when I first visited it in 2008. All the original buildings are still standing—four of them—except for the kitchen that was torn down after we provided the ovens and a new kitchen was built. In a way they are like scars that remind you of what happened to you in the past.  The building where Alex’s office was located now houses the generator, which in and of itself is amazing.  Until last year the school had no electricity, but now some of the buildings have solar panels the government provided and the generator. So instead of three dilapidated buildings and a wretched kitchen, there is a girls and boys dorm, three classroom buildings (each building houses two classrooms, an examination building that functions as an auditorium, and administration building where Alex now has his office, a new kitchen with two stoves, two laboratory buildings (funded by the World Bank) and five duplex houses for teachers. electricity, and computers, and several new latrines that replaced the dilapidated ones.

I am sitting in on a physics class in the new laboratory building. I was impressed with the lecture.

When we began our partnership with STMS, there were 47 students, only eight of which were girls. As of this visit, there are 154 girls of which 115 live in the girls dorm (which was originally supposed to house 60 but bunk beds work wonders) with a total of 402 students. There were originally three teachers and now there are 23 teachers. Helen, the deputy head teacher who has been there as long as Alex, said with a laugh that when she arrived at the school she felt like she was being punished and tried to transfer to another school.

For me personally, the most moving part of our time there was hearing two graduates of STMS, Robina and James share their stories. They graduated in 2010 and have recently been hired as teachers at STMS!! Robina told us and the students that she wasn’t much of a student and might have dropped out, but when the girls dorm was built, it totally changed her attitude and allowed her to stay in school and graduate. I got a little teary when I heard that. James shared how the changes in the school had also had a positive effect on him. (I was hoping to include a picture of them on the blog, but the only picture I have of them is too dark.)

Gulu to Arusha

Larry Comstock, a World Vision US person from New York who accompanied us on the trip, and I headed for Entebbe at 4:50 am. The amount of time the trip takes varies greatly depending on traffic which can frequently be congested. We made the whole trip from Gulu to Entebbe in record time: 5 ½ hours. Our driver, Bright, thought it would take 7 hours. The light traffic on the main highway between Kampala and Entebbe was especially shocking. I have never seen it so light, nor had Bright, and he makes the trip all of the time.

This is the saddest that I have ever felt leaving Uganda. The trip has been great, and I have grown so close to many of the WVU staff and former staff. The manager of the Gulu Cluster refers to me as a “Home Boy.” I do feel at home here.

My flight to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania left at 1:55 pm and took about 1 ½ hours. A taxi driver picked me up and then drove me about 45 miles to Arusha. The temperature when the aircraft landed was 86 but on the way to Arusha we ran into a thunderstorm. In Uganda it is the dry season and I was assuming that it would be the same here, but I was wrong. It is the rainy season which dampens (no pun intended) my hopes for actually getting a glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was completely covered in clouds and you can’t see it from Arusha. I might be able to get a glimpse of it early Monday morning when I will be in the vicinity again.

It’s just about 6:00 pm so I am going to get a little dinner an crash. I hope to blog about the St. Thomas Moore School this weekend because my schedule won’t be so jam packed full.

But I do want to give one vignette from yesterday. At the co-op where we bought the bead necklaces, there were quite a few children, mostly elementary school and younger in age. Charlie, Steffi, and Joan were like “children magnets.” I have a picture of Charlie seated in a chair surrounded by these children.