Heading Home

 George, Sayuni, and I had a chance to debrief the marriage workshop this afternoon before I headed to Kilimanjaro Airport. The feedback we received was very positive. In fact one pastor is planning to have a marriage workshop at his church the first week of December and he wants George and Sayuni to lead it. This is exciting to us because our goal has been to train motivated people to go into their churches and areas and hold workshops for their congregations and villages. This was our first stab at training trainers and we are encouraged by the response. Most of the pastors and wives who attended are planning to go back to their communities and do the training.

On the way to the airport I actually saw Mt. Kilimanjaro!! This is my ninth visit to Tanzania and as I mentioned in my first post, I have never seen it on the ground in daylight--it has always been encased in clouds. My driver stopped by the side of the road so I could take a picture:

The day after the marriage workshop I had time to hear the story of Luka, one of the two people Geroge and Sayuni have helping them and who did some translation for me. He has an incredible story that I won't go into detail here, but he is a Maasai man and has made some decisions in following Jesus that has created a lot of hard feelings from his family. He married a woman, Brenda, who is from a different tribe and his parents have not accepted her. A Maasai man is supposed to marry Maasai women. He can't take his wife to his parents village, in fact. I was impressed with his faith, his attitude, and his work ethic. Here is a picture of Luka, Brenda, and their daughter, Mylene (which I think means "mercy' in Swahili).

I want to thank everyone who prayed for this trip!

Marriage Workshop

 We held the marriage workshop on Thursday and Friday. Fourteen couples aattended which included three bishops and their wives. This is the first marriage workshop that we have given where the majority of pastors were from the Lutheran church. Since Tanzania was a German colony until the end of WW1, the Lutheran church is well established here. We have had one or two Lutheran pastors attend in the past, but they were never the majority: the vast majority of pastors have been Pentecostal at other workshops and this is the first one where they were in the minority--five of them. There was one pastor from a denomination I wasn't familiar with and several were Anglican pastors.

The workshop went well. The pastors and their wives were hightly motivated to take the information that we presented and try to bring it to their congregations. The culture is so patriarchal and the church in many ways just reinforces the great inequality and we spent the first day focusing on the scriptures and especially Jesus and his attitude toward and treatment of women. We were pleased with how well-received our presentations were and how the pastors and bishops wanted to start sharing what they had learned with their churches. Below is a picture of Sayuni speaking.

The couple married the longest had been married for 40 years and the couple with the fewest years had been married two and a half years. They didn't have anyone to take care of their daughter so they brought her with them. 

I am grateful to God for the opportunity to hold this marriage workshop and the positive response of the pastors and their wives. 

Preparations

 Yesterday we visited the venue where we will be holding our marriage workshop today. Someone she knows recommended it and reserved it, but since she had not seen it we drove there to inspect. She was pleased with what she saw and then informed the person responsible for setting up the room how she wanted it laid out. The 20 couples that will be attending will be staying here as well. We are staying at a hotel about 12 miles away. Here are some pictures of it. The first picture is the entrance, the second of the hall where we will meet, and the last a different picture of the courtyard.

I spent most of the day preparing myself for the workshop. I haven't given this in over 3 years and I needed to spend a good amount of time revising and becoming familiar with the material again.

On the Road

Yesterday morning we departed from Arusha at 9:30 and headed for Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania. We traveled approximately 260 miles and it took us 6 1/2 hours. The roads were good but they were 2 lanes with some passing lanes every so often. From the outskirts of Arusha to the outskirts of Dodoma there was very little traffic but the highway went through many small villages and the speed limit was 30 mph in every village so while we could go 75 mph outside of the villages, we lost a lot of time poking along for a mile or two while passing through the villages. Every once in a while you would see a "Cattle Crossing" sign. One time we encountered cattle crossing the highway:

 Over the last four or so years Dodoma has gone and is going through a rapid transition. In 1974 the leaders made the decision that they would move the capital from Dar es Salaam on the coast to the center of the country and Dodoma was chosen as the site. Not much happened for about 40 years or so. Most of the government departments and offices stayed in Dar. A previous president of the country gave the order that all of the government would move to Dodoma by a certain deadline. This has happened and is happening. I was here in 2019 and the amount of new construction is amazing. The population has exploded and so have prices. Rents have tripled and many of the people who lived in Dodoma can no longer afford to live here and so have moved out to find more afforadable housing.

Tomorrow we prepare for the marriage workshop that will be all day Thursday and Friday. We will stay in Dodoma Saturday so I will be able to do some couples counseling for any couples who would like to meet with me. We will then head back to Arusha on Sunday.

Lameloki

This morning we headed south about 30 miles to the Maasai village of Lameloki. Although it is closer, it took just as much time to arrive as it did to Kimokouwa because we traveled most of the way on dirt roads. It started out in average condition for Africa and continued to get worse--more and larger ruts we had to naviage around and the last 25 minutes or so their was a deep layer of fine dirt on it. We drove in a cloud of dust literally. We were following another vehicle that was going with us to Lameloki and there were numerous times we had to stop because we couldn't see anything outside our vehicle. I have ridden on very rutted roads in East Africa before some even worse than this one in terms of ruts and enormous potholes, but never in that kind of dust. We were way back in the bush and we followed one of the men who lived there on his motorbike to find our way out. But the fine dirt was so think he was fishtailing much of the time. I was impresseed that he could stay on his motorbike, frankly. Most of the people who live here really never leave. A few people have motorbikes but most don't. It is an hours walk to get to the nearest public transportation. Here is a picture that might give you a little sense of what it was like. It actually got much worse than this picture at times.

 Our destination was an "orphanage" with 40 children. I put orphanage in quotation marks because it isn't like a normal orphange. None of the children live there, although the women are trying to raise money to build some dorms for them. Many of them live with very poor grandparents and that is where they sleep. But the two women who founded and run the "orphange" have paid for their school uniforms and they make sure the children attend school. After school they come to the "orphange" where they receive a meal and they have programs for different age groups. Some of the girls are learning to sew, for example. The two pictures below show the welcomr we received when we arrived and the two women who run the "orphanage' with George and Sayuni. Because I was giving a talk on marriage, a number of older single and married women attended as well as a few husbands.

Geroge and Sayuni had purchased some simple school supplies for the children and they asked me to hadn them out.

You might notice the purple bags the school supplies were in. Tanzania has outlawed the use of plastic bags throughout the country so they now use these cloth kind of bags.

I gave a brief talk to everyone about how we are God's beloved sons and daughters and then the children went somewhere else and I gave a shortened marrage talk, with emphasis on women being equal partners, not second class citizens. George translated for me.

Kimokouwa

 Yesterday we traveled to the Maasai village, Kimokouwa. It is approximately 50 miles due north of Arusha and we were only about 2 miles from the Kenyan border. It took us about  1 1/4 hours to get there and most of the drive was through semi-arid land. The short wet season goes from the end of October until mid-December and the rains are late in coming. My weather app says there is a 40% chance of thunderstorms on Friday, but other than that there is no rain in the forecast for the next week. 

The church we met in was constructed in 1984 and it is the only Maasai church in the area. Some of the people, mostly women, had to walk 1 1/2 hours to get there. George and Sayuni arranged for all those who had gathered--approxiamtely 100--to eat before we met. According to them the people don't have a lot of food and they thought that some might only have one meal a day: ugali (a type of stiff corn flour porridge) and milk.   

When we arrived this is the road that led to the village:

As we pulled up to the church, the children had gathered to sing and dance. We then entered the church, introductions were made, and I was invited to speak. In Maasai culture women are 3rd class citizens coming behind men and cattle (cattle are wealth). Girls are given as wives when they are 12 and 13 y.o. and a man can have as many wives as he can afford. I spent a lot of time from scripture making the case that God created men and women as equals and both men and women are beloved children of God. My hope was to instill in the wives (there were only a few men there) that they are deeply loved and of infinite worth no matter what demeaning messages they may hear from others.

Below is a picture of the church and those gathered in:

The last picture is of my translator, Lukas, who is Maasai and works part time for George and Sayuni and me. He is a great young man who is married and has an 18 month old daughter. Lukas translated my English into the Maasai language. The official language of Tanzania is Swahili.

The Ways of God

 After meeting with George and Sayuni in Africafe yesterday, we were walking back to the hotel when we ran into some of their friends. They introduced me to Joseph and his wife (whose name I didn't get) who is a pastor and on staff with World Vision Tanzania in charge of "Faith and Development" for the whole country. As we talked, I asked him if he knew Daniel, the World Vision Staff person from Tanzania who sponsored the first pilot Marriage Workshop in 2015. Daniel moved to work at World Vision Kenya in Nairobi and I haven't seen him since about 2017. I discovered that not only does he know him, they are good friends and Daniel is in charge of "Faith and Development" for all of East Africa. Joseph told me that Daniel had just spent time in Arusha but had just left the day before. He called him on the spot and gave the phone to me and I was able to say "hi" and have a brief conversation with him. Sayuni then talked with him (in Swahili of course) and after we had said our good-byes to Joseph and his wife she told me that Daniel really wants us to come to Nairobi to do a pastors and wives marriage workshop--he is willing to set everything up. From what Sayuni reported, he sounded highly motivated for this to happen. It also turns out that Joseph is passionate about supporting marriages and in fact held a marriage workshop with some pastors from Florida in August, and was very interested to learn about what George, Sayuni, and I are doing. He lives in Dar es Salaam and wants us to come to Dar to offer some marriage workshops there. 

What is so amazing about this is that we have been trying to get some traction and support for our work here but so far it has been just us doing this ministry. World Vision Tanzania sponsored the first pilot workshop as I mentioned, but World Vision's funding decreased the next year and they decided not to support financially the workshops. But in a chance encounter--George and Sayuni didn't know they were in Arusha and hadn't seem them for a while--it suddently looks as though a door is opening for us to expand these workshops. The three of us were pretty excited about this! I would appreciate your prayers that God would guide us in these potentially new opportunities.

These are two pictures from the pilot marriage workshop we gave in Arusha in 2015. This is where I met George who worked for World Vision Tanzania at the time and was my translator.