Dar Reading, Mwanza Cookin'

We are all back together after our jaunting about! Amisadai came home extremely inspired and excited about her trip to Nairobi for the MUN event! She can tell you all about that on her blog! Tim has been about numerous different villages with farmers and beekeepers which will be the next post!  And I am back from my trip to Dar es Salaam last week! It was fantastic to be back with everyone at Under the Same Sun! I was also able to go to a couple of meetings with the VCC church. And in one short flight home (at an insane time in the early hours), managed to lose my luggage which ended up on an island off Madagascar. Air Tanzania did manage to return it once they found it, although I would have quite enjoyed recovering it myself!

The Dar Mamas were delighted and excited to receive their first sales money! The group made their first 100,000TSh, which is hugely encouraging! They have been making some lovely necklaces and earrings, and the stitched cards are improving all the time! And now they have all started learning the basics of making beeswax products! We made our first lip balms and Neem Creams last week.

Varnished beads drying while we make lip balms

A satisfying sight! 

It is such a privilege to be able to come alongside this group of women in a small way. And great to be something of a connector between them and the Mwanza Mamas - they share a name and more significantly, a story and I hope one day they can all meet! Our Bible studies this visit were much better with the gift of Bibles from Tadley Community Church! Each woman was offered a Bible either for reading during our time together, or to take home at a very low cost if they chose to. Everyone took one and took great delight in reading it for themselves! I pray that this Word would truly be a light to show their way and in it they would find true joy. Some were struggling to read the print, and it was a fantastic moment when I passed along some basic reading glasses! There were loud shrieks of amazement that letters could actually be so clear and visible! I wish I had caught the moment on camera!

Brand new reading glasses (labels intact!) and Bibles

All engrossed!

Thrilled to read!

Let's Get Cookin'

The great news here is that the Mwanza mamas finally have their oven! Four of us went shopping on Wednesday... which is another crazy story in itself, really! It entailed much too-ing and fro-ing, hunting through hospitals, waiting in banks, trekking through town - all simply for a stove! We have been long-anticipating this day. It is nothing big and fancy, but all are so excited to share in this and now learn how to bake! I find myself suddenly rather less excited and seriously daunted about the next step forward. Suddenly realising that I am supposed to be teaching these women as well as the girls at the safe house how to bake, I threw myself into garlic sticks, cinnamon twists, bread and rolls at home to practice! I am certainly no baking expert and felt rather apprehensive about definitive recipes!

We were supposed to start cooking today, but today was another one of those kinda crazy Tanzanian days when things don't go according to plan. Trying to get the connector for the gas to stove proved challenging. This started at 8am with a trip to town only to find that all the stores were shut to get everyone sweeping for Clean Streets. No one was sweeping but we had to go back at 11am. Which meant getting rather tied up in traffic as we looped around the crazy market area with Zuena continually hopping out while I created traffic jams. Trying to get all the Mamas to arrive on time in time to get the bread rising proved challenging. Yes, it has crossed my mind numerous times that bakers arrive at work VERY early. This will take a minor miracle with these Tanzanian mamas.

But never one to be phased by a challenge ... we rise to it. Let's get cookin'!

Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
I have taken an oath and confirmed it, that I will follow your righteous laws.
I have suffered much; preserve my life, Lord, according to your word.
Accept, Lord, the willing praise of my mouth, and teach me your laws.
Though I constantly take my life in my hands, I will not forget your law.
The wicked have set a snare for me, but I have not strayed from your precepts.
Your statutes are my heritage for ever; they are the joy of my heart.

My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end.

Psalm 119:105-112

A Kiln in Kimande

We're back! It's been a while since the last blog post and once again, it is hard to know where to begin! Tim picked up my cousin, Kate in Dar es Salaam at the end of August and she had just a few days in town before we whisked her off to life in Kimande! It had been a busy and bit of a stressful time before that, with Louisa getting rather sick, making things a little unpredictable! But thankfully, she recovered and after just one day delay, we headed off to the village last Monday.

We took Hosea with us (Mongers, Kate and Jesca) this time. He is a friend from the stoves group in Magozi, who had been trained there to build a kiln. He came with us to build the kiln and he trained up Edward in the Kimande group. The two guys did a fantastic job and we are excited to try it out in a couple of weeks when the first eighty stoves are dried and ready!



The Kimande/Itunundu Kiln

Kate did really well with all that goes on in the village. Picking up Swahili and local customs, looking the part in her khanga, cooking on the jiko, making stoves, making baobab smoothies and eating ugali and spinach (which admittedly, she disliked!). Everyone loved her and she was given gifts of rice, papayas and spinach and a straw mat and generally made very welcome! It was always a little confusing explaining who she is as the Swahili words for relations get a bit complicated. She is my "little one" but she is also a lot taller than me!



Kate cooks lunch!

 

A gift of sugarcane!

It was a busy but encouraging week. As well as the usual stoves group work (which is going really well), and the kiln work, we had 17 trees to give out to plant. Thanks to many kind people in Tadley Community Church, we were able to offer Bibles to people who wanted one! This is probably the only book most would own and they were all delighted! And it makes our Bible studies a lot easier now too!



Simoni, the Stoves Group Chairman with his new Bible

Presenting the Bibles

New Bibles!

The afternoons were full with adult English classes and then also kids coming everyday to learn and practice English! We started a Bible reading group to help women practise their reading. Now they have something to read, it is a great opportunity to work on their reading skills and give them confidence in reading on their own and out loud in a group as well. Our first meeting together led to interesting discussions on struggles women are having with their husbands, raising things that we would love to see God change as we talk and read together. They were all very keen to come back, so we had another Bible reading meeting later in the week, which was really stretching far beyond the limits of my Swahili! I have encouraged them to meet this week while we are here in town, so the plan was for them to meet at Mama Christina's home (the woman with the amazing garden) and read and discuss together.


Bible Reading and Discussion with Mamas

One afternoon we did a mamas "Cooking and English" combined lesson which was good fun. I made bread and orange cake, explaining it all in English. Kate was writing all the English words on the flipchart along with the Swahili, so she learnt loads as well! That also was popular and so it's banana cake next time! Tim led a Bible Study one evening with a great group of people in Itunundu; we are starting to work through the book of Titus with them.

Kate scribes for the Cooking in English lesson!

One morning, Tim, Kate and the girls went with the pastor to meet with others in Itunundu to pray with a girl called Rachel. This young, 15 year old girl has suffered from years of living with evil spirits, never able to live a normal life, and she has never been to school.

But she is not the only one to miss out on an education. We also found out that Mama Esther (the pastor's wife) suffered with epilepsy for her whole childhood and was never able to go to school. She feels incredible shame about this now (no longer with epilepsy) and would love to be able to read the Bible she now has and also join in the Bible reading and studies with other women, which at the moment she is too ashamed to go to. So we are talking about how the church can start a Reading and Writing class for these and others who have never had the opportunity to learn. This is such a huge thing for these girls and women who feel so ashamed and inferior now, but will learn and have a whole new world opened up to them! And it will be their own husbands and church who solve this problem ... which makes it all the better!

So we shared lots of good times with people, shared over meals, over learning, over playing cards! Unfortunately, Jesca got sick during our week there. I took her to the hospital on Friday to get tested for malaria, which proved positive. That was an adventure in itself. It's all a procedure here, going from one room to the next, popping off to the little shop to buy an exercise book for records, then back later to buy syringes, then to pay, then into another room for blood tests (and I shut the door, which we shouldn't have done because the door doesn't open from the inside and a guy with a bashed head and bloodied shirt had to let us all out ... As I've said before, I don't really like hospitals and we were there going through all these procedures with this guy with his head bashed with a sharp object in a fight across the road. He was bleeding as you would imagine and I was trying so hard all the time to keep him out of my line of sight! But he was always right there with us. Then there was a police officer at the scene. And a short while later there was another injured guy going through the same procedures with handcuffs on. The head got stitched up and Jesca was injected with medicine and then it was a relief to get back to the house. But in all the goings-on, I had completely forgotten that a retired Canon and his wife were coming for lunch, but Kate had done an amazing job on the jiko and after a very short time, ugali and spinach was served! Jesca is doing well now, but she did have to home on the bus a day early to get some rest and recovery at home.

So now we are back in town and have started school again. The girls have done very well putting up with a rather tired and impatient teacher who has been a bit distracted by other things! I feel I have rather missed out on the whole "Back to School" buzz, both as a teacher getting a lovely classroom prepared and lessons planned and as a mother in getting all those shiny new school shoes and funky lunchboxes! But we landed with a bump in the Tudor period and are working hard, with Kate helping, to getting double the maths done in a short period of time before we go back to the village next Monday!

Amisadai and Louisa inspect the kiln