week thirteen - outreach begins!

Habari! ‘hello how are you?’ its the main greeting here.... yes we have arrived! we left late satruday night from Perth. flew through Dubai and landed in Tanzania monday afternoon. we were met at the airport but through a series of finding a vehicle big enough to take us all and one for our luggage as well took around two hours. but this is Africa, and this is outreach, which basically means that you must be flexible. anything can happen, or not happen! just go with the flow....

so we got to the base after a very eventful drive consisting of sharing back roads through villages with huge trucks.... the kind of moments where you suck in thinking it will help your van get through the driving space! but we made if fine to the base and it is beautiful here. we’re slightly outside the city and the base actually sits upon eighty acres of land, all of which were donated to YWAM! we have real beds (bunk beds of course) with a lovely little foamy for a mattress, and equipped with a mosquito net to be tucked in each night around us and untucked each morning. (trying to prevent malaria for the bite of a mosquito.)

the food is... we’ll i’m getting used to feeling hungary a lot of the time. the food in itself is not bad just not enough to sustain you for long periods of time. an average day consists of bread/mundazi (kinda like a donut without sugar) and a hot drink for our seven am breakfast, lunch is then served at one and is usually ugali (white, play-dough like stuff that is made of water and grinded maize (corn)) and beans, and dinner at six with perhaps more ugali and rice and of course beans. sometimes instead of beans theres this tomato sauce stuff with random veggies in it which is good as well. not much variety but so far i’ve enjoyed it.

what have we been up to since being here? well we are still awaiting our visa’s, which is apparently more of a process then we thought would be. our visa’s will give us residency and permission to work in the hospital. so this past week was kinda catching our bearings, we did a town run.... which in itself is an adventure. the public transport is called a dala dala, which in Canada is about the size of a mini van, legally seating twelve people, but here there are no such laws and yesterday we counted almost forty people squeezed on with a few hanging out of the door! so yes quite an adventure. so yes town run where we learnt how to catch a dala dala and then had some lunch in town and could look at shops if we wanted, we were so tired after the ride in and finding somewhere to have lunch that we left shortly after! there is one village in between us and the city where we stopped and looked around a bit. its an odd feeling to called out to consistently, and stared at, but again this is outreach and hopefully after they realize we’re here for awhile they will settle down!

we’ve done some help for the base as well. i was in a group that went to the primary school (elementary) to help the teacher mark tests. it was fun cuz the tests were in english and hearing some of those kids answers was just adorable! the school is ran by the base here, they actually have quite a few different ministry’s that they do. they have the primary school (which they desperately need teachers if anyone feels led to come and work in Tanzania!), a pre school, sewing classes and construction classes and of course run DTS (disciple training school).there is also a farm on base which provides some of the green’s we get, and soon hopefully other things will be ripe to eat! they have pineapples, passion fruit, some mango tree’s, coconut tree’s (which i’ve already had a few of!) and other things.

so trying to pick up some language and get to know the base staff here. one girl lives in the room with us, (our team is split into six different rooms, three of which are families and then us single girls split up in three rooms as well) and she speaks a little bit of english so trying to learn swahili from her and then teach her some english... its been interesting!

i think next week we’re going to be doing some teachings in the villages nearby and perhaps get to go and teach some basic health to the public school across the main road. we’ll see what happens! you just never know!

we went to church this morning and it was so neat, the kids did a few songs for us and the worship in general is just what you’d imagine singing to be like in Africa! i love it! oh and a fun fact for those of you who didn’t know, the movie ‘the lion king’ has swahili in it! ‘Simba’ means ‘lion’, Rafiki means ‘friend’, ‘hakuna matata’ literately means ‘no worries’ and my favorite is ‘asante sana’ means ‘thank you very much’. when we found that out we couldn’t help but add on the rest of the phrase, ‘asante sana squashed banana’s’!

internet is going to be far a few i’m thinking, to get free wireless to use my computer i have to take a trip downtown, not my favorite thing to do, and with only having one day off a week i won’t have the time to do so. so i apologize if this is not as updated as it used to be but at least there is a place where i can bring my computer! i hope it works, i actually haven't tried, i’m currently writing things on my computer and saving them to make the sending off faster! so we’ll see i guess! yesterday was our day off and we went to the beach! about a forty minute trip using two dala dala’s but we found our way there and it is beautiful! we’re right on the indian ocean... just gorgeous!

oh i just remembered another thing this week that happened! i turned twenty-two!!! it was a very special birthday for me, in the evening the base held a birthday party to celebrate all the september birthdays, i felt so special to be included in this celebration and to have it happen on my real day. there were four of us in total but two did not come and so it was me and a little four year old named Shady, (short for Shadrak). it a little overwhelming as they had us sit at a table facing everyone else. so everyone is watching you all the time! and then Shady fell asleep with his chin on the table! so cute, so it was just me. they brought out a cake with candles and everything! my name was even on the cake! i had people praying for me, encouraging me and even was handed a basket of goodies. without my knowing it my team had gotten together to purchase presents for me! some of which were brought from Thailand (one student and her son had a layover there, on our way here they flew separate) so yes it was a very good birthday, i felt extremely blessed!
okay i realize how long this is but so much has happened, i’m finding myself settling in and adjusting to once again washing my clothes by hand, taking bucket showers and am even getting used to wearing a skirt at all times..... this is outreach!
i’m looking forward to when we get our visa’s and start teaching and learning and delivering babies!
take care till next time!