weekly round-up

Haven’t been on in a while, but the good news is we have internet! It came last weekend and it works, most of the time, and so we hope to post more often. We had a very interesting week. First we met with a longstanding UK non-profit called WaterAid. They’ve been doing work in Tanzania for over 2 decades. We met with one of their lead policy advisors and we learned a lot about what is happening in the area of clean water in Dar. We also scheduled a meeting this coming week with the director of the Dar office and I’m hoping she will be able to fill us in more about what the local projects are, which communities are most vulnerable, what’s being done now, etc. We really feel that research is the first step to doing anything significant in the community.

We received our first package, care of Eben and Sarah Brusco in Ireland! It had candy, and a dress for melissa - it was so nice to get some western canday...though Cadbury makes some kind of Mint Chocolate bar that we can buy for $1.50 that is out of this world! Candy is good despite the somewhat melted state after it sits in a non-airconditioned East African warehouse for a few days.

There is this wonderful family that has lived in Dar for years, she works in education and he's a geologist. They invited us to dinner this week and they live right near the water. Being near the ocean affords certain "luxuries" we didn't have living in central Ohio (though we had the Sciota river). Anyway, they own a sail boat, as "racing" sailboat and I got to go proper sailing for the first time in my life. I've since lost all the exciting new lingo, but i felt quite cool that evening. It was really fun - I made sure to say that a number of times in hopes I would be invited out again soon!

We’ve continued to meet neighbors and practice Swahili in our local community. It’s always challenging, but we’re learning quickly and people are so helpful – even complete strangers are willing to listen patiently and correct you if there is a problem. Language is our priority at the moment, despite starting some other networking, b/c everything we do is communication. We’re actually increasing our tutoring instruction to 4 mornings a week b/c we really want to progress further. Thankfully the language instructors we’re connected with employ many of the latest techniques and exercises – similar to the LAMP methodology for learning language. Our language tutor is named Johari, and she is a Muslim, and she’s taught peace corps and other Americans for almost a decade. She has been hugely helpful when asking difficult cultural questions and her experience allows her to talk openly with us as Americans…there really is a large difference between East African and American cultures. That reminds me, before we left, Rich Mendola found a study comparing measurable cultural values, like timeliness, power distance, male-female relationships, and many other cultural indicators. When plotted on a graph, East Africa was almost completely opposite America on many of the indicators. Other Americans living here have verified, or heard of similar studies, and say that Americans have a really hard time in East Africa. There is more “cultural novelty” for us coming to Tanzania than almost anywhere else in the world. At times its hard to believe, because Melissa and I, so far, really like it here and haven’t found adjustment too difficult. But that’s in part b/c we we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s happening all around us, with community relationships, who’s influencing whom, really understanding how people make and maintain relationships, what obligations to we have as neighbors, how am I (a man) perceived carrying Asher, on and on…We just talked with some friends this week ministering south of Dar in a smaller Muslim town. He said he’s learned the “3 minute” rule. He said he can’t be alone in any home with another women longer than 3 minutes, literally, b/c people will presume their having sex. It would discredit him on the street and undermine the relationships he’s trying to build. That is a pretty extreme example, but in general people’s behaviors are governed by their perceptions of their cultural surroundings (neighborhood, daily activities, relationships, etc). Our perceptions are just at the infant stage. We’re learning quickly, but we perceive and recognize everything through our American eyes. We need to learn to see things through our Tanzanian Glasses. All that to say Johari has not only be extremely helpful in teaching language, but in cultural understanding as well.

Another small but important accomplishment this week, maybe better described as a milestone, is we successfully arranged for some neighbor girls to baby-sit Jude and Asher while we had our Tanzanian Bible study. It went really well, and to make all you parents jealous – we “overpaid” the TWO girls by giving them each $3 for 4 hours of babysitting. So we’re hoping that as our ministry grows, or other late night events occur (Tanzanians stay up late – eating dinner at 6:30 is very early – much more like our college days of eating between 8pm – 9pm). The girls seem really responsible and we hope they’ll continue to want to watch the boys – they literally live right next door to us…our majirani (neighbors, I think).

One last thing – there is car trouble and then there is CAR TROUBLE. We’ve had the latter. Please pray that we’ll stop flushing money into our cars…it’s getting very expensive, even for us missionaries (haha, joke).