Where did we leave off...?

Too long, I know…there were legitimate and illegitimate reasons. Hopefully, that is behind us now, just water under the bridge.

I won’t attempt a full catch-up but instead just start from today. Today, we welcome our pastors/bosses to the east coast of Africa. They plan to stay with us for 1 week, doing extensive psyche evaluations and to ensure none of us have totally flipped out. Truth be told, studies show half of all missionaries develop a clinically diagnosable neurosis whilst on the field (so that’s where my constant desire to drive on the wrong side of the road comes from)…thankfully, we haven’t noticed anything serious, but it’s good to have a 3^rd party perspective. Also, we’re excited to do some long term planning and set some goals for the next 6-12 months. We’re pretty much settled and have extensive language under our belts (though I wish we were much further along towards fluency).

Something that was very exciting we got to do today was work with our Kiswahili instructor who was hired by John Hopkins University to translate back into English various HIV/AIDS skits and adverts that have been playing all around Tanzania as part of Tz’s National Campaign for AIDS Prevention (JHU wants to review the content of the programs they’ve supported). Anyway, we sat down today and worked to translate a whole bunch of radio advertisements. It was exciting to understand enough to do the work and participate in something which we like. Another cool piece of the story was that our instructor had thought we’d like to help her and she asked her husband (who also works as a language instructor – they co-own the school we’re in) and he said “…missionaries don’t want to do that kind of work, they don’t really care about that kind of thing [meaning the hiv/aids prevention adverts]”. As she told us later, she countered him and said “…yes, but these are a different kind of missionary, I think they’d like it”. She is Muslim by the way. Needless to say, I appreciated that she approached us and that she thinks of us differently than others with whom she has worked with in the past. We just bought her a New Testament, both in Kiswahili and in English. She was thrilled and said she’d start reading on her own. We’ll see what happens. She is probably our closest Tanzanian friend, and we see her 4x a week for 3 hour chunks. We're hoping to finally meet her family on Saturday b/c they’re all invited to Jude’s 5^th B-day party. Very cool!