Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for November, 2007

How do I feel about coming home?

To tell the truth, my first feelings were ones of a little disappointment.  I miss home, family, and friends a lot but we’ve spent a long time preparing to get here.  Finally, we’re here and as soon as we finish language school, we’re going back home.  I’ve just been looking forward to getting into actual ministering to the Tanzanian people for so long, to have it so close and have it delayed for 4 1/2 more months has been a challenging adjustment for me.

But, Dana is the most important person to me on the Earth and to see how safe she feels, how excited she feels and how relieved she feels to have the baby back home in the States… well, I’d go back for years for that.  Taking care of my wife is the biggest responsibility God has given me.  That’s the commitment I made when we became one more than 3 years ago.  So, once I accepted and understood that going home is indeed the best for her, I was able to look forward to returning.  I am excited.  Not about continent-hopping again, but definitely excited to be back in my home culture and around familiar people, places, smells, tastes, roads, sanitation… the list goes on…

How do we drink water?

Good question.  We wondered this quite a bit before coming over here.  We brought our own 5-gallon bucket-style filter as well.  The answer to the question is chupa nyingi za maji (many bottles of water).  Since we have a small fridge in our banda and room to keep a lot, we usually by the bottles by the box-load.  There are six 1.5-liter bottles in a box and I like to buy at least 3 boxes at a time.  The price for a box has recently increased to Tsh 2,200/= which is just under $2.00 USD.

We use the filter for  brushing our teeth, cooking, etc.

By the way, the word for bottle (chupa) is really easy to  be confused with  the word for underwear (chupi).  Yes, I have made that mistake here… at the table… during lunch… with lots of  Tanzanian laughs all around…

We have returned

We just got back today from our first safari. Our friends, the Nicholls, bought a Land Rover last week and invited us to go to Ruaha National Park with them this weekend. You betcha!

Going on a safari in Africa zaps energy out of you due to riding on the rough terrain and dwelling all day in the heat. But, overall the trip was fantastic.

Here is one of my favorite shots from the trip so far. We took over 1,000 photos so I’ll have to decide which ones to put online for you to see.

We went to Mbeya again this past weekend. This time to pick up things we need to take to the States with us like diapers and such. Our friends the Nicholls told us about someone they knew who had a full-size LandCruiser and invited us to ride along when they went on Thursday. No bus?! You betcha. Count us in!

So, there we were, Paul and his wife Katrina, the Nicholls tribe, Dana and me, riding along the bumpy road from Iringa to Mbeya when Paul pulls off the road. Yep, it was a flat.

All-in-all, it took us an hour to get it changed because his jack was too short and there aren’t many resources out in the middle of the African countryside. After moving the car to the other side of the road (for slope), digging a hole, using a piece of concrete I found up the road (how’d that get there anyway?), and sweating off 3 pounds, we piled back into the car and were on our way.

I didn’t enjoy that Paul’s tire was shot but I did enjoy helping solve the problem. I dug the hole to give room for the spare to go on.

Just a couple of miles up the road, we stopped again to make sure all the lug nuts were tight. While we were stopped, I looked out of the back window and saw this kid on a wooden scooter. He wasn’t the only one. It seemed as though every youngster in the village was on one. Interesting…

November 18, 2007

The Creation of God

I was sitting at our desk which faces the porch from the inside of the banda.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught some movement in one of the trees outside.  As soon as my eyes focused through the screen on the window, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at and what was looking right back at me.  A male African Paradise-flycatcher.

If you are not into bird-watching, you may be asking, “what’s the big deal?”  Watching birds has become far more than a hobby to me.  It has become a significant way of me noticing more and more of God’s detail in His creation.  More of His creativity.  More of His ability.  To make some of the things I’ve seen absolutely requires a Creator.  There are thousands and thousands of different species of birds in the world, each with its own size, color, beak shape, song, and so on and so on.  All of these are details God came up with just because He wanted to and could.

So, each time I see a bird I’ve never seen before or have the chance to watch how He made them to live, I feel blessed.  Honestly, I do because it is more than just about this bird or that bird.  It is about God… and me…

I searched and searched for a good FREE FTP client for me to use in uploading files to our website. I was using a program called Fetch. I like it but my two issues with it are: it doesn’t ask for confirmation in replacing files on the web server and it can’t resume an interrupted upload. The latter is especially crucial here in Tanzania where the internet connection does what it wants to, up to and including quitting often and for no reason. That ends my uploads and with Fetch that means I have to start the upload over. Yuck.

So, yesterday, I found FileZilla, a FREE FTP client that is able to resume an interrupted upload. Hooray! Now, even though it may take an hour or two, I’m able to complete the upload of 1MB+ files.

Thanks FileZilla. You’re helping this missionary keep his mind. Or, what’s left of it…

If you’ve noticed, our e-mail response times have improved and our blog posts are more frequent.  These are just two of the benefits of having internet access in our banda now.  Yes, out in the middle of nowhere, we have figured out how to access the internet.

I discovered shortly after arriving in Tanzania that Celtel (cellular provider) offered data services like internet access on their network.  They are the only company that has a signal that reaches us at Riverside so that’s who we’re with.  A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out all of the umpteen-gazillon settings and got my laptop online… about wet my pant, I tell ya.  On top of that, I can do it without wires because both my phone and laptop have bluetooth connectivity.

So, the next challenge was to get Dana’s online.  I tried and tried all to no avail.  Then, I remembered that my laptop can share it’s internet connection.  We tried it and it works.  So now, the internet comes into our banda, into my phone, to my laptop via bluetooth, out of my computer via wireless card, and into Dana’s laptop via wireless card.

i didn’t even have this cool of a setup in the states.  Guess I never really needed to tap into my resource of a cell phone as a wireless modem.  It is REALLY nice to be able to communicate all from the luxury of our riverside African banda.

Now, you can pray for the price to come down (450 TSh/Mb ~ $0.40 USD/Mb) and its speed to increase… I’m connecting at about 5 kb/s, about a tenth of the speed of dial-up in the USA.  Patience is a virtue.

Our Broom

Most brooms here are sold without handles.  It is not that they have a place for the handle to fit and you just have to provide your own.  No.  The brooms here are handheld and Tanzanians just bend over to sweep.  Our banda floor can get pretty dirty if we don’t sweep it between our weekly campsite-provided cleanings.  So, I bought one while I was in town on Saturday.  It cost me 300 Tanzanian Shillings, the equivalent of about $0.25.  Nice.

I got home and gladly showed Dana my purchase and that I’m a good husband by using it.  She asked if it hurt my back to bend over like that and sweep.  It really didn’t but I can see how it puts me at risk considering my back history.  Then, I remembered that we had a scrub brush with a long handle.  So, I unscrewed it, used some trusty packing tape, and am now able to sweep upright.

Resourcefulness is key out here.

The truth is that we really don’t have a church right now. The closest one to us is a 40-minute walk away in a nearby village. The ferocity of the sun rules it out as a possibility because it is too harsh for my baby’s mama. So, we lean mostly on downloaded sermons and personal time to nourish our spirits.

Today, we listened to Take It to the Limit, Part 5: A Time to Run from Andy Stanley’s podcasts. This is a series about setting up margin in your life and this particular sermon was on sexual morality. I decided to note some great boundaries (we call them hedges, too) that he shared. Dana and I have discovered the need and benefit of having boundaries and the margins they create. These are the ones Andy shared:

1. Do not chat online with someone of the opposite sex.
2. Do not eat alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Do not ride in the car alone with someone of the opposite sex.
4. Men let your wife choose your assistant if that person is a female.
5. Where there is a debatable relationship, decide up front to talk about it and expose it to your wife.
6. Pornography and clubs are not neutral forms of entertainment. They are paths to destruction.
7. Don’t confide in a member of the opposite sex or allow them to confide in you. It is better to hurt their feelings than to hurt your/their marriage.
   

Others Dana and I have implemented are:

1. Go to bed at the same time. If that is not possible, I will not be online while she is asleep.
2. Do not be in a private room alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Covenant Eyes, an online accountability program that logs everywhere I go online, is installed on my computer.
4. We are
   

A great summary question he said toward the end of the sermon is this…

How far would I want my spouse to go to protect himself/herself from unnecessary sexual temptation?

I pray all of us, men and women, can understand the severity of these standards and the consequences of the lack of them.

Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 1 Corinthians 6:18