Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for the ‘Bits of Culture’ Category

As an American, one of the things I have grown to deeply enjoy is a vintage Sunday routine. Usually, that’s comprised of a good morning at church followed by a good lunch and a relaxing afternoon in front of a football game. No live games were on this afternoon (still preseason) but they were airing the Panthers game from Thursday. A change out of the church clothes and going horizontal on the couch proved lethal for my consciousness. I napped well. Today was a vintage Sunday. Great to be Stateside.

Sitting here now watching a LIVE football game from the stinkin west coast. We’ve got it good.

Although churches are numerous in Mbeya, Tanzania, the sizes of the congregations usually don’t surpass double digits in count… on Sunday morning. Tonight, we went to our first Sunday evening service since about 2006. The church tonight was Northside Baptist in Charlotte, the same place whom has so graciously put us up in their missions house for the duration of our furlough. Northside has a large sanctuary that can seat over 1000 people. Tonight, there were about 150 people. In that space, the crowd looked small and in that regard, I became slightly somber.

Then, I remembered the land, the culture from where I just came. A gathering of believers this size was an extremely infrequent thing. As a matter of fact, there was not a single time over the 2 year span we spent in Tanzania at which we sat among a group this size who all spoke English as their native language.

So, was this really a somber event in that there was a small group in church tonight? No. There was a big group there tonight… and it was really, really nice.

In Mbeya when we left, the sun was fully set by 7pm. I mean dark all the way. We landed in NC within a day or two of the longest of the year, not dark until well after 9pm. Couple that with the same sun effect in London (was still light when we reached our hotel at 10:30pm) and you’ve got whackey people!
Eyes say to body, “Why are you so tired?”

After a defeating battle with two mosquitoes throughout the night, I wasn’t exactly happy to hear my phone ringing loudly in the living room at 7:20am today.  We’ve been waiting for the water truck for more than two weeks so the possibility of it being them motivated me to go see who was calling.  It wasn’t the water truck guy.  It was our guard wanting to tell us he and his wife wanted to come visit us and introduce us to their new baby, just today two weeks old.  That was actually very considerate of him.  You see, it’s not usual to call ahead.  Tanzanians just drop in for a visit to their friends and family.  In just the short time we’ve had our guard, he’s learned our ways.  He respectfully gave us a heads up on their coming visit.

After they arrived and began drinking their chai, I asked when they planned to name the little boy.  They said they brought him to our house today so WE could name him!  AAAHHHHH!  WOOOOOOW!!!  Humbling I tell ya.  I asked Dana and she immediately said, “Caleb.”  I liked it.  We looked it up in the Swahili Bible and told them the name we had chosen and they liked it.

Kalebu. (kah-LAY-boo).

Flying by like speeding bullets have been my first three days of the work week.  Mondays and Thursdays are my days for going to the office for tea break, devotion and meetings.  I woke up Monday morning with a small hope of being able to record some of Mark in the Malila language this week.  Little did I know that one of our Malila translators was ready to come back to the studio with me after our team meeting!

That’s the way it is here and I’ve gone quite used to it.  You take what you get when you can get it.  It took us the remainder of that day and most of yesterday to record all of Jesus’s words from this gospel.  Making good progress.  Good thing with only 17 workdays left in Tanzania.

We had another fun day out at Utengule Coffee Lodge, getting a chance to take Asher swimming, enjoying a good lunch, relaxing for one of our few remaining Saturdays in Tanzania.

On the way out to Utengule, I noticed the low fuel warning light on in the car.  Then, I remembered I had first noticed it a number of days ago.  The optimist in me was confident we could make it round trip on our daily outing without a worry.  Nevertheless, on the way home, we had to climb back up into Mbeya via multiple smaller inclines and one large one.  The Google Earth shot below is a 3-D glimpse of what it is like.

Within 1.5 miles, it goes from about 4,600 ft to 5,200 ft.  Not too intense of a climb but obviously one that was destined to give a hard time to a low-on-fuel SUV blasting the A/C while sucking every bit of diesel it can through it’s front-of-the-tank fuel line.  3/4 up the hill….  That’s odd.  The car’s doesn’t seem to be climbing like it usually does. *sputter-sputter**put-put*  …uh…. Honey…. Thank God we made it to the very top before it gave out completely!  I popped the hood and pushed the plunger on the fuel filter up and down numerous times in hope of enough fuel remaining in the tank to at least crank it up.  Our goal… make it back to the bottom of the mountain where there’s a gas station.  It worked!  We started it back up, whipped it around, darted down the hill and pulled into the new, less-than-one-year-old fuel station.  I stopped next to one of the pumps and rolled down my window. “Je, hii ni diseli?”, I asked. Is this one diesel? “Hamna.”  Wati a second.  That wasn’t the reply I was expecting.  Not good. “Hamna diseli?”, I asked, not wanting to know that I’d heard him correctly.  “Ndiyo.”, he confirmed.  Hamna diseli = there’s no diesel.  Great.  Kinda funny actually.

Our 2+ years in Tanzania has given God plenty to use in creating in us an unusual ability to be somewhat amused at life’s curveballs.  God will always provide.  Even if one of those coming curveball days results in us losing our lives, God will provide.  In our life, in our eternity, He has the last say and since He has justified us through the faith He’s given us, He says we’ll always be His.  Keeping that eternal perspective gives us the freedom and the hope to the extent of being able to laugh at curveballs and hope in Christ all the more.  It even makes it easier to thank Him all the more for the fact that He planned long ago in eternity past to allow another gas station (with diesel) to be built 1/10th of a mile down the road from the first one.  Thank You, God.  You are good.

Within the first few months here in Tanzania, our landlord-at-the-time introduced me to a friend of his.  I’ll leave his name private but will let you know he’s the head of the Mbeya customs department.  Basically, whenever a package arrives from the States for us, one of his employees is in charge of inspecting the package and assessing any duties and taxes.  Yesterday, I had four packages to pick up, two of which were for a Tanzanian friend and pretty heavy.  Lately, instead of having a customs person staffed at the post office, we’d have to carry the package(s) up to the customs office about 150 yds up a hill in order to have them cleared… up to the third floor.  Ugh.

So, I arrived at the post office yesterday and considered calling my now-long-time friend, the head of customs.  He’s a great man, a believer to whom many favors I have already given and from whom many have already been received.  We have a good relationship but I haven’t ‘taken advantage’ of it… until now.  I think he enjoyed having me call him for a favor… to have one of his employees come down to the post office to process my packages.  Literally, within minutes of my phone call, a customs official (another good friend) was on the scene and I was on my way 15 minutes later with all of my packages in tow.

Do you think it was okay, or even ‘ethical’ for me to use my relationship for such a favor?

Riding out to a local playground brought us up behind this fellow… at least we think there was a fellow in there some where.  You should’ve seen how the bicycle frame bent when he went over bumps!

I was out shopping yesterday evening in town in a frequented store called Azra.  My market man (I text him my vegetable shopping list and he delivers to me at Azra) brought me my order right as I was checking out at the store.  He knew another customer who was there shopping and she asked him for lettuce, or saladi in Swahili.  He said every vendor in the market is out.  Little did he know at the time that my next lettuce crop is on the verge of coming in.  I asked him if he would like some and of course he would!  He also asked for seeds if I had them.  I have so many I can’t plant them all!

So, today I took him a whole head of seeds and a plastic bag full of baby romaine sprouts for him to plant in his garden.  The gift hardly cost me a thing but should earn him a decent amount of income in the market especially since that is the place for ‘specialty’ items.

A picture taken when the romaine lettuce seeds were just starting to come out.