Karibu Jessica

Yesterday, Today, and Forever flowers in bloom in Arusha.

Oren had an odd nightmare last week. He  dreamed he was walking around the quiet suburban neighborhood where we own a home in Maryland. He was strolling down the road with two of his Indian schoolmates from Arusha when he heard the sound of loud machine gun shots coming from behind them. He turned to see a man driving a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on it. An active shooter. The man started shooting at Oren and his friends, who dove for cover behind a hill. Later he learned that the shooter frequently drove through the neighborhood and had killed others.  Occasionally, the shooter showed up at the funerals of his victims and shot more people. The people in the neighborhood seemed to feel powerless to do anything about it; they just put up with it, and ran for cover when the shooter came around.

As allegorical as that is to the situation with second ammendment rights in the US, what really struck me about the dream was the sense of how much our home country once again feels like a foreign, and forboding place. Somehow, Oren has already internalized the sense of unease that many of his age-mates feel going to school back in the US, and he has shared that he's really happy to be attending school in a much safer situation. We are entering year 3 of our time in Tanzania, and while this could be our last year, we do hope to extend our term. I had the sense that we were 'coming back home' this year, different than the year before when we were 'returning to Tanzania'. The US seems further and stranger. Most of what we hear from home is in the form of extraordinary events, like mass shootings.

But it is good to feel like we are returning to something familiar, and even comforting. We do have a burgeoning community of our own here, built around our job, our homestead, and our church. It was good to be back in each of these settings.

We returned nearly 3 weeks ago now, and jumped right back into work. It is the season of reporting and I had progress reports from 7 partners sitting in my inbox when I arrived. This is not entirely unpleasant; it is interesting to see the update on progress although it does mean a couple of labor-intensive weeks to get them into our MCC database.

Morning, day 1.

Rebecca also had work to catch up on, and the fact that the kids did not get into school until our second week back made it a challenge. We were very happy after the first weekend to see them off to school on Monday morning and to enter back into a long absent familiar routine. Although the familiar routine still begins at 5am for me and involves us all leaving the house at 6:40am and driving to the office to meet the bus for a 7am pickup. Rebecca and I have continued our morning swim and did use our wetsuits on the first week back. But I was surprised to find the weather has already begun to warm up and after a few days we abandoned the wet suits and are once again swimming in our normal suits.

It was good to see the kids coming home the first day feeling really good about their classes. David has a new 'form tutor' (like a homeroom/primary teacher), whom he seems to like and who seems to be committed to make writers out of the kids in her class, based on the amount of writing they get for homework. Oren is preparing for O levels and is taking English Lit, Chem, Math, French, Computer Science, History, Geography, and Art. Even his art class is very rigorous, with an extensive text book which includes techniques in hand created art, as well as how to use computer programs for all the adobe graphics programs (Photoshop, Illustrator). Both are doing swimming as a 'club' activity.

The big event at work happened on the Wednesday after we returned. It was the arrival of our new YAMEN volunteer Jessica, an occupational therapist who will spend the year with us,working with Step by Step Learning Center, a facility for severely mentally disabled children. YAMEN is like the SALT program I have written about in the past. The main difference is that YAMEN volunteers do not come from the US or Canada. They can come from anywhere in the world, and usually they come from an Anabaptist church. Jessica is a Mennonite from France. She arrived last Wednesday afternoon from an MCC orientation in Rwanda. Rebecca and I picked her up from the airport.

Since then, Rebecca has been occupied with in-country orientation, processing residence permits, getting her set up with language study, etc. Jeassic has also been getting to know the MCC team and we have had several social events including a team meeting that included sharing food from our respective countries, and celebrating the birthday of Chrispin, our Ag. coordinator. This has given us occasion to take Jessica out for some local cuisine. She had her first taste of 'ugali' last week as well.

Our current team, Sharon, Jessica, Lucia, Rebecca, Paul, Chrispin.

Starting this past week, Jessica has been staying with us at our house, as she will not be able to move in with her host family before Sept 10th.

Jessica showing the Tian she made. 

We have enjoyed having Jessica at our house. Although she speaks English we have mainly been communicating in French thanks to our Rwanda/Burundi years. It is fun to practice using that language again. She is also a very good cook and has treated us to several delecacies of French provincial cuisine. (She is from Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France.)

We have also been busy with a number of church activities. In preparation for the beginning of Sunday School (for which I am the coordinator), Rebecca and I did a half-day training last Saturday. We invited the previous year's as well as new teachers to participate and make sure we were all on board on how to teach the curriculum. It seemed to go very well and we had 4 new teachers --  what we needed to have enough this year. We began registration two Sundays ago and then began teaching last week. We had about 60 kids join us (in 3 levels). That is a good number, but from last year's experience I expect we could grow to 80.

We have been trying to do some improvements on the grounds as well. Our family brought back some new swings for the swingset, and we are ordering a new piece of playground equipment and more sand for the sandbox in the near future.

Choir also began 2 weeks ago, so we are going to practice on Wednesday nights. Jessica is joining us for choir practice. We have a concert at the end of September for our Harvest Festival weekend. We are doing some very nice pieces including a John Rutter setting of "For the Beauty of the Earth."

Getting back together with our small group has also been very gratifying. David and Oren were thrilled to see their Australian friends Harry and Sammy, as we were glad to see their parents as well who work at an Anglican Bible training college. We have about 4 families who seem to be coming consistently and over a dozen kids who seem to be able to play together nicely.

This weekend Rebecca and I hosted an ultimate frisbee game followed by a potluck and game night at our house for members of our small group and other families in our compound here. We had about 24 turn up for frisbee and had a great tournament with 3 teams rotating in and out. It was our best attended game to date. The potluck and gamenight that followed were really fun as well. We taught many games including 7 Wonders and One Night Werewolf. Jessica is also an avid gamer (being a Mennonite:-) She brought us a game as a gift called Pikomino, which has been enjoyed by adults as well as kids.

That is the news to date. This week I will be traveling up to Ngorongoro to visit our maternal and child health project with Sharon our Country Rep. More about that later.