Small Challenges Amid a Plethora of Blessings

I am not a car salesman. I have nothing against car salesmen, but I am not one. That said, I have to marvel sometimes at the number of different skill sets required to be a country representative... accountant, pastor, IT specialist, chauffer, to name a few. This is not the first time I have had to buy or sell cars for MCC, but as an American in this context, it is not at all intuitive, and the experience bears little resemblance to the process in the US. 

As we have said before, the MCC Tanzania program is in the process of consolidating into the Nairobi Kenya MCC office and we are now at the point where we are disposing of assets. Figuring out the values and selling items is tricky. Arusha's economy is depressed as a result of low rates of tourism because of COVID. So people don't have a lot of money. As far as cars, I am realizing that people who have been answering ads for our Rav 4 seem to consider themselves duped if they do not get a price below the stated value in the ad. (I did check this out with our national staff and they confirmed that it is important to set the value over the amount we want to get because anyone paying the full price considers themselves to be cheated.) Even still, I struggle with showing the car to potential buyers who are extremely aggressive about getting a low price, wanting to pay cash, and then driving away with the car within 10 minutes of seeing it--like the car is a bolt of kitenge fabric. When I want to slow down to be sure that we go through the proper legal process with regard to title transfer, they balk. I think there is the hope that they will be able to drive around as long as possible with the current registration and insurance and only re-register when absolutely necessary. It has an air of desperation about it that makes even having a car to sell and insisting on a proper transfer seem privileged and immoral.

Work in the past two weeks has been full of meetings with our staff Chrispin and Lucia, our Area Directors in Nairobi, lawyers, and even auditors who came in two weeks ago to do our 2019 audit (delayed because of COVID). Closing down is at least as complicated as registering, I believe, and we don't want to finish off with a huge fine from the Revenue Authority for failing to cross a 'T' or dot an 'i'. 

I don't want to sound too much that I am complaining about the routine of life these days. The truth is, it has been mercifully normal. No one has been sick for several weeks, the kids are in school all day so Rebecca and I can be in the office after a work out at our club. We were even more thrilled to see the pool has been refilled and we have re-established our Friday after-school family activities at Gymkhana including squash and swimming. 

The return to a sense of normality does have a certain eeriness and sense of impermanence about it, like an eddy of calm in a fast-moving stream of chaotic change. This is particularly true as we read about the second wave of COVID hitting Europe, the slow-motion train wreck of COVID management in the US, and recent outbreaks in Kenya. By contrast, Arusha seems to have very low prevalence, and in fact, our doctor friends who track respiratory infections in area hospitals are reporting that there have been none this month. I still find it surreal to see everyone walking around without masks, and spurning social distancing. We still maintain stricter protocols in our office, but the kids have given up on mask-wearing in school at this point since they are the only ones doing so.

Low prevalence in a number of African countries is still not well-understood but does seem to be happening. I think it is possible that there may have been some high levels of cross-immunity, and an outbreak that came close to providing herd immunity in April-June, as there were many deaths in that period here. I think this will be an interesting research topic in the years ahead. For the time being, we are thankful, but weary of a sudden change and return to strict isolation protocol. (I really really don't want to home school again!)

Some of the rewarding work we have had the chance to do in our job is visiting partners. Rebecca and I went over to MWANGAZA, one of our education partners this week who have been doing a very effective project in Lutheran schools to eliminate the practice of corporal punishment. It is very challenging to change the culture of discipline in schools, even with strict govt. limitations on it because all teachers grew up with it, and even parents judge the rigor of a school and quality of education by the number of times the cane is applied. Sadly, this is one of the projects that had to end early, but during our visit to their office, they told us that they found another donor to continue supporting their work. I admit that these visits to partners we have had to cut with our program reduction is bittersweet. It is good to be able to sit together and appreciate our mutual work and learning together, but I feel a jolt of fresh regret that we are not able to continue to work here in the capacity we have been for many years. 

Another life-giving routine is restarting Sunday School. While our church has not reopened yet, (It will in October), Rebecca and I have gone for the past 3 weeks to the kids' school St.Constantines, to do Sunday school in an outdoor space. The kids who attend are boarders and had been coming by bus to our church in the past. It has been fun to see their faces again and continue doing lessons with them the past few weeks. There is no plan to restart Sunday school at our church since the Sunday school was always very crowded in cramped rooms and we would not be able to control social distancing in our church setting. 

We also continue to meet with our small group and it has been good to see a number of families returning. Oren and David finally got to get together with their friends Harry and Sammy T. as their family returned from Australia and finished quarantine about a week ago. We all met up at the birthday of one of our small group members at a club called TGT on the West side of Arusha. The 4 boys enjoyed spending hours together catching up. I am grateful they have close friends here, even after many months apart. 

We have also been able to resume our Thursday dinners every fortnight with the team here on our compound where we live. It is good to catch up with others who live with us here. In fact, life on the compound has been quite satisfying after school, particularly for David who considers the 3 guard dogs his pets, and often helps them escape from their pen in the late afternoon to play with him. He has also been avidly riding his bike around the compound, a return to this activity after nearly a year and a half hiatus because of an accident he had which really put him off bike riding. Now he and I take a ride around the compound and into the neighboring village on a regular basis. (It is kind of like off-road biking since all the roads here are not paved and very rough.)

Rebecca and I were at the office alone last week as both Chrispin and Lucia have been out of the office for different activities. We usually take a day off per week one at a time, but this week, since we were alone, we took off Thursday together and went to a resort called Ngare Sero (on the foothills of Mt. Meru) that offered a special 'family day' deal to spend the day including, swimming, boating, hiking, bird-watching, even horseback riding, and a full meal all included for about $25 per person. Rebecca and I splurged on it while the kids were at school. We had a great swim in their 30-meter pool (narrow but long), then had a fabulous breakfast, followed by hiking and bird watching. It was a very welcome Sabbath days after a lot of busy administrative work at the office. We saw a number of very cool birds including a fish eagle perched on the small lake near the lodge. Very similar to the American bald eagle as you can see. 

We have much to be thankful for, in our remaining months here, one of the greatest blessings is seeing the kids really enjoy their school here and succeed academically. Oren is particularly good with the Cambridge system aced his prep. tests for O levels at the end of the year. According to him, he is glad he is smart because he hates to study:-) 

Even with the many blessings here we cannot be fully at rest. We are already making preparations for our next role and a big move next year. Once the program here is closed, and the kids are out of school, we will be moving to Addis Ababa to begin our work as Reps. in Ethiopia. I am supposed to start in Feb, followed by the family in June when school ends. Getting documents ready for the visa process there needs to be prepared nearly 6 months in advance. So we are working on that and while we are grateful for a new opportunity, it seems to cast an uncertain shadow over our life here and now. This is the season of jacarandas in full bloom. I know Ethiopia has much to offer, but I feel melancholic knowing this may be the last time I live in a place where these majestic trees burst into bloom everywhere in town, and cover the ground with a lilac carpet under their spreading boughs.

Bonus postscript: I preached for our church several weeks ago (online) and recorded the sermon. If you are interested in listening, here is the link: sermon link

A Budget Safari in Maramboi

We have now enjoyed two full weeks of in-person school here in Arusha. I (Rebecca) say “Enjoyed” because it has honestly felt a lot like a vacation to go into the MCC office these past weeks, and to be able to focus solely on the work we needed to do there. No need to educate or entertain our kids. No need to worry about cooking or cleaning or taking care of household tasks. There was something refreshing even in the full day I spent going over all the financials in our office and making sure that everything was formally approved and signed off, after the past five months of director absence.

Our schedule is a little different and more compressed in this COVID era. We have realized that the crowded school bus (minivan) is an excellent setting for transmission and so we are driving the kids to school. We need to leave a few minutes later (6:50 am), which feels like we’re really relaxing in the mornings! We take the new bypass road (slowly now, because of so many traffic police out looking for speeders) and then drop the kids off just before 7:30 to wash their hands and get their temperatures checked. They are part of a very small minority of students who are wearing masks. On the good side, their school has great ventilation. All the walkways in secondary are open-air and classrooms have windows on either side. Desks are placed with moderate social distancing (1.5 meters). Students are required to follow one-way walking patterns to avoid crowding or bunching and there are now 5 shifts in the lunch hall, to reduce the number of kids inside. Still, it’s very difficult for kids to stop touching, hugging, and getting in each other’s faces. According to Oren, the school has a ways to go in enforcing its precautions and that if there is someone with COVID coming to school, everyone is going to get it. We remain somewhat nervous about all of this.

In fact, we are experiencing a worse sort of culture shock than anything we’ve ever felt before in crossing international boundaries: COVID culture shock. Back in the USA, we lived in a state where everyone understands that good citizenship involves wearing a face-covering out in public. You can go into a store and feel ok because all the other customers are also wearing masks. We have had a common understanding of the risks and how to mitigate them – at least with the friends we met up with.

Here in Tanzania, “Corona is finished.” People are going about their business as normal. You see virtually no one wearing masks, and you are liable to be mocked and heckled if you wear a mask in some places. People are shaking hands, giving hugs and happy to meet indoors in enclosed spaces. The narrative that the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror is strengthened by both political power and religious persuasion. It does indeed seem that prevalence is low here, although it's not clear why or how long it will last. We hope and pray that this is indeed the case. But if you happen to suggest that you believe that the virus is still out there, you are viewed as one of "ye of little faith."

All of this makes social and professional interactions rather complicated. At work, all of us have separate rooms to work in, but when we need to go into each other’s offices, we should be wearing masks to protect each other. We intend to enforce the same protocol with visitors to our office and we set up a space for meetings that allows more than 2 meters of space between people with open windows. But not all visitors come with masks. It is very awkward to wear a mask when others didn’t bring them along. We brought disposable masks to offer to visitors, but we had not anticipated how culturally disruptive that might be. We now have 4 plastic chairs at the office so that we can meet people outdoors, but that’s also difficult with sensitive conversations. Anyway, we and the kids are living daily with a sense of angst and cognitive dissonance around what we know to be true about this virus, and the way things appear here in this culture.

So, back to school: David has now started his first year of Secondary School with Year 7 (6^th grade). So far, he seems to be taking the changes and higher expectations seriously. He’s been pretty good about getting into a routine of doing his homework promptly after school. For his electives, he’s going to swim team practice twice a week as well as one afternoon of badminton – hopefully, all the extra activity will help him with the weight he gained in lockdown (like all of us!!).

Oren has been having a pretty demanding start to school – his postponed Year 10 exams will start Monday, so he’s had a ton of studying to do, to recall the material from last school year. I’m so thankful Paul is not afraid of chemistry and has been going through 175 pages of a review packet systematically with him. That’s the tough one, but there’s also a lot of review for Geography, Math and History. Hopefully, it won’t be too tough for him.

For Paul and me, the slightly later drop off of kids means that we are really squeezed for time to do a morning workout before going to the office. We certainly wouldn’t have enough time to swim, but coincidentally, our club’s pool is also not currently functional (that is another story that we might tell sometime). One of the unexpected side effects of 5 months of lockdown was that we learned how to exercise on land, using online workout videos, a 2m space, with rocks as dumbbells in just 30 minutes. This now comes in handy, and we are still able to do a good rigorous fitness routine in the gym at our club, grab a shower, and get to the office by 8:45. We still maintain that daily physical activity is the number one key to mental wellbeing.

Three days a week, we are both in the office. But these days, now that Paul and I share the job equally at 1.5 time total, each of us also has one day a week to be away from the office. This had been my habit in the past anyway, but it’s a first for Paul. I think he has really enjoyed and been refreshed by the opportunity to spend a day each week, doing what is important to him. For two weeks in a row, he has played a round of golf. He’s had time to think about our church Sunday school program going forward, write a sermon, and even take a midday nap.

I have a little more of a dilemma: I had become accustomed to having two days out of the office per week. On one day, I had a true Sabbath and day of solitude. On the other day, I attended a women’s bible study and did my non-work work: church responsibilities, Parents’ association stuff, etc.   – I was very spoiled! Now I have just one day a week for Sabbath and all those other involvements. It’s a little bit tricky to figure out how to prioritize. The women’s bible study was somewhat decimated by the exodus of a lot of families in the past few months and needs some tending to get going again in a good rhythm. And I really enjoy sharing prayer, spiritual reflection, and practical conversation with those women. I also really need some time of solitude to stay on an even keel. The day out of the office is also quite a bit shorter since it involves doing the school pick up at 3:30. (In the past, I could be home for a long stretch of time all by myself until 5 pm when Paul would come home with the kids, who had taken the bus to the office). I’ll have to see where all this shakes out.

Last weekend, we celebrated our return to Tanzania with a weekend outing to a fancy safari lodge. Although rates of COVID seem low here, the tourism industry which powers the economy of the Arusha region has been devastated. Big safari hotels in the national parks have literally been overrun by impala, giraffes and vervet monkeys because there is absolutely no one going to stay there. The human toll of this economic devastation is very heavy and hard to see. It also has meant that some lodges are doing everything possible to entice the local market. And thus, we were able to stay at Maramboi Tented Lodge on a resident special for two nights, full board (I mean FULL board), for all 4 of us, including wildlife management area fees, for $210 total. It was an unbelievable deal, and even though I knew very little about the place, just what I’d heard from women’s bible study, I felt like we just had to go and enjoy a little more of Tanzania in the short time we have left.

Paul and I took a half-day off last Friday so that we could go home, pack the truck, and then go pick up the kids directly from school. It was an easy 90-minute drive from school down to the wildlife management area (WMA), a sort of wildlife corridor between three huge national parks. We reached Maramboi as evening was coming and were able to watch the sunset from the pool deck directly across Lake Manyara to the escarpment surrounding Ngorongoro crater. The pool area was actually surrounded by the lake on two sides, with a bit of savannah on the other two, and beautifully built. We were able to watch and identify a wide variety of waterfowl as well as all kinds of land birds. A pair of zebras grazed to one side and basically seemed to live at the lodge. Our “tent” was enormous, spaciously accommodating one huge king bed and two full-sized beds, several lounge chairs and lots of space, with a solidly build bath area at one end, all under a high-quality thatched roof. We had our own private veranda, from which we could observe the wanderings of wildebeests.

The staff was very much COVID aware and masked up anytime we were near. Meals were all served at our private table, family style. There was so much food! And you know, when you go to a nice hotel, it’s interesting how the kids even eat salad! Butternut soup! Eggplant! And they declare it delicious and so much better than what you make at home! (and it was really good, but not that different).

Seeing animals in the WMA was a little hair-raising– there were no rangers available to walk with us into the bush. So, on Saturday morning, we were advised to just walk around on the paths leading out to various tents and see what we could see. As we walked, we did see plenty of wildebeest, giraffe, warthogs, impala, Thompson’s gazelles and a few more wild zebras. All these herbivores seemed quite at peace. But then we found a warthog skull and scattered bones. The kids were really involved in getting some teeth out of a jawbone. We started asking ourselves, “Now how did this skull end up so very close to the tented lodge? Clearly, someone has hunted and had a nice dinner.” We walked out a bit further into the savannah and found two more skulls and decided that we had had enough of walking around without an armed ranger! All the while, we definitely were keeping an eye on the plentiful grazers, to follow their lead if they got nervous, but still…

The pool was lovely to splash in, and we had time to rest and play a few games together. Oren and I have been listening to Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and I’m really glad he’s so interested in hearing about her life. Later, David talked me into going out for another walk along the lakeshore. We found ourselves absolutely surrounded by a family of giraffes – there must have been 30 altogether – but they just kept appearing as we would walk around these little clusters of palmettos. We were probably too close to them, but it was as if we were just tripping over them! And the birdlife – I must have added at least 10 species to my life list in one weekend. It was great!

On Sunday morning, after a leisurely breakfast and another little walk, we packed up and drove back to Arusha. We had just enough time to turn around and head out again to attend our family Bible study, for the first time in person since early March. We were really delighted to be together again and have the time to share our prayer needs with each other –which are still quite considerable. Lots of people are facing lots of uncertainties these days. Still, it’s really a mark of God’s provision that we are able to be back here together physically at all with these dear friends, and we’re still praying one last family back this coming week.

On Monday, I plan to travel to Dodoma with our Food Security Coordinator, Chrispin. I’d never had the chance to meet with our agriculture partner down their or see their work (in fact, I spent most of the first 3 years here in our Arusha office), and I’m really grateful for this one last chance. We will also go to bid farewell to an education partner, Dodoma School for the Deaf, and to greet Mennonite church partners down there. It will be a challenging week for Paul while I’m gone, especially as Oren is going through his exams. So please do be praying for his stamina. And for safety in travel for Chrispin and I.

And now for an amusing anecdote apropos to nothing:

When we were packing our suitcases to return to Arusha, as usual I used every available space, packing spices into thermos mugs and bottles of allergy meds into the bottoms of Oren’s sneakers. When we arrived home here, I unpacked the spices and pulled the meds out of the shoes and then realized that there was still something in the sneaker. I shook it out upside down, and out emerged the dessicated corpse of a large toad! How had the toad met his doom? Well, Oren hadn’t worn those shoes for months, and they had been sitting in the garage, a favorite haunt of toads. So, probably a toad hopped in there one day and then found itself trapped.

It was quite startling to see the dried out little creature and I was hysterically amused, running downstairs to show Oren what was in his sneaker. Apparently, I then tossed the shoes into the shoe pile near the door.

Two weeks later, I was taking an evening walk with Oren, who had just started school again, wearing school uniform including sneakers. At one point I looked down at the driveway and exclaimed! “Why, there’s a dried out toad!” Oren said, “Yes, Mommy, it’s the same one you NEVER TOOK OUT OF MY SHOE!” Apparently, Paul had driven them to school without me that morning. Oren was putting on his sneakers in the car and found that his foot would not fit into the left one. He shook it out and – voila! Toad! He had to open his door and shake it out onto the driveway where we found it. I guess that’s one of my worst absent-minded motherhood moments, failing to remove the dead toad I had already discovered, but leaving it there to startle us another day!