Values in Concert

Music Club presentation (David on far upper right)

Hmmm, it’s Monday… Paul has just left for a 3-day trip and I don’t think a new blogpost has magically appeared since we went to bed last night ;-). I guess I will have to pinch hit and report on our week myself.

We had a fairly routine week in many respects, in terms of going to work, trying to get some Swahili lessons done (though our charming teacher has proved to be a bit unreliable when it comes to showing up for class L  ). I am currently working on assignment descriptions for young adult volunteer opportunities for next year through the one-year SALT program. https://mcc.org/get-involved/serve/volunteer/salt

Lucia, Paul, Neema and Chrispin at the funeral

We are hoping to find one or two young people with training in Special Education or OT/PT who will come and serve with the Step by Step Learning Center. So I went to visit Margaret Kenyi at the school, to talk more about the opportunity and to learn more about the school. Paul wrote about his visit there a few weeks ago, but I was really glad to go myself.

Margaret is such a wonderful, warm woman of faith, and I loved talking with her about her experiences in working with each individual child in her program. They are all different and have different gifts and needs, and I appreciated how much the education there is relational. I also have a better understanding of the profound needs her students have. Under any circumstances, I know it must be a challenge to raise a child who isn’t typical. Unfortunately, in Tanzania, when a child is born with special needs, families have very little safety net to draw upon. Rarely do families even have a diagnosis. Often the father takes off, leaving a mother to raise the child on her own. Her options for earning a living are even more limited, and she may need to make the terrible choice of leaving her child unattended and locked in a house while she goes to try to sell something or tend her fields. Many people are hostile to people with disabilities, fearing that their condition may be contagious, so children with autism or downs syndrome or other learning disabilities struggle with both poverty and rejection. It was a real testament to the work of the SSLC that all the children I met were eager to greet me and shake my hand, to the best of their ability.

I know that Paul would have wanted to say something about a big event on Tuesday as well. Our MCC colleague Chrispin lost his mother-in-law at the end of last week. As a sign of solidarity, the whole MCC team attended (except for me, because I was on kid pickup duty) The funeral was held in Chrispin’s wife’s village not far outside of Arusha. After a church service, the family and friends accompanied her body back to her own lands, where she was buried down a steep hill in her banana plantations. Paul may have more to add in detail about his experience of mourning together with our colleague, but at least I can attach some photos of the funeral and our colleagues here.

Another special school event took place at our kids’ school. The Upper Elementary classes presented a concert on Thursday evening. Since we live so far away, we can’t really go home after school and return in time for evening events, so the kids and I hung out at an outdoor café next door to the school for some early dinner. The kids had gone off to play in the somewhat distant playground while I waited for our sandwiches, but when the food arrived, I realized I had a problem. A troop of vervet monkeys had been playing in the magnificent tree shading the café, but now, with food in sight, they were on the ground, prowling nearer and nearer! One seemed pretty unafraid of me, and kept approaching so I resorted to waving around a pair of pants (Oren had changed). But how to get my kids to the food without the food going to the monkeys? Fortunately, Arusha is a small town and I knew the two ladies sitting nearby. One offered to continue waving the pants at the brazen monkey while I ran off and summoned the kids. I was thankful!

The concert was very fun. Each class had prepared a song/dance routine to a western pop song that had something to do with the Values of St. Constantine’s. We heard “Honesty,” “Respect,” “Superhero” and many others. David’s class presented the theme song from Zootopia, “Try Everything,” – which has sort of become my theme song for this beginning period in Arusha, since I’ve heard it so much as David practiced. “No I won’t give up, I won’t give in, til I reach the end, then I’ll start again…” The finale involved all 12 classes, singing Katy Perry’s “Roar!” The sheer volume of their performance, in and of itself, was tremendous. But there was also something incredibly moving about hearing a group of international kids of this particular demographic, singing these words. I’ve attached a video that Paul made of part of the song. Click the link below. Or maybe the link below will work...

We will try to post it on our Facebook pages.

Roar!