Week #4: July 29-August 3 (Safari)

A lioness in the Serengeti

We had a great adventure driving all over the Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National park on safari. It was breathtaking to see all of the animals you dreamed of seeing as a kid right there in front of your eyes. Our Creator is a master designer and we thoroughly enjoyed our time perusing this gigantic exhibit of His work.

Thompson's Gazelles grazing

Momma elephant and baby


Hollering hippopotamus


A lioness lying in a tree

Week #3: July 22-28

The site for the baptisms from Matt's series

Week #3 was filled with busy days preparing to preach in the evening, various Indian lunches at our favorite restaurants we'd discovered the previous week, and busy nights at our sites preaching our hearts out.

Arusha National Park - Monday, July 22

We had an amazing day today. We visited Arusha National Park. It is truly awe inspiring to drive into a park and find a group of ten to twelve giraffes roaming freely right next to the road. I was in shock. One of the most beautiful sights of my life. I've dreamed about seeing these animals in the wild my whole life. The park is gorgeous. The whole thing is one the side of Mt. Meru, a 14,000 ft + volcano. There were cape buffalo all over the park. We took a one hour walking safari with an armed guide to protect us. Saw a beautiful waterfall and walked right out across a field past a herd of these buffalo. They are actually the most dangerous animals on safari. We had a great time watching the Colobus Monkeys in the trees. There were a couple of babies. Right before we had to leave four of them in a row jumped across a 10-15 foot gap between two trees. It was a perfect end to the day.

Sabbath, July 28
The week ended with a beautiful day of baptisms, gifts, and good-byes. It was very hard to leave at the end.

Women from Leah's site being baptized


Man from Matt's church being baptized

God blessed the work that went on and many people made decisions to be baptized. During the preparation for the series, the director of our group told the local leadership that he was setting a prayerful goal of 100 baptisms. They were hoping for 50 and said that 100 would be incredible. In the end, over 200 people made the decision to fully surrender their hearts to Christ, and to begin their eternal relationship with Him. It was a beautiful testimony of the power of God's love and His desire to save us.

Week #2: July 13-20

Friday/Sabbath

Leah and I were both excited about starting our series on Friday night, July 13.

I started Sabbath morning for church. Leah's original site was cancelled because the police wouldn't give a permit for her meeting. We trusted that God had a plan.

Leah's site

Sunday, July 15, was Leah's first day at her site. We play a segment from a movie of Jesus' life every night. When Leah returned that night, she said she felt like she could have been in the Jesus movie at her site. It is a 40 km drive out into the hills around Kilimanjaro. She stands on the side of a hill to preach and the people sit just down the hill below her. She looks out over the village with the mountains behind it. She has the son of the conference ShareHim coordinator as her translator and he is a very good translator. She has won the hearts of the kids at her site. Today we are going to buy shoes for a little boy from her site who had his toe smashed. It wasn't taken care of by his parents, and looked like it was becoming infected. So Leah brought her first aid kit out one night and fixed him up. He seems to be doing much better.

Matt's site

I've really been enjoying preaching. It is exciting to get to know people from my church family in another part of the world. It is also exciting to be sharing the gospel. I love our series of sermons, because no matter what the topic is that we are presenting, it is always tied in with our relationship with Jesus, and focused on the gospel in some way. I'm excited to see visitor's coming. For several days I didn't know if there were any coming. But last night they told me there have been fifteen to twenty. And even when I wasn't sure, I was still excited for two reasons. One, I've found that these meetings are just as much for the church members. They are encouraged, and refreshed by what we study. The second reason is that I know I am preaching to the whole neighborhood. :) They have loud speakers pointed out into the neighborhood that project for about two miles. So I know that there are people listening in their homes. It makes me feel like I'm a radio preacher. :) Pray for those in their homes as well as those attending the meetings. The area I'm in is the hardest to evangelize in the whole conference. They say that 100 baptisms here is like 1000 in the rest of the conference. Most of my visitors don't come to the meeting until after dark, because they don't want to be seen by a pastor or other church member who will report them. In spite of any obstacles people are coming and being blessed. So am I.

Week #1: July 8-12

Sunday/Monday, July 8/9 - Went to urgent care the morning of departure. Mom and Dad dropped us off with our heavy luggage. Had to move some things from one bag to another because it was over 50 pounds.
Our flights were so long, but it was fun to go over the Atlantic Ocean. It was neat to look down on Ireland, Great Britain, and the Netherlands with its dikes by the ocean. Ate a European breakfast of hard bread with cheese, tomato, and pesto on it (and pulled of the cheese) and a waffle that tasted sweet like a pastry.
I think I caught the very edge of the Austrian Alps when I woke up from a nap. I enjoyed flying over the Adriatic Sea and looking at the mountains right by the shore. I fell asleep over the edge of Greece that we flew over, but when I woke up, we were just passing over Crete. I really enjoyed comparing it with the map in the back of my Bible and picking out the "Safe Harbor" where Paul's ship pulled in for safety during a stormy season on one of his journeys. Saw Egypt and northern Africa, where the desert just stretched on and on for a couple of hours. Then we began to fly over mountainous lands south of the desert. Finally we landed in Nairobi and collected all but one of our bags (we got word today, Thursday, that it is now at the Kilimanjaro airport.)
Met our friends the Folkenberg's who led out in the trip to El Salvador last year. Also met Pastor Don and Mrs./ Dr. Cynthia Gettys, pastor of McDonald Road SDA Church and Education Superintendant of the Georgia-Cumberland Conference respectively. Pastor Gettys has quickly become a favorite of ours with his warmth, humorous stories, and dry sense of humor. It is also fun to hear him trying to pronounce Swahili words.

Tuesday, July 10 - Drove from Nairobi, Kenya to Arusha, Tanzania to Moshi, Tanzania. Enjoyed watching the Masai villages pass by out the window and the children out shepherding their goats, cows, camels and even ostriches. Very interesting to see the clusters of dung huts with thorn bushes piled up around them to keep the lions out.
At the stop where we had to get our passports stamped to depart from Kenya, the bus driver told us, "Just get your passport stamped and get right on the bus." We had one yellow form to turn in to the Kenyan government as we left the country, and one blue form to give to the Tanzanian government as we entered a quarter of a mile ahead. Everyone else on the bus had left before me, and I didn't see where they went. When I got off the bus, immediately, a young man told me, "Blue cards this way," while he pointed to the opposite side of the street from where the bus was parked. My driver called out to me and pointed in the opposite direction from where the young man was trying to lead me to where the rest of the group was standing with their yellow cards . After getting my passport stamped and finding out that we didn't turn in our blue cards at that stop, I returned to the bus where the same young man approached me and said, "Come with me for blue cards." I hopped right on the bus, thinking about what his intentions might be as he tried to deceive me into following him into some shop, or even behind some building. It made me stop and think about how it was the directions of the bus driver, who knew that there would be people trying to mislead me, that popped into my head and helped me get right back onto the bus after getting my passport stamped, instead of following the "blue card" guy. We then drove further down the road until we crossed the border into Tanzania and we stopped and went into a building where official government employees stamped our passports and collected our blue cards.
We were blown away as we approached Moshi and could begin to make out the base of Mount Kilimanjaro through the overcast and cloudy horizon. We could only probably see the lowest 10% of the mountain, but were in awe at the massive width of the mountain. When we were still 25-30 miles away, it covered the horizon far to the left and the right of the road. It doesn't have any surrounding foothills and isn't part of a mountain range. It must be at least a 30-40 mile wide mountain just rising straight up from a perfectly flat plain that stretches as far as you can see in any direction. Our hotel was pleasantly clean and simple but comfortable. We did switch rooms though when we found the one we had been assigned had two double beds instead of a single large one.
Wednesday, July 11 - Met the rest of the group. All but Leah and I and Tom Cochran (history teacher from Hinsdale Academy) are from Collegedale, Tennessee area. And all but two of those attend the McDonald Road SDA Church where the Folkenbergs attend. Very friendly group who welcomed us right in and made us feel like part of the family. Hit it off well with Tom with our connection as teachers, Midwest residents, and only members of the group who didn’t already know each other. This morning we made another connection when Tom came to breakfast with an L.L. Bean shirt on and we discovered that he was originally from Maine and went to Pine Tree Academy!
One thing that sticks out about the group is the large number of kids. Many families came and brought their kids. And the kids are probably preaching at about half of the 17 sites we have here in Moshi! Awesome! Several of them are paired up together, taking turns every other night, and several of them are preaching the whole series at their own sites. We had our orientation meeting and met the Conference and Union leaders who very graciously welcomed us to Tanzania and told us how much they'd been looking forward to our coming.
After the meeting I met my translator, Chesco, and found out he was a teacher too. He speaks English very well, and after lunch we spent most of the afternoon just talking and getting to know each other. We both seem to have a common picture for how to work together most effectively and have decided to meet every day to practice the sermon together. He wants to be able to translate the sermon with enthusiasm and emotion, which is very exciting for me to hear. A translator who just monotonously and robotically repeated my words in Swahili would be so much less exciting to work with. The people here are so friendly. They will just sit and talk with you for long periods of time trying to get to know you better.
The highlight of the day was when Leah excitedly called me to the roof of the hotel to see the mountain with the best visibility that we've had yet. When I reached the top, I was mildly excited to find that I could clearly see the rolling hills at the base of the mountain, which had been obscured by fog up to that point. I was about comment about how it was "kind of cool" when I suddenly realized that, far higher than I ever expected to see it, easily missed up among the clouds, was the snow covered peak of Kilimanjaro glistening white in the sun. It was seriously a jaw dropping sight. I stood on the roof for 10 to 15 minutes, watching as one by one, other people from the group came out onto the roof, scanned the horizon with puzzled or unimpressed expressions, and suddenly gasped or let out a "Wow", a "No way", or an "Awesome" as they too realized that it was the peak of the mountain they were seeing so high up there where they only thought there were clouds.

Thursday, July 12 - Traveled to see our sites. Most of the sites were not ready yet. Almost all are taking place in open fields where a platform and a screen are being constructed by the members of the local church or company. After going with a woman and her son whose site was near mine, and standing there watching as they began constructing her platform, I was very surprised by my site. Theirs was in a rural village in a very poor area. When we pulled up to my site and stopped, we were outside a beautiful flowering hedge about ten feet tall which completely surrounded the grounds of the church, which they are currently constructing. My meetings are being held in the "temporary" church on the same property which is covered with a canvas awning and set up with a "real" church platform and many benches.
Leah's site was on a lot next to a building near a small shopping district area and school. She laughed at the size of the platform they had made for her. It was about five feet square and she felt like she might fall off if she moved around too much, not to mention trying to fit both she and her translator up there. She told them to make it bigger if possible, so we'll see what happens.
We are both excited about beginning the series tomorrow night, and are looking forward to meeting the people who will come to our sites. It will be a true blessing to share the hope that we've found in Jesus and His Word, through the messages that we are giving.
I am also really enjoying the challenge of trying to learn as much Swahili as I can. So far I've learned how to greet people who are my age and younger, and also how to use a special greeting for people who are older than me to show respect to them. I can ask what someone's name is, ask how they are doing, tell them my name, and say "Good-bye" and "Good night". I can also say several phrases I'll use during the meetings, such as "God loves you", "Greetings people of God", and "God is good - all the time". I love languages so much, so I'm really enjoying learning from my translator about the language and the cultural customs of Tanzania. (I've also asked him to tell me about things that are offensive in their culture, which I've appreciated learning as well. One thing I've learned so far is that greetings are highly important and valued in their culture, so not greeting someone could really offend them. Another is that when you point without having your pointer finger sticking out, that is an offensive gesture. That was interesting to find out, because in our culture you're taught not to stick out your pointer finger when you point during a presentation, which could have been quite insulting if I had done it here. I'm sure they would have given me the benefit of the doubt, being American and all. But I enjoy knowing things that can help me connect with their culture better.

Friday, July 13

Today we had our best view of Kilimanjaro so far!

I saw my site all finished and decorated today :)