A brief and fond farewell

It is the time of the semester when every brain cell I’m using has been borrowed or rented for the sole purpose of grading 250 tests, essays, revisions, etc. Those cells will remain that way until I board a plane on August 2nd for the States.

Bottom line: no blog for a while.

I could not have imagined a more glorious adventure than this year in Tanzania. I am grateful to divine, ecclesiastical and other powers that got me here and sustained me. I am also very grateful to various churches, groups, and individuals who donated money.

Gladly, I will be returning to Tanzania at the beginning of October to teach again at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College. Again, I will be serving as a volunteer, with funding from the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA. If you’re inclined to donate toward this cause, the Nebraska Synod and I would be delighted.

If you wish to host a $1,000-a-plate banquet, I would be happy to provide entertainment, but only of a dignified nature, and not on a Sunday. Don’t forget to put my name on the memo line of your $500,000 check to the Nebraska Synod.

Or you can send a check (with my name on the memo line) for next year’s venture to:
Nebraska Synod ELCA
4980 S. 118th St., Suite D
Omaha, NE 68137


If you do send money, I cannot guarantee you less time in purgatory or your own chamber in heaven with a coffee bar and 24-hour massage service, but you will get a heaping thanks from me.

Let me now give at least twenty spoonfuls of thanks to the bevy of loyal followers of this blog. It has been a treat to get personal messages from you. I thoroughly love being here, and sharing all that I love with you has been simple unadulterated joy.

Until October, adieu!

Where it stops, nobody knows

When a ball starts rolling down a mountain road with large rocks jutting out, who knows where it will go?

One might say this particular ball started with Zareke, the boy at Sinai Lutheran Church who raised his hand after my presentation of Tanzania pictures. “What kind of toys do the kids play with?” I hadn’t really paid attention to toys but I did see little boys running down the hill with a stick they used to push a wheel. Clearly all parts of it had been something else in previous lifetime. I’d also seen boys kicking a ball made of thirty miles of string.

Like that ball of string, Zareke’s idea was passed to Pastor Ostrom who thought surely it would be easy enough to send a soccer ball to Tanzania, and probably a pump. Yes, I said, that sounded good. I’d find a place for it when I returned.

When three soccer balls and a pump arrived in Tanzania, I wondered who on earth I could give them to. Suddenly the Kirima Primary School up the hill floated in my mind. Village schools often do not get the same benefits as city schools, and I decided they could use three soccer balls and a pump.

The balls and pump sat in a box in my house for about three months until one day, I was sitting in the shelter of the village bus stand, a hut with a roof made of dried banana leaves. Ferdinand, the shoemaker who uses the stand as his shop, was sewing up a shoe when I plopped myself on the bench next to another man. School children passing by greeted him, “Shikamoo, Mwalimu.“ I perked up. “Mwalimu” means “teacher.“ This mwalimu taught at Kirima Primary School. His face lit up when I told him about the soccer balls, and then it radiated like neon when I mentioned the pump. I would come on Monday, I told him.

On Monday, I decided arbitrarily that noonish would be the time to come with the soccer balls. I also had a gazillion pens from my good friend Debi, who teaches English at an elementary school. I also decided arbitrarily that Debi, formerly of Verdigre, Nebraska, where it doesn’t get more rural, would want the pens to go to children in a rural school.

Noonish was actually a good time. There seemed to be a kind of recess going on, with children darting about outside like heated molecules. Soon a small parade formed behind me. The air that had been full of shouting and laughter now quieted to hushed whispers. In Tanzania, someone always offers to carry my bag, and sure enough, one child formed the head of the parade beside me, proudly carrying the plastic bag with three soccer balls.

At the far side of the school, we were eyed carefully by four school teachers, one of whom had a short cane in her hand. When I explained that I had brought a gift from my church in America, I was happily whisked into the main office where I signed my name in a book as big as the desk. For the sake of posterity that probably wasn’t called for, I wrote a paragraph explaining that Sinai Lutheran Church of Fremont, Nebraska, USA had given a gift of three soccer balls, a pump, and many pens. Then I added, “God bless you!” because surely primary school teachers need a blessing every now and then.

I said I wanted to take a picture of the children. The teacher hostess, who had me sign my name, told me to wait, she would arrange for a picture. With a stick in hand, she beat the school bell, which wasn’t a bell but the metal inside part of a truck tire which hung from a tree. (Obviously I have no clue what you call that tire thing.)

Streams of children flowed by. The ones who had misbehaved at an earlier time were snagged by the hand of a teacher who shouted, “You!” and whapped their fingers. The stream flowed toward the assembly area, under the shade of the largest tree on the school grounds. They lined themselves up into columns, each child with his hand on the shoulder in front of him.

The head teacher now told the children about today’s guest. They were to greet me on the count of three. Then I made my entrance, following the hostess teacher, and stepped in front of 436 children. Most of them wore a school uniform--sweaters of green, blue, black, and yellow, the colors of the Tanzanian flag. Many of the sweaters had sleeves or necklines that were threatening to unravel, clearly having been passed down by older siblings. One in the front row only had horizontal threads across his right shoulder. His sweater had been worn by every generation since independence.

The children greeted me according to plan. But I wasn’t prepared for their song, something pure that could not be touched by grime and dust, by harsh words or a stinging cane. This song had a purity of 436. Which was just enough to tip me over into gulping sobs until I realized that every single child and teacher would wonder what the Sam Hill was wrong with me, and the whole event would be ruined.

When the head teacher announced the gift of three soccer balls, a great murmur moved through the sea. Another murmur after the pump was announced and another with the pens. For the picture I wanted to take, the children sat down. Actually it was five pictures in order to get all 436.

On my way out, I was escorted by three of the teachers. They were grateful for the gifts. As we stood at the road, we lingered there for the last thank you and the last goodbye. Just before I stepped into the road, one of the teachers said, “Can you help us? We really need toilets.“

And that was where the ball rolled.

Church of the psychic pastor

On the morning we went to see the psychic pastor, Happy’s sister Neema slipped me a handwritten prayer to give him. I had been ironing my dress on the foot of her bed while she sat curled up at the head, writing.

She had heard the same stories I had from my friend Edith about the pastor. One woman had asked him to pray for her brother, and in the midst of his prayer, he understood the brother was near death, which turned out to be true. Another woman asked him to pray for her husband, and in the midst of calling on God the Father, the pastor knew the woman had threatened to leave her husband. While these stories piqued my curiosity, they spurred Neema to see if the pastor could use his divine influence on her behalf.

Happy and I took scarves to wrap around our heads before we entered the church of the psychic pastor. Edith had said covering the head was required because women did so in the Old Testament. My scarf was the nearest thing I could find: a flashy yellow and black sarong still damp from being used as a towel an hour ago. When Edith joined us at the bus station, she looked at my necklace and earrings and said no jewelry either.

On the bus toward Arusha, I unfolded my sarong on my lap. It was almost dry when the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. People got off the bus and waited for another. I found a tree on a knoll and answered a call of nature. Another bus arrived. As we mashed ourselves into it, the bus conductor counted us - 26, 27, 28... Happy and I shared half a seat. Edith shared the back row with eight others.

When the bus stopped at a lonely row of shops with two huge boulders by the road, we got off. Across the road was a mirror image of shops without the boulders. Out of the silence, a motorcycle materialized. Edith had told me we’d be riding one to the church.

As she negotiated the fare, two more appeared, rumbling loudly. The three of us stood with our arms across our chests while negotiations were in progress. Happy and Edith wore faraway looks. This was necessary lest the cyclists think we really needed the ride, giving them the upper hand. While the driver of the first motorcycle talked to the back of their heads, Edith and Happy said a few words to each other quietly, and suddenly Happy climbed onto a motorcycle and rode side-saddle. Edith pointed for me to climb onto another motorcycle with a solid foot platform while she took another.

The church itself was a solid brick building, a rectangle with a metal roof. Long open-air windows on two sides of the rectangle provided the only light, but it was plenty. The doorway too provided light since there was no door. When we walked in, the congregation was singing, rocking to the music, hands in the air, swaying and clapping.

When the music ended we searched for places to sit. On the left side of the sanctuary, people sat in plastic lawn chairs. On the right side others sat on back-less benches. Along the sides of the brick wall were rough-hewn logs sliced in half, the flat side resting on rocks piled up. Edith and I sat on one such log next to a row of little boys. We faced the side view of people sitting in benches.

The woman nearest me had eyes sunk in deep sockets. They rested on my face for a solid two or three minutes. I felt somewhere on me was a bull’s eye and somewhere in her eye was a bullet. Her aim moved to my throat, my left arm, my right arm, my chest, my stomach, my legs, my ankles and my toes. And then she repeated the same slow sweep over Edith. Finally, I had the nerve to stare at her face - long and thin with cheek bones protruding like rocks jutting out of a road.

A woman at the front led the singing. Sometimes her singing melted into wailing, and then the congregation knew it was time to stop. After all, it is difficult to follow along with wailing. Later in the service, there was more wailing when the pastor prayed what Lutherans call the Prayer of the Church. In this Pentecostal-type service, the prayers are a loud chanting with the name of God repeated in many ways, many times while we all raise one hand in the air.

As the pastor began the prayer, others whispered their own and soon there was more wailing. One woman on the bench near me began to repeat the same syllable and I’m pretty sure it didn’t mean anything in Kiswahili: “ku-ku-ku-ku-ku.” Then “chi-chi-chi-chi-chi.” She swayed. The woman beside her was overcome with sobbing.

Even though this was the prayer, I opened my eyes and saw from the woman’s mouth a string of drool lengthening. I would have been terrified if either Edith or Happy had started doing the same thing, but both had closed their eyes and seemed as they usually were.

After the service, the pastor gave a general announcement asking us to raise our hands if we wanted him to pray for us individually. Then we rushed to the front of the sanctuary and stood before the chancel, a raised concrete platform with an altar and flower petals scattered on the floor. I had clung to Edith who would translate for me, and I managed to get a front row position with Edith directly behind me and Happy beside me.

Down the row from me, the pastor had started praying over a woman, his hands on her head. Soon other church leaders swarmed around her. She was wailing and the others were shouting loudly over her in angry voices. I turned around and asked Edith if they would do that to me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “she has a demon. They are taking out the demon. You don’t have one.’” I thought, “How does she know?”

Now the woman collapsed, and luckily the church leaders, still shouting, caught her and lay her on the floor. In spite of the less than meditative atmosphere, the pastor began to pray quietly for another woman in my row. She did not have a demon. I took comfort in that. Now the pastor took a bottle of oil from the altar, put a little on his palm and placed it on the woman’s stomach. I asked Edith about that. The woman wanted a baby. Since I didn’t want a baby, I figured the hand on the stomach was one less thing to worry about.

When the pastor stood before me and put his ear next to my face, I asked if he spoke English. He pointed to Happy standing beside me to translate. I handed him the prayers from Neema. Without unfolding the paper, he explained that Neema had a vision to study in America. He prayed that her wish might come true. Then he said she had a problem with her stomach. He prayed over that. I was glad that my own stomach was not the surrogate for Neema’s.

It was late when we arrived back in Moshi. I asked Neema what she had written in her prayer. She said she wanted to get a master’s degree, but that it didn’t matter whether it was in America or Tanzania. I asked about her stomach. She said the pastor was right about the stomach problem.

Only time will tell whether she will get a master’s degree and whether the stomach is healed. If these things happen we will wonder, were the prayers of the psychic pastor so potent, or does God listen to the daily prayers of ordinary mortals?