Going to Loliondo

Loliondo is the last place you’d expect a miracle, an area in northern Tanzania so remote that there are no signs of civilization. The roads that do exist are so rocky, any car that ventures on them inevitably suffers at least one punctured tire.

But Loliondo is where a retired Lutheran pastor lives in a one-room mud home near a tree with a miracle cure. In 1991, the Babu (“grandfather” in Kiswahili) had a dream telling him to cure people. He ignored the dream. A few years later, he ignored a second dream with the same message. In 2002, in another dream, he was told to cure people by giving them water boiled with the root of a special tree. The instructions also included a specific plastic green cup. When the Babu awoke, the cup was in his hand. This time he paid attention to the dream.

First he began with the people in his village, but they tended to dismiss his dream and his miracle cure. However, others did not, and word spread gradually. Per the dream’s instructions, the Babu focused on five main diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and asthma. The dream also told him to charge only 500 Tanzanian shillings for each person, the equivalent of less than 50 cents.

In about February of this year, someone¬—not the Babu—told journalists that he would stop curing people the day before Ash Wednesday (an utterly false rumor). Suddenly the fame of the Babu spread nationally, not to mention internationally. People came in droves. Stories of miraculous cures became the daily story in the news. In one case, a woman with cervical cancer was hemorrhaging so much she had to change adult diapers eight times a day. The day after she took the miracle water, she changed diapers twice. The day after that, none.

Since February, an entire sector of the Tanzanian population has been lined up in cars for weeks at Loliondo. There are now 24,000 people in about 6,000 vehicles, and the Babu has asked for assistance from the government to stop allowing people to come so that he can catch up on the 24,000.

People now come to work and find co-workers absent for days because they’ve gone to Loliondo. Mama Viktor, one of the cleaning ladies at SMMUCo, took her father-in-law. She was gone for three days. When her father-in-law returned with the ability to walk and leap for the first time in years, Mama Viktor turned around and took her mother-in-law.

Besides stories of miraculous cures, there are daily stories of conditions at Loliondo. People in cars wait up to seven days before they are served the miracle water. Some people try to butt in line, and the Babu warns them that the water will not work for them. People are forced to sleep in their cars and relieve themselves outside, creating foul conditions. Yet the flow of people seeking the miracle cure from the Babu has not waned. He works from sun-up to sun-down boiling the tree roots and serving from a plastic green cup.

No one complains of going to Loliondo and not being cured. No one tries to explain the miracle. They only wonder if they can make it to Loliondo before the miracle runs out.