The Steffensens World

As I write, I am filled with anxiety for my Degree students as they take the first exam of exam week. They begin with my class, New Testament I. I never realized how hard it is to give a test. I struggled over the questions, I sought the essence of what I would like these students to know, and I worried that they would prepare properly. One student is suffering with boils, another with stomach problems, yet another lost his sister-in-law to malaria last week. One lost his son the first month of class and his wife the second month. All are present and all are sitting the exam on time. God bless them!

Joseph Ailo, a Maasai who is one of my degree students, preached this morning in chapel on John 6:1-15. He spoke of the three responses noted in this gospel before Jesus feeds the 5,000. There is Philip, who worries about the money; Andrew, who worries about the small amount of food not being enough; and the unnamed young boy, who offers the five loaves and two fish he has. Here are the disciples, who have witnessed the authority of Jesus in his miracles already, yet they still don’t really believe or realize who he is. Their faith gets lost in the worldly details. The boy just gives what he has, to let Jesus do with his gift as he will. This hit me straight in the heart this morning. After five months, with all of the highs and lows we have experienced, there have been many times when I wonder what I am doing here. What have I dragged Kirk and the children into? Tanzania is a beautiful and amazing country, but it is also very dangerous. BUT: didn’t I answer a call? I need to remind myself that I simply offered my gifts to God to use. He called my family here, for whatever purpose in their individual lives. I was called to offer my education and my Spiritual gift of teaching to the Church. It is just my small offering to a world full of need. “Here I am, Lord.” My students give everything of the little they have to seek the opportunity to study. My difficulties are not much compared to theirs.

We have had a very busy month. We visited the village of Mvumi, where I preached in honor of a fundraising event for a parish rectory. The parish and Fr. Daniel Mazengo welcomed us with a feast and a rooster for a gift. Henry named him “Jimmy.” Jimmy lives in a coop with two lovely hens next door to our home. The following weekend Kirk, Greg, and Charlotte traveled to Kiteto Christian College in Kibaya. It’s in the Mt. Kilimanjaro Diocese, about three hours from Msalato. The KCC English missionaries had visited us with some broken computers. Kirk and the kids went to help them and were able to fix all of the campus computers. Kirk and his computer skills have been desperately needed blessings to Central Tanganyika. He enjoyed experiencing another mission community, worshipping at the cathedral and helping them in their time of need. Now KCC can finish their semester with proper papers and exams.

This past week we had the SIM Pastor’s Books Set conference at the Lutheran Cathedral in Dodoma. I went with a group of ten from Msalato to collect 8 sets. It was a powerful experience to meet and praise God with eighty pastors from all denominations. It was a celebration of the book set blessing, but it was a time of fellowship with many Christians and form new friendships. I was enthusiastically greeted by some Assembly of God teachers from Kongwa, the Lutheran Bishop, former Msalato students, and the Moravian contingent from Tabora. My family hosted Robert Anderson, a Danish Moravian missionary, and his daughter Emily, who is Charlotte’s age. They traveled twelve hours to come to the conference. They stayed for three nights with us. Charlotte and Emily are best friends from when they first met at language school in August.

I must now mention Charlotte’s ministry. I have noticed that her optimistic, can-do nature has become a blessing to other missionary children. Emily Anderson is ten years old and lives in a very isolated village, hours from any town. She has not made any friends among the local children. Her parents worry about her. Emily is the oldest of four children, so she does have her sisters and brothers to play with. Charlotte welcomed Emily as if they’ve known each other their whole lives. They had actually only spent a total of ten hours together in August. Within a few seconds of arriving the two of them where arm-in-arm and off to play in Charlotte’s room. They didn’t waste one moment over the three days. Charlotte had the energy to fill this friend with experiences to last her until we visit them in January. Charlotte is also best buddies with a home-schooled girl from Texas. She also plays with a Dutch girl and a German girl she knows from school at CAMS. Charlotte acts as a little sister to Jenny, a fifteen-year-old girl from Minnesota. Charlotte’s enthusiasm and ability to enjoy whoever she is with helps these girls to blossom here in Tanzania. I have always admired Charlotte’s refusal to clique. Especially in fourth grade in the US, she may have been forced to join in or have been pushed aside socially. It has been wonderful to watch her gifts be a blessing here in Tanzania.

At the college, we are now in exam week as I mentioned above. It has been an extremely busy semester for me as the new teacher. I had many lectures to prepare and many levels of students to work with. I have learned to preach and enjoy it! I have experienced the fellowship of both the college community and the larger mission community. Next semester will bring its challenges, but I am definitely ready to handle whatever the college needs me to do. I will miss the students these two and a half months, but I am ready to recharge my batteries. I will begin to prepare for the second semester’s classes, but I will also be using the break to gather the histories of the ordained women in Central Tanganyika. I hope to use this research to record this history which is being made right here. No one has written anything down yet. I meet on December 4^th with the first woman dean who oversees the parishes in Dodoma.

Thank you to all who prayed for Kirk when he was ill with malaria. He is well now, but he is slightly anemic. Although he’s better, he needs to mind his nutrition and rest for the near future. As the rains arrive, we are all on the daily anti-malarial drugs. Please pray for our family’s health, safety and our mission work. We ask for your continued prayers for the Anglican Church of Tanzania, the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, the Canon Andrea Mwaka School, and Msalato Theological College.

With love and in Christ,

Leslie

PS: I am trying to raise money to buy as many as twenty of the SIM Pastor’s Book Sets for the Msalato Library. There are 58 books in the $75 set, including hardback reference books (NIV Study Bible, Bible Dictionary, Concordance, African Bible Commentary, and an Introduction to Systematic Theology. Any two of these would be $75 alone!) There are pastoral and evangelist’s aids. There’s even a beginner’s New Testament Greek. Many are books that could be used as much-needed textbooks for classes here. Let me know if you would be interested in donating a set.

I finally worked through the power outages and slow bandwidth to get the site transferred to our new server at GoDaddy.com.  If you’re reading this message, your DNS server has caught up with our address change.  Everyone’s DNS server should be caught up by tomorrow, at the latest.  If you happened to send an e-mail on Sunday or Monday, and we didn’t reply, please send it again.  It may have gotten lost in the DNS shuffle.

SimpleHost, the company that hosts our website and e-mail server, cannot figure out how to process our US credit card with a Tanzania address. I’ve updated the billing info three times now and am finally giving up.

So, I’m moving the site to GoDaddy.com. There won’t be any updates to the site for a few days, and e-mail may be sporadic until the end of the week. It will take a couple of days to set up the site, and then a couple of more days for the DNS records to catch up with the new server location.

All is well here. I’m feeling much better – fully recovered from my malaria. Everyone else is healthy.

Wish me luck on the website transfer…

Greg, Charlotte, and I went to Kibaya yesterday and returned today after a very successful trip. (Leslie and Henry stayed at Msalato because the college talent show was last night and Leslie was obligated to attend. Henry wanted to stay home and read instead of sitting in the car.)

The trip didn’t start off very well, though. We had a spectacular blowout about 20 km after we turned off the paved road. A rock cut up the side of the tire and dented the rim. Within about 20 yards I could tell that there was a problem because the tire was making a loud noise. I pulled over within 100 yards, and the tire was absolutely shredded. I’ve seen tires like that at the side of the road, but never had one do it myself. To make matters worse, the last time those particular lug nuts were put on, it was with a pneumatic wrench and they were too tight to get off with the little lug wrench that came with the car. After about an hour, a minibus came by and a big guy helped me get the nuts off. I drove very slowly the remaining 70 km in fear of having another flat/blowout with no remaining spare tire. Fortunately, there was a guy in Kibaya that was able to replace the tire with a decent used tire, so we had a spare for the return trip.

The whole reason for the trip was to help the Kiteto Christian College with their computers. When they came to our house on Wednesday night, they had 2 of 9 computers working. Following my directions, Emily was able to get 2 more working, but was stuck on the other 5. So, I went to look in person. Fortunately, we were able to get them all working by this morning. We also had a great time having dinner with them last night, going to church at the Cathedral this morning, and having lunch with them and a German family who are long-term missionaries in Kibaya. Overall, it was a great trip. 100% success on the computers and also on making new friends.

Leslie doesn’t like it if I get too technical on here, so I started a separate Tech Diary Blog. It’s really a place for me to keep notes on what I’ve done, so that I can remember what and why two months later. I try to put in good comments as I go, but it’s hard to remember each file that I had to modify when I’m making further modifications later.

So, I’ll keep my geek rants out of here from now on and put them there. (OK, a short rant here: This was inspired by a total failure of an update on Edubuntu from version 6.06 to 6.10. I’ve spent hours on what should have been a 10 minute job. Some of that has been trying to recreate what I did in the past, but most of it was due to a bungled upgrade path by the Ubuntu team. It seems that they don’t spend enough time testing distribution upgrades…)

I was answering e-mail this afternoon when one of the Msalato students, Erasto, came to the door and said that there were visitors to see me outside our house. It was a English woman named Emily and a Tanzanian named Peter. They had traveled from Kiteto Christian School in Kibaya, Tanzania, to Dodoma at the direction of their Bishop in search of Elizabeth, another missionary in town, to try to get their computers fixed. But Elizabeth was out of town, so they heard that I know computers and drove out here to Msalato. Emily said she had two of their computers in the car, so I said, “Bring them in and let’s take a look.”

Emily and Peter had traveled with Chris and Karen, both from England. While Emily and I worked on the computers, Leslie talked to Chris and Karen. We all had tea together, and it took long enough that we ended up having them all stay for dinner. It was great to talk to them and get to know them. We’re probably going to go to Kibaya this Saturday so that I can work on more of their computers. Seven of their nine computers are dead and it sounds like each computer may have a different problem.

At one point we were all laughing about how things seem to work like that here. Everyone is very flexible, which makes it possible for four people to drive three hours and end up eating dinner at a brand-new friend’s home, even if you hadn’t originally even known that person existed. You learn quickly to go with the flow and see where it is taking you. The missionary community is fairly small, and you eventually get to know many people through friends of friends.

Over the weekend, we got great news that the grant we applied for was approved by the Mustard Seed committee of the Diocese of Virginia. We got about 80% of the car paid for. So, we’ll leave the car behind as a Diocese of Central Tanganyika vehicle, specially designated for use by Virginia or American missionaries. (If there are no US missionaries here, the Diocese will be able to use it as a Diocese car. Our one fear is that it will then be forgotten to be a missionary car when the next set of missionaries do arrive…) We’ll have some paperwork to coordinate between the Diocese of Virginia and the Diocese of Central Tanganyika when we leave to make sure that all of this is clearly spelled out in a binding agreement (or at least as binding as any agreement can be in Tanzania).

Thank you to all of you who wrote with get-well messages and prayers in response to Leslie’s message that I came down with malaria on Friday. It hit me really hard, but I’m much better after taking Coartem for the prescribed three-day regimen. The malaria test actually came back negative, but our doctor neighbor told me to take the malaria cure medicine anyway because I had all of the classic symptoms and there hasn’t been a stomach flu going around here.

On Friday morning, I threw up after getting up, but really didn’t feel that bad. Leslie had been up until 4 in the morning hunting, and she couldn’t drive; so I drove to school with the idea I’d go get a malaria test at the Diocese Medical Lab during second period at school. But during first period, while Henry’s class was watching a video, I threw up again and got much worse. I realized that I couldn’t drive, so I called Leslie. She got our neighbor, Robyn from New Zealand, to drive her to school to get me. Our other neighbor, George from Musoma by Lake Victoria, came with them to help get me to the Laboratory. Leslie drove me home and put me to bed. I slept the rest of the day, too weak to read or do anything other than get up a few times to throw up.

By Saturday morning I was feeling much better. I was able to keep some water and bread down. Sunday I was able to eat a little more, and today I’m almost all better. The only symptoms left are fatigue and a headache. I took today off. Leslie and our neighbor, Kate, are trying to talk me into taking tomorrow off, too. One of the things everyone has said is that people try to go back to work too soon and then relapse. The real problem is that the malaria parasite basically make your blood cells explode after they’ve multiplied in the cells and give you anemia. It takes some time to rebuild your blood supply.

We’ve heard that it’s not a matter of “if” you get malaria, but “when” you get malaria. We’ve had the first “when” for the family. Hopefully, we’ll be able to avoid other times. I probably got it while we were in Bagamoyo with side trips to Dar Es Salaam. We haven’t been taking preventative medicine because it’s the dry season in Dodoma, but it’s always wet on the the coast. The rainy season is approaching here in Dodoma, so we’re going to start taking preventatives this week. Wish us luck.

We had exciting weekends these past two weekends. Last Saturday we went with a group from Msalato to St. Philip’s Theological College for a games day. We drove our packed car to Kongwa early. We wanted to hike and picnic in the beautiful hills there before the netball and soccer matches began. I was very excited to bring my family to visit this place which is so important to me. My first experience of Tanzania and of teaching happened at this little college. Some of my students are still there and greeted us. I met Ezekiel’s wife and children and visited with Timothy, Edward, Kenneth, Second Jotham, Beatrice and Mary.

Our hike was great fun. There were many students from Msalato there and we marched in a long line up the hill, following the “bomba” water pipe to the spring. There we ate our picnics in the shade of an enormous fig tree. Monkeys played on the hillside trees opposite us. The spring is filled with pollywogs which amazed the children. They were very large!

The games were a success with the students. Everyone enjoyed the friendship matches. Our women won their game of netball. The races were evenly split between us and them. They beat us in the soccer match. There were rumors of ringers on the St. Philip’s team…

On Sunday we were invited to be the guests of honor at St. Paul’s (Paulo Mtakatifu) in Mvumi. I preached on Luke’s the “Great Dinner” parable. I also stressed the gospel’s themes of community and giving up everything to follow Jesus. I wanted to link my sermon with the fundraising effort of the parish churches. They are trying to build a rectory for the pastor, Daniel Mazengo. The church gave us a rooster and some katenge cloth as gifts. Henry named the rooster “Jimmy.”

I went hunting on Thursday night. The moon was out and the antelope stayed away. We went to a parish who had invited us to hunt antelope. The deer have been decimating their crops. We only shot dik dik. We cooked one over a large bonfire and had a feast at 1:00am! It was absolutely beautiful. We did see some antelope, but they ran away. We also heard hyena laughing in the dark, saw a fox and a civet. There were many night birds flying about too. I am so happy that the men keep inviting me to join them on these adventures. Robyn Appleby, a missionary English teacher from New Zealand, joined us. I kept telling her, “see, I told you hunting is fun!” I think she really enjoyed herself. The best part is experiencing Tanzania in the night. The moon was so bright we didn’t need to use our flashlights.

Saturday, yesterday, I helped Given Gaula take a box of Bibles to a little church nearby. He had preached there last month and noticed no one in the congregation had Bibles to follow along when the lessons were read. He ordered a box of 20 Swahili bibles. We bumped down a dirt road and saw the church with a crowd out front. There was a group of 25 waiting for us. The ladies drummed and sang us into the church. We danced with them and then made speeches and handed out the Bibles. It was a lovely little church. Now they can read the Word and study it for themselves! My presence there lifted their spirits. The Tanzanian Church members love to have tangible reminders of the larger World Anglican Communion. The church on the ground doesn’t give a fig about the political issues that threaten to divide us. They send you their greetings and love every time I speak to any church. They love you! Think about them next time you get fired up over these issues – it makes you wonder to who’s glory is the war of words (Satans?)

Today is Greg’s 13th birthday!!! We can’t believe we have a teenager, but we do. Congratulations to both him and us for making it this far. Only 7 years of teenagerdom to go until he’s a twenty-something. Wow.

We went to the Chinese restaraunt at the New Dodoma Hotel. It’s one of two good restaraunts in town. We special ordered Peking Duck the day before, and Greg really liked it.