Mon 6 Aug 2007
We’re back in our house in Springfield, VA, and we’re slowly getting unpacked and settled in. I have a job, and Leslie is looking for one in between the unpacking and getting the kids ready for school. Now that we’re almost settled, I’m going to break down and process the rest of our photos from the past year and do some revisionist history on the website to document where we went and what we saw.
In the meantime, Matthew Davies, the editor of Episcopal Life Online, asked all of the Tanzania Missionaries to submit comments on what it is like to be an Episcopal missionary in the field in the middle of the Anglican upheaval. We had met him in February when the Presiding Bishop came to Dar Es Salaam for the Primates Meeting. She met with all of us, and Matthew wrote a story about it. Here is my input:
While we were working in the Diocese of Central Tanganyika (DCT), we were lucky to work for the one Bishop in Tanzania that was willing to stand up against signing the Anglican Church of Tanzania (ACT) letter cutting off ties with the Episcopal Church USA. Bishop Mhogolo gathered all of the DCT missionaries together to explain his position and told us that with all of the help that Africa needs, it is foolish to single out one organization for one sin. He said that no one in Africa asks the Red Cross, UNESCO, or the many governments that donate money if they have any homosexuals working on their staff. He also said that singling out homosexuality over adultery, greed ( i.e., corruption), and dependence on alcohol (all issues in Tanzania) was missing the point that we are all sinners and we are all forgiven.
Bishop Mhogolo emphasized that the important thing is developing partnerships. Our family helped DCT in many ways, through both of us teaching many students and my setting up two computer networks for two schools. But our family received many blessings in return. Our children learned life lessons that we could not have paid for at home. They are much more aware of the world around them, how lucky they were to be born into the situation they’re in, and how much other cultures have to offer to their understanding of life. (The kids couldn’t articulate that if you asked them, but you can see it in the ways that they’ve changed over the past year.)
The hardest thing to come to terms with was that I couldn’t solve all of Tanzania’s problems - I could only do my small part. There were many hours spent on poor roads thinking, “What would I do if I were President for a day?” The answers were the big tickets: transportation infrastructure, functioning banking system, improved universal education, etc. But I couldn’t do much for those problems. What I could do was teach teach the 60 students that had in various classes over the course of the week. I could go to the villages with Leslie’s students to meet their families and see how they lived. I could help make the best of the limited computer resources that our two schools had and teach the students how to use them to open up the world through the internet with Google and Wikipedia as a launching point. There were days when these things didn’t seem like very much, but they were the things I could do, and I think that they truly did help the 150 or so total students in the two schools.
And now that we’re back in the States, we will always have a piece of Africa and Tanzania in our hearts. We’re still unpacking our possessions, but after we finish with them, we’ll need to unpack our experiences and share them with our parish, our Diocese, and the other people that helped enable our mission journey. This lifelong partnership is one of the key points that Bishop Mhogolo makes when he talks about the ways missionaries help DCT. He says that we help in the ways that we can while we’re there, but that we help even more when we come home by spreading the message of partnership with Africa and by helping to recruit more missionaries and assistance, whether it is through active recruitment or by passive recruitment through witness of life in Africa.
