The Steffensens World

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?)

I didn’t realize that Halloween is not celebrated outside the US. (I don’t know about Canada. I assume it is celebrated there since we’re neighbors. But the other English-speaking countries, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, don’t celebrate it. The churches there view it as an evil holiday that celebrates witchcraft and other evils…) OK, so it does have witches and bats as part of the theme, but it’s still fun to watch the kids dress up and go door-to-door for candy (or to dress up and go to a costume party.) I think some of the other countries take themselves too seriously…

So, we had our own private Halloween at home. We had gotten some candy from friends and family at home that we saved for Halloween and we bought some in town this afternoon. (The stuff we bough in town was all stale, but the kids and I ate it anyway because it was chocolate.) Charlotte was the only one that made an attempt at a costume. She put on a dress and a tiara and was a princess. I made them come to the kitchen door and knock. Either Leslie or I would answer and make them tell us what they were dressed up as. They had to have a different answer each time. It was entertaining for a few minutes. We couldn’t go door-to-door for an hour, but the kids were happy.

The kids and I had two weeks of break from school. Leslie took a long weekend and went to Ruaha with us, but she couldn’t take the whole two weeks off. So the kids and I went to Bagamoyo (70 km north of Dar Es Salaam) by ourselves. We stayed at the Bagamoyo Beach Resort and had a great time on the beach. It’s really neat, because there’s a coral wall about 100 yards from the high-tide line that forms a huge tide pool at low tide. We saw lots of crabs, jelly fish, sea cucumbers, feather worms, and fish. The kids really enjoyed making sand castles, because the sand was saturated with water and made fun canals, dams, and lakes.

We went on our first safari (Swahili for “trip”) to Ruaha National Park, southwest of Dodoma. It’s about 240 kilometers (150 miles) by plane, but it’s about 750 kilometers (460 miles) by car. The road is paved from Dodoma to Morogoro to Iringa, but then it’s dirt from Iringa to Ruaha. The total trip is about 9 hours (6.5 on paved road, 2.5 on dirt road).

The photos in the album, are in chronological order. I’ve reduced them all to 800×600 pixels for the web. If you’d like any full-sized originals, please e-mail and I’ll be happy to send them to you.

Before I launch into the story, here are some photos of us:

And here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:

Since Leslie had to finish teaching on Wednesday morning before we went, we drove to Iringa via Morogoro and stayed at the Riverside Campsite, and had a great night there. The tented bandas are very comfortable, and the food is great. Best of all, the price is very reasonable. Here are some photos of the dining banda, our tented bandas, and the shower banda:

On Thursday morning we drove through Iringa and then to Ruaha National Park, where we stayed at The Ruaha River Lodge. This was a great place. Nice riverside bandas with an awe-inspiring view of the Great Ruaha River and a great Tea/Dining Banda that also overlooked the river. The Foxes gave us a nice discount since we’re missionaries. Thanks, Foxes! Here are some pictures from the porch of our banda:

Well, that’s enough for now. Between a slow internet connection, power outages, and my malaria, this post has already taken two weeks to write. I’ll post more of the specific stories about various animals later.

The power has been out every other day for the past two weeks, and it looks like it will be the same for quite a while…

Lake Mtera, the main power source for most of Tanzania, is running out of water. The government and power company (a government entity) officially blame this on recent drought, but all of the papers and most people you talk to blame mismanagement of upstream water on the Great Ruaha River. There are huge rice fields upstream that divert millions of gallons of water every year. What’s worse is that the official diversion numbers are way low because local corruption allows many “leaks” in the levies to flood fields that were never supposed to be irrigated.

You might be asking yourself, “Why are they trying to grow rice in a semi-arid environment?” Or making a note like, “We don’t try to grow rice in West Texas, even though we irrigate there.” If you did, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Apparently this is not a short term problem, it’s one that’s been building for years. Even though the government and lots of people know about it, and the economy is taking a huge hit from every-other-day power outages, the rice fields are still there. Amazing and frustrating.

The corruption here is supposedly not as bad as it is in Kenya. We haven’t personally seen any. All of the government officials we’ve dealt with, including police and bureaucrats, have been polite and have not hinted at “rushwa” (Swahili for bribe money). But we’ve heard stories that Tanzanians have to pay bribes to get driver’s licenses and passports and even money at the bank. For example, if someone gets money wired to them, the bank teller will say “Oh, no it’s not here yet.” But it magically appears with some rushwa. My impression is that larger corruption is the real problem. Like the corruption that allowed a huge rice production to go into place upstream of the main dam. Like the corruption that allows officially-sanctioned monopolies to companies that have the “winning bid” in a given industry. I don’t have anything to base this on other than the press. It is a free press, but it does tend to be a little sensationalist. To be fair, the press does point out that the government is taking active steps to reduce corruption, but it seems to be aimed at the small-scale corruption. I’m not sure about what is happening at the top.

In the meantime, we only have power every other day…

We finally have our car, and it was worth the wait. It’s 15 years old, but it turned out to be in better shape than I expected. It looks and runs like it’s only 4 or 5 years old. I don’t know anything about the previous owners other than they were Japanese, but they only drove it 90,000 kilometers (about 55,000 miles) over the 15 years, and they obviously took excellent care of it. Here are a couple of pictures of us with the car (from our Ruaha Safari in October, since I’m cheating and writing this at the end of October, but dating it right after we got the car…)

Greg and I took the bus to Dar Es Salaam on Friday and picked up the car at MAF late in the afternoon. We were going to shop and explore Dar on Saturday morning, but it was raining hard and we were tired of dealing with the traffic and lack of road signs, so we headed back to Dodoma. On the way back, we saw much more of the country, since we were looking out the windshield instead of a bus window. We saw many Masai herdsmen with their herds. They all waved as we went by.

I am writing this on one of the computers in the Msalato Library computer room. It is one of five thin clients that I finally sucessfully configured to boot over the network from one Edubuntu Linux server. Ahh, the simple things that make a computer geek happy!

The ultimate goal is to get the College off of Microsoft Windows. Almost all of the computers on campus are running Windows 98 because they’re too old to run XP. Also, Microsoft has started their Windows Genuine Advantage program to crack down on pirated versions of XP. If you have a pirated version of XP, Microsoft will not support your computer with security updates. It is very hard to purchase a computer in Tanzania that does not have a pirated copy of XP on it. So, the whole Diocese is going to shift to Linux.

Now I just have to retrain all of the students and staff on how to use Linux and Open Office. They’re both fairly intuitive, if you’re used to using computers; but for many of the students, this is the first time they’ve ever used a computer, so change throws them for a loop. Wish me luck.

The trick with posting something daily is that you have to be really careful. On the one hand, we’re here in Africa, and I want to give a realistic view of what it’s like here. On the other hand, I don’t want to paint an overly bleak picture of the place and miss out on the bright points.

It’s true we’re living in a near desert and I’m not teaching what I thought I was going to be teaching, but there are still bright points to every day. Today, Greg finally found one of the giant scorpions that lives around here. We’ve seen dead ones, but he found one in a hole. He thought it might be dead, so he poked it with a stick and it backed down the hole. He was very happy about that.

Another bright point was coming home and seeing Jambo wagging his tail. A dog’s unconditional love will always warm the heart.