Last Work Day–Testimony–Kasulu Changes – Friday May 3rd

Published May 3, 2013 | By Bill Schrull

Today is our last work day at Kasulu Bible College. Tomorrow, Saturday, we will be visiting other areas in the diocese, Sunday will be devoted to church and “relaxation” (you can be sure that work of some type will appear) and Monday we head back to Dar es Salaam to begin our journey back to the States.

Bill spent the morning setting some printer administration and doing some training with Elysha and Antone who do the technical support for the Bible College. Here he is showing Elysha how to put ends on network cables. He also set the original server so that it is all set to run if the new server should have issues. The workstations are all set to switch to the old sever if it necessary. It has been a long time desire to have a backup server. Some issues can be quickly resolved by connecting to the server over the internet and talking with Elysha over Skype. Other issues are more complex and take longer to resolve so having the ability to NOT have the internet café be dead in the water while they are resolved is a GOOD thing.

The Bishop asked me to speak this morning to the third year students and their wives. The wives are here for six weeks attending a course to help them be better Pastor’s wives. The Bishop had paid me the great Tanzanian complement (which is still very patriarchal) of being a good Mama (wife/mother). A lot of his complement is because I am very supportive of Bill’s work here. Or course, as an American woman who has a career, I know that I am much more than that, but it is very true that a Pastor’s wife plays a VERY important part in her husband’s ministry here. What to say to these women and their husbands? I gave a brief version of my testimony. (And thank you, Faith Alive, for giving me practice in doing this.)

After introducing myself, I said that I have worked at a bank from the time I was a young woman and that I still work at a bank. I started the testimony part by telling them that, as a young girl, I was hesitant to accept Jesus fully and do what ever He wanted me to do, because I was afraid that God would send me to Africa and I didn’t want to go to Africa, but here I am, and I’m happy to be here. I told them how Bill and I included working together in Christ’s ministry as part of our marriage vows, and shared some of the ways that we ministered together and apart. I shared how my ministry changed after my daughter was born. And how it has changed since she and our “other children” (our exchange students) have grown. I tried to emphasize that in all of this Bill and I prayed together and supported each other in our ministries, some of which we do together and others which we do separately and that it is an adventure. My hope: that the women are fulfilled in their roles as pastors’ wives, mothers, and whatever additional roles the Holy Spirit puts in their paths. As most of them have five or more children, I suspect that the roles of pastors’ wives and Moms are going to take most of their attention for the years to come.

We had lunch at Olivia’s and Daudi’s house today. They pulled out all the stops with a traditional meal for honored guests. (We’ve been getting a lot of these meals for the last week.) Chicken, Beef, Pork (unusual in a country with a large Muslim population), bananas cooked with coconut, beans cooked with coconut, peas, fried potato chips, greens and rice, followed by watermelon, avocado and cucumber slices.

Last year I posted a picture of Olivia’s kitchen, and here it is again, on the left. Pots set over charcoal fires. In the last year, since full time electricity has come to Kasulu, some changes have been made to the Ndahana home. They, and most of the middle class homes in Kasulu have long had satellite TV which was run by generator a few hours of the day. Now there is a fan, to keep things cooler when it gets hot. Olivia’s shop has been successful enough that she was able to go to Dar es Salaam and buy a new kitchen: a rice cooker, a micro-wave, an electric stove and a refrigerator. The fridge has made the biggest difference. If food was not eaten right away, it spoiled and was wasted. Now Olivia can store it safely, and tonight, instead of cooking from scratch, they will heat up leftovers from lunch in the microwave. (Sound familiar?) Because the stove draws so much power it is not often used. This is unfortunate. The charcoal fires and not environmentally friendly and often women develop respiratory problems because of the smoke they inhale over the years. At lease today’s rice was made in the rice cooker.