Cathy Schrull
2015 – Short Post Thursday
Kasulu – We have a tendency to be totally oblivious to the Tanzanian holidays, and today ended up being one of those holidays we are oblivious to. I thought that the noise from the mosque started a little earlier than usual, and it is very unusual to hear drumming. I know that drumming is part of the Ramadan celebration here, but that was over back in June. Then when we drove down to the Bible College for the 7:00 am Thursday Eucharist that Bill had been asked to preach at we noticed that the street in front of the mosque was blocked off and it was full of people sitting on the street. Turns out that today is the celebration of the Hajj and that is a national holiday here. Even the Diocesan offices were closed and there were no classes in the Bible College.
Bill successfully tried his last trick to get the messed-up-wouldn’t-boot work station fixed and it worked! But it meant that he missed today’s Swahili lesson because he didn’t want to stop what he was working on. Today’s construction at the Bible College consisted of plastering the secretarial office that is being built just inside the door of the administrative offices. No work on the staff offices today!
We came home from lunch to find that Andrea, our hostess, had returned from her travels. It is really nice to have her here.
We are off to a Cathedral parishioner’s home for dinner tonight and the driver is waiting, so I’ll end here.
Tommorrow starts at 7:30 in Marusi for the last Friday of the month eucharist.
2015 – Yeah, We’re still in Kasulu..
Kasulu – Life continues in Kusulu with mornings and afternoons spent at the Bible College and evenings spent as guests of various College and Diocesan staff members. Today’s lunch was a bit of a change up as the Bishop returned today from his short trip to the Gloucester Diocese in Great Britain and the staff had a “welcome home” lunch for him, which we attended.
Bill spent a lot of time working on one of the small workstations, which he cannot get to boot. He has tried all sorts of workarounds to fix the operating system and has one last trick up his sleeve that he will try tomorrow before perhaps giving the entire thing up as due to a bad disk drive.
The rest of the work today involved completing setting up the new ip addresses on all of the workstations and taking away their admin rights, installing one good anti-virus software program and removing the FOUR others that Bill found on various workstations and setting up the color laser printer that we brought. (Note: it is not a case or “the more the merrier” in the case of having anti-virus software packages installed on a computer. They just fight with one another and bollox things up.)
In other news, the students started building the end walls (between the corners they built yesterday) of the new staff offices and Bill and I started our Swahili lessons. I spent the afternoon transcribing and trying to make sense of my notes, while Bill did a dry-run of playing a DVD movie over the projector.
It looks as if movie night will be Friday night now. We will be traveling to Kigoma on Saturday with the Bishop for confirmations in Kigoma and Ujiji and spending the night there.
I will say that the weather here is lovely, although much drier than folks would like (end of the dry season). Although the the days get hot and the sun is not something you want to stand out in for long, the nights are cooler and absolutely perfect sleeping weather!
Again, thank you so much for your continued prayers. God is really blessing us here.
2015 – KBC Tuesday
Kasulu – Last night we ate Deacon Eldah’s house. She is a teacher at the Bible College and a very brilliant woman. She would love to be a priest in the diocese, but the diocese synod will not yet accept ordaining home-grown female priests, though they seem to be accepting of women from first world countries who are ordained.
Today at the Bible College has been spent resetting ip addresses and other clean-up on the existing thin-client stations, re-configuring a workstation we brought a few years ago that has gotten messed up and playing with the projector we brought. The projector works REALLY well and we are hoping to have a movie night for the Bible College on Saturday night (Despicable Me …Minions!) A lot of the staff is not here today as they have traveled to Kibondo to attend Daudi Ndahana’s Dad’s funeral.
One thing you notice about Tanzania is that they are ALWAYS building something somewhere. You think that there is no land available, you look over, and there is a foundation for something new. A current project at the Bible College is staff offices. They are being built by the students in the afternoon after class is done. These men have have all had other trades before coming to KBC; they include farmers, carpenters, bricklayers, etc. and they are putting their talents to use starting to build the brick walls to the office.
Today I met with the student who will be teaching us kiswahili. We will only have five or six sessions with him before it will be time to start our journey back home but we hope to begin learning enough to get around a little better and be better able to make polite conversation. The lessons will start tomorrow at 9:00 am. Pray that our brains and ears will be awake and aware!
We want to thank you all for your prayers and request that you continue to keep praying for us as we continue with our work and the opportunities that God places in front of us while we are here.