"We Are Unable to Repay"

The final day at Namwianga was a great one. We all went to chapel as a to say goodbye to the students there, and take a group picture afterwards. Ba Janice and I drove to the clinic and told everyone we had worked with there how much we had appreciated being with them. Clement, one of the clinical officers, told me I should not forget them or the things I would be able to accomplish with them if I were to come for a longer period of time. I assured him I would not forget. I went to the Haven from there and visited all three before lunch. I joked with the Aunties in Haven 1 that they should pack a small bag for Jessica and Tegan and I would be there to pick them up in the afternoon; they laughed and laughed at that. After lunch I walked back to the Haven and played with the kids like I wasn’t leaving. I took Jessica on a walk until she started sucking her fingers and fell asleep. Tegan and I played on the porch and she practiced taking a few wobbly steps. Donna offered a ride back to the house (one by one the students put their respective baby down and left crying), but I decided to stay after everyone left, say goodbye, and walk back for the last time. I rocked Jessica for a while longer, kissed Tegan on the cheek, and told the Aunties “bye”. Loveness, one of the Aunties I met the very first day started to cry when I hugged her and I told her I hoped to come back and see her again. I walked to the cemetery and stood there a few minutes before going on down the path away from the Haven. Post-dinner everyone finished packing and preparing to leave. The girls had gathered a bag of things for our night guard Webster and we took it to him on the porch that night. When he first received the bag, he had to walk away because he was already crying. When he returned he kept repeating “thank you” and shaking his head. He asked to pray with us, so we went inside and he knelt down on the ground. We followed his lead, and held hands in a circle as he offered up one of the most simple, sincere prayers I have heard. When he finished, everyone was crying, and his tears were dripping off of his face and splattering the concrete. It was a good way to end the night.

Thursday morning we had a quick last breakfast on the porch (including fried termites that had been caught the night before, which I tried), circled up with the Zambians who had come to see us off, prayed, and boarded the bus. We made it to Livingstone in time to eat at a little Italian restaurant the Daggetts had found on a previous trip into town before going on to the airport. We flew with Victoria Falls as our last sight of Zambia, and on to Johannesburg. One ten hour layover and thirty exhausted people later we boarded our 1 a.m. flight to Nairobi, Kenya. We arrived in Kenya near 6 a.m. and waited another three hours for our flight on a small passenger plane to Mwanza, Tanzania.

We stepped off the plane at the two-room “airport” and herded to the passport control window. Only two bags were lost, which we counted as impressive all things considered. The resident missionary families were there to meet us, and we piled into their land cruisers and took off into Mwanza. Half of the group went with a team to Geita, a mining city two and a half hours away, on the opposite side of Lake Victoria. The rest of us remained in Mwanza with the mission team there.

We divided into groups among the different families, although four of us stayed in the guest house of one of the families who was in Nairobi at the time. We took turns eating meals with each of the families throughout the week, and started that first day with lunch at the Baileys’. We dropped our luggage at the guest house, changed into skirts, and left for lunch. After virtually no sleep the two previous nights and over 24 hours of travel, a full schedule does not allow for sleep (at least for us it did not). While the boys napped, lounged, and swam (!) us girls headed out with two of the missionary wives to a village about an hour and a half away for a ladies’ bible study. We miserably fought to keep our eyes open across in the back of the land cruiser as we bumped and weaved our way through Mwanza traffic, around scenic Lake Victoria, and into the bush. Our first stop was at the house of a couple involved in the village church there, where we sat in colorful plastic chairs in their dirt-floor house while the wife prepared our second lunch-a heaping plate of ugali (an nsima-like maize staple) and a bowl of tilapia in fish broth. We looked at one another, thinking about how we had just eaten, while thanking them for serving us and reaching for the communal platter to attempt to make a dent in the enormous serving. Luckily one of the Tanzanians joined our table, and easily ate more than the other five of us put together-no surprise there. Once we’d eaten all we could we thanked them and left to tour the village school, where the husband of the family we ate with teaches. There were colorful murals everywhere (including the life cycle of the mosquito) painted by a group from the US a couple of years before. The children were all in the courtyard and shadowed us as one movement while we moved from one room to the next. The classrooms were nice, complete with chalkboards, desks, dirt floor, and chickens. When we got our cameras out the kids would crowd together to be in the photo, and then crowd around us laughing as we showed them the image of themselves. The last stop was for the ladies prayer meeting. The village was in the process of constructing a church building, so we met under a grove of trees instead. There was a row of brightly colored plastic chairs set up for us and a wooden table with a cloth over it and plastic flowers set up across from the chairs. The African women sat on rocks or wooden benches while the children played in the dirt around us. We were asked to sing “a few songs” so we gathered around and sang one in Swahili and several in English. It was encouraging to see the woman taking the initiative to lead the study, and they sang for us at the end. Afterwards, what was there to do but eat again?! They moved the wooden table that had been used as a podium over to our chairs and served us bowls of rice, beans, fish head, and chai. When we had stuffed ourselves as much as we could hold, we thanked them and drove away to sunset over the green hills. Most of us could no longer keep our eyes open on the way back to the guesthouse, and slept between the jerks and bumps in the back of the Land Cruiser.

Saturday we met up with all of our group who had remained in Mwanza and toured the international school that several of the missionaries’ children attend. Classes are taught in English and Swahili, and of the 500 students over 20 different languages are represented. There was a beautiful view of the city after a steep climb to the net ball court. After touring the school we drove to the Sukuma museum. The Sukuma people comprise the largest tribe in Tanzania, and we followed the “curator” to several huts set up with traditional tools and demonstrations of everyday life for the Sukuma. At the end of the tour we passed around Indian snack foods for lunch while a group of Sukuma natives danced a series of traditional dances for us. Each of the dances had a purpose: to bring the rain, harvest the crops, or the most fascinating, which was the snake dance that included a real python. The headman in charge of actually handling the snake even put the snake down his pants to demonstrate the power he had over it to keep it from biting him. Saturday night we all gathered at Jason and Emily’s house for a devotional and delicious meal.

Sunday we split into three groups and went to different bush villages with a respective missionary to worship with them and spend the night. I went with four other girls, Jason (one of the missionaries) and his son Judah about an hour and a half from Mwanza. We pulled up beside a huge tree and walked over to the one-room adobe church building around 10 a.m.. Two men from the congregation greeted us and welcomed us inside. The back wall had been destroyed during a storm, and in its place they stretched a blue tarp, tying it to the tin roof on either side with string and weighing the bottom down with big rocks. There was another tarp stretched along a portion of the dirt floor for the children to sit on, and four or five short, rough wooden benches. There was a wooden table covered with a chitenge at the front of the room, and around it were more of those colored plastic chairs. Jason explained they wanted us as honored visitors to sit in the good chairs, and so we took our seats around the table, facing the rest of the congregation. We waited almost an hour and a half (meanwhile practicing our Sukuma greetings) for the rest of the people to show up for church. We heard two lessons, sang from the Sukuma song books, and had the offering, but did not take communion because the woman who typically prepares it was away at a funeral and no one had remembered to prepare it in her place. We introduced ourselves individually and came up with a few songs to sing for them, which they in turn reciprocated with introductions and songs themselves. Each and every person stood and (via translator) told us how “very welcome” we were, then had a group discussion with Jason in which they asked if we could stay with them at least four days instead of just one. Once the service was over the men removed every piece of furniture from the building, folded up the tarp, and padlocked the door (yes we wondered why ourselves, there being no back wall and all...). Most of them followed behind the car to a compound of one of the families for lunch. We used our limited Sukuma on the women cooking for us, played with the children by the chicken coop, and finally took a seat in plastic chairs set up for us under a tree outside of one of the huts. We sat in a big circle with the Tanzanian men while the women cooked our meal. The conversation mostly went back and forth from the men to Jason to us and back, since we did not understand Sukuma and they spoke not a word of English. Dark clouds were closing in on us until the sky opened up and it started to pour, so they rushed us inside one of the sleeping huts to escape the storm. The hut consisted of three small rooms; the main room you were in when you stepped inside the door, and one room on either side with doorways from the main room but no doors (used as sleeping rooms and for grain storage). The main room was empty so we crowded our chairs together and sat in the dark to wait out the worst of the rain (there was only one window in the hut with a wooden flap which we had to close to keep out the rain, but which also closed out the only source of natural light for the space). Luckily by the time the meal was ready, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, so we opened the door and window and the women moved a table in between our chairs. One of the women brought around a pitcher and bowl with a bar of soap and washed our hands for us, and another girl brought in a communal platter of rice and individual plastic cups for chai. The women do not eat together with the men, so it was just men and visitors sharing food together. They eat the rice by taking a handful with their right hand and rolling it deftly into a ball and eating it. We were not quite as skilled at this, between the steaming rice which burnt our hands and was sticky enough to leave us with rice covering our entire hand (or dropping bits into our chai or on the floor). The Tanzanians hands; however, were rice-free after each bite. There was no protein, only rice, probably a combination of the number of people eating and the irregularity with which they are able to eat meat. The rice was delicious, and the eight of us eating off our platter made a serious dent in the large volume of food we were served. After lunch the women returned and washed our hands again, and Jason said it was time to divide up and go with different families for the night. Amanda (one of the students) and I elected to stay at the hut where we all ate lunch, while the other three girls left with the minister of the village church, and Jason and his son accompanied another man from the congregation on the other side of the hill. He told us he would see us Monday mid-morning(ish) and we waved as everyone went their separate ways, wondering what stories we would emerge with the following day-little did we know what an experience we would have!

Once everyone else had left, Amanda and I shrugged at each other and followed our host, Emmanuel back to his series of huts (a kitchen hut, bath hut, and two sleeping huts). After a morning of struggling through Sukuma greetings, I had resorted to using the Swahili I remembered-rusty, but more promising than the Sukuma words I’d been stumbling over. Jason had told Emmanuel that I spoke some Swahili (and understood a little more than I could speak), so we commenced an afternoon of Sukuma vs. Swahili vs. English (and probably a bit of Spanish thrown in there when we got really desperate) method of communication. We sat in the room we had all eaten in earlier, and after cleaning the dishes, some of the women joined us. We alternated between sitting and staring at each other, and attempting to communicate with a combination of three languages, hand gestures, and lots of laughter from all parties. Each time one of them would say something to us, Amanda would look at me as if I knew what was being said, so they would address the questions to “Jesca” (my name was also easier for them to pronounce) and wait for me to try and piece together what was being said. I introduced us and asked each of their names, trying to gather what their relationship to each other was. Family is often made up of grandparents, children, siblings, wives and husbands all living together, which makes it more difficult to discern how each person fits (especially when you don’t know how to ask or how to understand if you even get the asking down). We identified Magdelena as Emmanuel’s wife, along with their baby Peter and daughter Maria. We met Emmanuel’s parents, and two young women who both had young children, who we decided were Emmanuel’s sisters. I held Lucy for a while; a chubby, naked baby of one the women, while the rest of the family played with my camera. I would take a picture and show them, and they would crowd around and laugh hysterically at seeing themselves, so I showed Emmanuel how to take pictures and he went around pointing the camera at everything and everyone around him. Amanda and I handed out the little amount of candy we had thought to bring with us, and once the word got out children started appearing out of the woodwork. We had gotten down to only a peppermint between us, so I suggested we try to crush it and divide it between all the kids. I smashed it in the wrapper with my water bottle, and Amanda handed out sliver after sliver until it was gone. The women found it entertaining to try and force the two children who were clearly terrified of us to come take a piece from us. They would scream and cry until one of the women would grab them and thrust their little hands forward for us to put the candy in. We also passed a good deal of time taking turns pointing to an object or animal, asking for the Sukuma and Swahili word, giving them the English translation, and laughing at each other as we struggled to pronounce the unfamiliar letter combinations. After a couple hours of this, Emmanuel asked a question that he had to repeat several times before I told Amanda (if I remembered correctly) I thought he was trying to ask us about bathing. We had been pre-warned that they might want us to take a bath (to make sure we were cool, clean, and comfortable), and though we would have preferred to opt out, I responded enthusiastically, and they sent one of the girls off to collect water for our bath. We had chitenges to use as towels and we carried them with us as we followed Magdelena to the bath hut. The bath hut is a straw square structure with no door, but one wall that juts out further than the others to form a sort of enclosure. The height of it reached my neck so that my head poked over the top when I was inside. Magdelena motioned me in, and then Amanda in behind me, so that we were in the bath hut together. She handed us a bar of pink lye soap and pointed to the bowls on the mud floor. We each had a bowl of cool water to wash from, and we sat the bar of soap on a rock in between us, hanging our chitenges and our dresses over the side of the hut. Our sandals formed a constant suction to the ground as the water we splashed out created more and more pools of water and mud. We had to cower in the corners to be completely out of sight to passers by, and the whole situation struck us as unbelievably hilarious, so I’m sure the whole family heard us trying to stifle our laughter the entire time. At one point a little girl wandered in and just stood looking at us for a minute, then just as suddenly ran away. Once we had dried off, redressed, and were emerging from the bath hut, Magdelena handed us a pot of scented vaseline to rub on our arms and legs, so we had to go back in the hut. Bath completed, Emmanuel told me it was time to go watch choir practice. He carried our plastic chairs on his head over a path to his father’s hut where the choir had set up an amp and mike. The lead singer used the mike to sing over the blaring music while the rest of the choir did a coordinated dance strangely reminiscent of the electric slide. Amanda and I sat directly in front of them by ourselves and watched them until they stopped and the children hovered around to have their picture taken and then laugh at their image.

Once it started getting dark Emmanuel said we should go back to the hut, so we followed him back down the path and sat in the now-familiar room in the sleeping hut playing the “name that object in three languages” game until Magdelena brought the table in for dinner. She knelt in front of each of us with a bowl, pitcher, and bar of soap to wash our hands, and then left and returned with a steaming platter of towering ugali and a bowl of chicken pieces floating in some sort of broth. Amanda and I both had huge eyes at this point, because of the sheer volume of food we realized we were going to have to consume with only three people-ourselves and Emmanuel (since the women do not eat with guests). He motioned for us to eat, and so it began. The ugali was so hot it burned our fingers, but we rolled it around in our right hand until it cooled enough to dip it into the chicken broth. Neither one of us were too keen on eating the meat (especially since it was dark by then and we couldn’t tell what we were eating by the flicker of a single candle on the windowsill) but we had seen the women killing and preparing the chicken earlier, and knew they had fixed the meat specifically for us. We would get a piece from the bowl, get as much chicken we could off of the bone, and set the remains on the table beside the platter. Things went on slowly in the same manner for over and hour as we attempted to make a dent in the food with the ugali settling denser and denser in our stomachs. Emmanuel only took two or three pieces of the chicken, spurring us on to eat more and more. Around the one hour mark we triumphantly finished the bowl of chicken, only to have Emmanuel call his daughter Maria to refill the bowl with the same amount of chicken as before. I tried to tell him it had been wonderful but we were full, but he would not hear any of it, and smilingly coaxed us to eat more. We laughed at our predicament, and not knowing what other choice we had, reached into the bowl for yet another piece of chicken. Unfortunately this bowl contained not only white meat, but all the organs-a delicacy which they treasure. After mounting a few weak arguments to convince Emmanuel to at least help us eat the organs (which failed miserably), we decided the faster we ate the faster it would be gone (praying meat would not come a third time) and divided up the organs among ourselves. One would chew while the other encouraged her through it (did I mention we did not have anything to drink the entire meal?) and when I finished the liver we breathed a sigh of relief...until Emmanuel motioned for us to drink the half-full bowl of broth the chicken had been bathed in. After each of us had taken a sip (similar to swallowing a large mouthful of ocean water) our stomachs sank to find we had uncovered two more organs. To make the story less painful, suffice it to say we successfully finished off both the organs and broth, and vowed not to eat chicken again for the duration of our time in Africa. Our host clapped his hands, beaming, and called his wife in with the bucket and soap to clean our hands and sweep the floor.

Once evidence of the meal was cleaned up the women moved the table and carried a worn mattress into the room on the left and laid it on the ground beside two huge bags of grain. Shortly thereafter they told us it was time for sleep, and I just barely got across to them that we needed to go to the restroom before bed-unfortunately there was not an opportunity to brush our teeth, and I tried not to gag at the thought of tasting the chicken all night long. Emmanuel told us goodnight and went to his sleeping hut while the women stayed behind with us. They watched us get onto the mattress, handed us chitenges to use for sheets, and Magdelena got across that she wanted us to lie down, so we complied. She then spread a maize sack on the ground next to me with a chitenge on top and plopped the baby down, laying down next to her. The mattress was comfortable but the night was a long one, with us waking every time the baby did (once we awakened to her having diarrhea (diaper-less) and Magdelena getting up to toss the chitenge out the door). At one point I woke to a scratching sound just in time to see a mouse knock over the candle they had kept burning in the corner of the room, so that everything went dark (and I prayed the mouse wouldn’t run across our bed). Magdelena got up shortly after every animal on the premises began to make noise; dogs, cat, chickens, pigeons, cows, and a rooster for good measure. I drifted off for a while longer, and when I woke up and turned over four of the girls were sitting on the maize sack quietly watching us sleep. I poked Amanda awake and we greeted them and folded our chitenges while they set our plastic chairs out for us. We snuck out and brushed our teeth (finally!) by the hut and Magdelena motioned that Maria was fetching water for us to take another bath. The morning bath happened in much the same manner, and when we finished our chairs had been brought into the sunlight. We ate a huge platter of groundnuts with Emmanuel, playing our word game until Magdelena brought out our actual breakfast-chai, a massive plate of rice, and...chicken. We groaned inwardly, but were determined to bite the bullet and finish it off quickly. This was a good thought, but unlike the night before, the bowl was full of the dark meat that was almost impossible to tear off the bone. An hour and a half, two bowls of chicken and a mound of rice later, we were done and Jason and the other girls showed up to collect us. We thanked our family profusely, gathered our small bags, and walked back to the car. Piling in the car, Jason informed us he had promised a friend John across the hill that we would stop by “for an hour or so”.

We have been in Africa long enough to know that an hour easily turns into two-or in this case, closer to five. We pulled up outside John’s hut to find that he was not even there, and commenced to wait for him under the mango tree with a few other men who wandered over. John’s wife brought us a platter of mangos and a huge knife to cut them with, which was a lot of work for the fruit but worth it in the end. An hour and a half later John appeared and his wife brought out warm groundnuts and sweet potato paste (sweet potatoes cut, dried, and then reconstituted in salty water). We attempted to leave after this, but John insisted his wife had already begun the lunch preparations and we could not go. It started to rain so we crowded into the hut, sitting on the only bed while John’s wife washed our hands and served us chai, rice, and (you guessed it) chicken. Five meals by early afternoon! It was late afternoon by the time we returned to the guest house, and all of us were exhausted and stuffed. Through all of the incredulous moments of the village stay, it turned out to be one of the best and certainly most memorable experiences in Africa as a whole.

Tuesday we toured the government referral hospital perched high on a hill overlooking Mwanza. It is the last-stop place for 6 districts (several million people) of individuals requiring a higher level of care; a 700 bed hospital filled consistently to capacity with only 300 staff nurses. We took boxes of soap to hand out to the mothers on the pediatric ward, and shook the hands of young children and old men and women alike as we passed through the halls of the different wards. The even have a neonatal intensive care, complete with one or two working heart monitors. It was a stark contrast to the kind of atmosphere I am accustomed to working in, and made me appreciate the health care we are able to give and receive in the US all the more. After the tour we met up with the rest of the group (who had been a few hours away with another missions team) at an Indian restaurant on the banks of Lake Victoria. We watched the sunset over the water, swapped stories from the week, and enjoyed our last night with the missionaries in Mwanza.

The group met at 5:15 the next morning to pile into our safari vans and set off for the Serengeti a couple of hours away. When we got to the gate of the park we popped the tops up on the vans so we could stand up and stick our heads out to see the animals better. We spent several hours driving loops towards our lodge in the Northern section of the park. Just after lunch we reached Mbalageti Serengeti lodge and were met with a warm washcloth (to wipe off the layers of dust caked on us from the drive through the park) and a glass of fruit juice. Janice and I shared a chalet tucked at the bottom of a hill with tented sides, a porch looking out over the sprawling Serengeti, four poster beds draped in mosquito netting, a wardrobe with bathrobes and slippers, a huge bathroom with a claw-foot tub, binoculars, and even a whistle with which to call an escort after dark. The lodge is not fenced in so once it gets dark Maasai warriors bring their spears to each chalet to escort to the main building for dinner. The views and meals were wonderful, and I watched zebras mill around at sunrise, right below my porch. After settling in to our rooms, we went back out for an afternoon game drive until one of the vans broke and we sat on the side of the road near the wildebeests and impala. I went to bed that night feeling truly clean for the first time in Africa. The next morning we left by 7 for a 12 hour game drive. The lodge fixed us box lunches to eat out on safari. We drove the Central Province and saw the migration of the wildebeests, a herd of six million producing eight thousand calves per day. We saw impala, ostrich, hyena, warthog, crocodiles, hippos, baboons, scads of zebra, plenty of giraffe up-close-and-personal (!), cape buffalo, and herds of elephant. The highlight was coming across lions, leopards, and cheetah-animals most people never get to see on safari. We even sat directly under a tree branch that a lion was sleeping on. The scenery itself was so beautiful I would not have minded driving for hours just looking at the landscape, but there was so much to see besides that. After two days of game drives we left before dark the next morning to drive the two hours from our lodge out of the park. Thirty minutes or so into the drive the sun began to rise, spreading gorgeous fingers of reds, golds, yellows, and everything in between across the massive expanse of sky. We stopped on the side of the dirt road to take pictures and imprint the image in our minds as well. The rest of the morning consisted of driving back to Mwanza, moving things around in our suitcases, and boarding our flight to Burundi and then Nairobi, Kenya. Six hours later, we got on our final flight to Entebbe, Uganda, arriving just after 9 p.m.

We spent the first night in town at the Banana Village and left early the next morning for our drive crammed (an understatement) in a 60’s style van through the capital Kampala and on to Jinja. Jinja is the source of the Nile River, and is beautiful and more touristy than the other cities we have stayed in. We met up with Bobby Garner and his wife Candace, the last of a mission team left in Jinja, and walked with him through town to the Source Cafe. The Source is a coffee shop, library and gift shop all in one, started by some of the earlier missionaries. The church also meets there on Sundays when the cafe is closed, and the gift shop generates profit donated exclusively to the community for things like water wells in remote villages. We met several Ugandans who work closely with projects connected with the Source (after a delicious lunch there) and talked with them about their various roles: AIDS counseling, stove-making, ministering, and an outreach called the Mivule Project, dealing with reforestation of the Mivule tree. Sunday morning we divided into two groups, either remaining in town for church services or accompanying Bobby to the village. I stayed in town and soaked up my last Sunday in Africa. Afterwards we broke into smaller groups and invited several of the Ugandans to lunch with us in town. My small group included Sara, a 17-year-old daughter of one of the women we had met the day before who makes village-friendly stoves. We enjoyed her company, and had a nice lunch in a courtyard at a picnic table. In the afternoon we caused a stir with management when we moved out of our guesthouse from the previous night and into a different one. Our original accommodation in which we occupied the entire guesthouse had broken toilet seats, bathtubs without shower heads, showers with shower heads over a drain in the floor next to the toilet, no pillows, one towel shared between multiple people, leaking sinks, no mosquito nets and two rooms with ant infestations-to name the major things. The new place was modest but much cleaner with good food. Once we were resettled, we walked with Bobby on a biblical tour of Jinja; stopping various places and discussing what we saw and how we could relate it to our lives. Monday was Nile rafting day, and we filled all four rafts with our group. Everyone had a great time, though no one got out having capsized their rafts less than two or three times. Almost all the rapids were class four and five. On the midday part of the all-day affair we floated lazily down the river, jumping off the boat and bobbing along beside the rafts. One of the guides cut pineapples for lunch and handed us huge slices still in the rind. We watched Ugandans on the banks of the Nile, washing their clothes and setting them on rocks to dry, little naked kids splashing in the shallow areas, and fishermen in boats casting their nets for their livelihood. I found it surreal wondering what the Nile looked like in Egypt during Moses’ time (and saw it as humorous that one of the guides was named Moses). They fed us skewers and chapatis overlooking the river for dinner, and we ended the day bumped, bruised, and burnt, but laughing. Tuesday we left early for a remote village to celebrate a closing ceremony after two years’ work on the Mivule project there. The project allows donors from abroad to buy a tree (complete with GPS coordinates for $20) which is then given to villagers to plant and care for, while the remainder of the money is given to them to invest in income-generating projects for betterment of the village. This particular village chose goats, and were very successful in raising, caring for, and selling the goats to benefit the villagers. We started with a tour of the planted Mivule trees, traipsing through amazon-looking forestry and towering banana trees to see the tiny saplings they are so proud of. One of the village leaders led us into his hut for matoke (cooked plantain with stewed tomatoes). We finished our plates and stepped out of the hut, only to be told to sit back down for more food! Luckily it was only jack fruit, an expensive sticky yellow fruit that tastes like Juicy Fruit bubblegum. By this time the music had started in the center of the village, and we walked over to the site of the action where tarps had been tied over the top of skinny logs to make a sun shelter. We sat in the wooden and plastic chairs while the villagers filled the wooden benches and straw mats on the ground. We sat for over two hours as they thanked us for aiding them in their project (not minding at all that we were not the actual people who had bought the trees) and flicking ants off of each other every time the wind whipped the tarp and sent them showering on us. The ceremony ended with the goats being rounded up and thrust at us to bless. There we were, holding the frayed ropes of skittish goats in a massive herd of people and animals, and offering blessings to the people for their goats and the continued “covenant” between the donors and villagers-T.I.A. They fed us a huge meal of matoke, rice, and chicken to end the day before the long dusty drive back to Jinja. One of their closing statements to us during the ceremony was, “We are unable to repay you, but may the Almighty bless you abundantly.”. I mulled that over the rest of the afternoon, feeling as if we are able to say that in return. Perhaps that is why we are good for each other; one having what the other lacks. We are unable to repay them for their hospitality and the way they have helped us view our lives differently and reshape our worldview...and may God bless us all abundantly so that we may in turn bless others with His overflowing gifts.

I am sitting in the Nairobi airport now at the beginning of our 54+ hour-long journey back to the US. It seems like the time went by so quickly, but the things we accomplished and the relationships we built were worthwhile. In a little over two days I will have access to television, news reports, reliable Internet connection, safe drinking water, predictable electricity and heat, phone service, paved roads, my own car, and any number of modern conveniences. What better time to be thankful for the little things than Thanksgiving? And to remember that the true necessities are in our relationships with family, friends, coworkers-even strangers, and most importantly, our relationship with Christ.