Unbelievable! A second semester has already come and gone and I am hours away from leaving on my last extended safari. I’m really looking forward to the next four weeks of travel but I have a lot to be grateful for looking back at the last three months. This semester was far more difficult than the first. As the weeks went by, the only thing that kept me going a lot of the time was the constant encouragement I received from Daniel, my family, and my friends via email, snail mail, or phone. It seemed like the months were just stretching out before me with no end in sight!
My afternoon classes: We agreed to schedule the class a half hour earlier and shorten it to 1.5 hours instead of two in the hope that this would encourage my students to show up more regularly. The first weeks, the level of enthusiasm is always higher than at the end and most of the class showed up. But once the mid-terms were completed, attendance went downhill. I had long conversations with the Principal and the Academic Dean about what I could do to improve the class, lessons, etc. But nothing seemed to make a difference. The breaking point came when my class decided en masse not to attend one afternoon because they needed to rest – this after a stat holiday the day before!
But all the frustrations and discouraging moments pale in comparison to the bright lights I’ve discovered among my students. They are the ones who push me to be a better teacher and to pass on as much of my knowledge as possible. We ended the semester with a drama exercise: each group had to write their own ‘story’ and present it to the class. My highlight was the re-enactment of ‘Samson and Delilah’. They did such a fabulous job rewriting the biblical text and acting it out for the rest of the class. They even pulled together some props and costumes. Hanania, who played Samson, was sporting a wig made up into a fro! It was priceless!
This past Sunday, our village/ school was hit by the strongest storm I’ve ever experienced! Gusting winds, pelting rain, fearsome thunder! I sat next to the wall in my room in case the wind blew the roof off, that’s how bad it was. The next morning, I received a call from Principal to survey the damage. I had to see it to believe it: the roofs of our dining hall and one of the students’ homes were blown right off and the twisted metal lay metres away. The front awning of a staff member’s home had been pushed right over the top of the main roof. Thankfully, no one was injured, although the student in question was in his home together with his family and several students, studying for final exams. We’re fortunate the storm hit when it did – the students were preparing to leave the next day after writing their last exam.
The College had no emergency funds to pay for the iron sheets needed to recover the roof of both the dining hall and the damaged homes. On top of this, the Kanisa Menonnite wa Tanzania was having their bi-annual conference at the school that same week with over 150 pastors from all over Tanzania expected to participate. And then the unthinkable happened: the local Member of Parliament came to survey the damage and pledged 1 million Tanzanian shillings (approx. CA$ 800) and 200 iron sheets to repair the roof. What an unexpected answer to prayer! God is good – all the time! All the time – God is good!
Prayer Request: I’m travelling to the TZ capital of Dodoma Tuesday for a few days to visit some fellow MCCers. I’ll be heading to Zanzibar for some R&R before we have our team meeting in Arusha on Good Friday. My mum arrives in Nairobi on April 15th – yay! We’ll spend a week in Cape Town with my aunt and return to TZ to meet my host family and fellow staff, see Nyabange and Musoma, maybe squeeze in a short safari to the Serengeti. There’s a lot of travel involved, travel arrangements can change on a dime, and transportation is notoriously unreliable. Please pray that everything will go smoothly and there are no major hiccups.
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