Home again.

^^^we arrived home safe and sound last tuesday. 

africa was an incredible adventure but home is always home.

Coming full circle. 

About ten years ago, my family met a man named Obey. Obey was from Tanzania and was attending a bible college in Birmingham. One sunday he wandered into the church I was baptized in as a child and where my extended family still attends. This church adopted and ordained Obey. When he returned to Tanzania they helped to support his ministry. Through Obey, my family began to learn about Tanzania and eventually, through him, we were connected to Martin and Charles in Kisii, Kenya. Unfortunately, Obey died from Typhoid about five years ago. Kenny and Thaddeus, along with continued support from America, have continued Obey's work and the church he started in Dar es Salaam. 

Before our trip this year, one of our Sweetwater board members ran into a man in a hardware store. Being the friendly fellow that he is, it wasn't long before he discovered that the man's wife, a doctor in Birmingham, was working with a group in Dar es Salaam. When the man went home and told his wife about Sweetwater's work, she became very interested and requested that we install a chlorine generator at the main church in Dar.  Arriving in Dar we met Joel and Hilda, who lived in Birmingham for almost fifteen years until they returned home to run the ministry in Dar es Salaam. 

On our last work day in Dar, Phoebe and I sat with Joel as he relayed to us his testimony and his goals for his organization. He explained to us that the people in the villages often are in need of physical help. They are hungry and poor and their goal was to minister not only to the spiritual needs but the physical needs of the Tanzanian people. His enthusiasm and love for his work was wonderful to experience and when he finished I began the story of Obey. I told him that as a little girl, I had heard this man speak on this exact thing. Obey gave a sermon that I will never forget. He said that he walked into that small church in Birmingham, Alabama and he was homesick and tired and hungry and at the end of the sermon the people greeted him, warmly, and invited him to lunch. Obey always said that this was what he fell in love with first. That we need to attend first to peoples physical needs and then their spiritual needs. 

At the end of my story Joel looked up and said, "I know this man, he was my friend!"

^^^ Us with Joel and Hilda along with Kenny and Thaddeus.

        In Dar es Salaam, we installed a chlorine generator at an Assembly of God church in the city. A ministry started in Birmingham, Alabama is working out of this church to minister to the villages outside of the city. Like Sweetwater, they are a young organization, not associated specifically with any one particular denomination. Working out of Dar, their goals are to address the physical and then the spiritual needs in the Tanzanian villages. Through a doctor in Birmingham, we made contact with Joel and Hilda Rugano, a local Tanzanian couple who lived in Birmingham for almost fifteen years and have now returned to Dar to start the Vision of Ministries Foundation. Their goal is to use this initial chlorine generator as a demonstration area, and then to send people out into the villages to install more. We spent our last week in Dar working on the chlorine generator for this ministry. In addition to the physical installation, we spent extra time allowing the group to learn how it works and to actually do the installation themselves. We enjoyed our time spent with this group; they are energetic about their work and very much welcomed us into their family.  

^^^ The plumber crawling out of the water tank. 

^^^ Installing the water tanks onto the concrete pad. They built the pad completely by hand, mixing the concrete by hand, and had the entire thing completed over night. 

^^^ Daddy going through the generator manual and taking inventory of the supplies.

 ^^^ The Chlorine Generator, built by the Water Step Organization.

 ^^^ Final installation

 ^^^ Testing the chlorine 

^^^ Phoebe and I also spent some time giving demonstrations on how to dilute bleach into a mother solution of chlorine to use to kill bacteria in water. A chlorine mother solution continues to be the easiest, surest, cheapest way for people to clean their water. 

 ^^^ The chlorine generator was successfully installed and everyone tried the clean african water!

^^^Sunset over Dar. View from the Roof.

In Dar es Salaam, we have had a few slow days, while we waited for a local church to do the prep work for a chlorine generator, that we hope to put in at the end of the week. To fill the time, we took a day and went to a local market place. It was like the original World Market only cheaper and more authentic. In Africa, outside of an actual mall, they haggle over everything. EVERYTHING. This market was no exception and because we are mzungus the prices started extra high. What they didn't know, however, is that we knew all of this and were prepared. I'm afraid we left quite a few African salesman a little disappointed. Although, it can be somewhat of an overwhelming experience, since they yell at you constantly throwing out prices before you even walk into the booth. I began looking through stacks of canvases in one shop and after that everywhere I walked by they would pull me into their shops showing me every painting they had and desperately trying to figure out what I was looking for. While I haggled over paintings, Phoebe led a determined expedition to find turkish pants. Kenny, our driver, seemed very impressed with our bargaining skills. 

^^^ Phoebe shopping for the just the right pair of pants.

Phoebe and I stopped to look at earrings in one booth and the men working, or hanging around, started asking us questions. 

"Where are you from?"

"America."

"OH!"

"What part?"
"What's your name?"
"Are you Married?"

"no." I answered.

"Why not?"
"I dont understand"
"Not yet?" They all laughed, looking confused (or at least pretending to be)

Behind me Phoebe replied with a smirk, "If you ever meet an American man, then you will understand."

They roared and we left.  

^^^ Kenny, our faithful and attentive driver/handler. 

I spent at least twenty minutes haggling with some poor man over these three painting. I laughed and shook my head with the first price he threw out and he looked like he was going to have a stroke at mine. Eventually I landed on a price I liked but he wouldn't go lower, so I started to leave telling him I would have to think about it. He called me back in a panic wanted to know how much I would pay right then and not leave. He shook his head no at the price I suggested and set a price in the middle, I walked out to "ask daddy" and returned with the amount I wanted to pay, after a few more min he shook his head and rolled my paintings for me in newspaper. 

 

^^^ I finished The Old man and the Sea on the plane over to Tanzania, finding this piece felt a little bit like fate.

^^^ wooden and bone earrings

^^^ Phoebe's spoils: Turkish pants.

On our way out of the market we passed a shop with a great, slightly worn brown and blue leather bag hanging inside. Phoebe asked the woman sitting near by how much for the bag. They haggled for a minute and Phoebe walked away, without it. Quickly the woman called her back and agreed to Phoebe's price. She then opened the purse and started pulling all of her personal items out! Phoebe literally bought the bag off the woman's shoulder.

^^^Phoebe desperately trying to leave ;)

We were finally able to stand in the Indian Ocean! 

Hello all! Sorry for the delay. We arrived in Tanzania safe and sound. Only took four hours in the car, two unimaginable, unmentionable bathroom stops, an hour flight, a layover, a delay, another hour flight, and the Tanzanian customs to go 750 miles. But it was all worth it just to go to the bathroom in the Chinese built, Kisumu airport. 

Dar es Salaam has been quite the culture shock from little, rural Kisii.  If Kenya exists in shades of rust then Tanzania is painted in ash. Dar is a much more urban space than Kisii, and much more packed together. Over four million people are living in a metropolitan area, which is roughly the size of Birmingham, Alabama. (Birmingham is home to less than a million.) Most of the buildings and homes are concrete and off the main paved roads everything becomes sand. The traffic in Dar es Salaam is indescribable. Phoebe said, “I’d always hoped that if I was to die in Africa it would be of some rare, tropical disease, I’m disappointed to find that I am going to die in a car accident. I could have done that in America”. The chaos of the Tanzanian road is almost comical, we sit in traffic jams more often than we move, and all drivers do exactly what they want following no traffic laws, traffic suggestions, or even the most basic rules or order.  Motorcycles and three wheeled taxis don’t exist to the other vehicles, even though they almost outnumber them and the motorcycle drivers see their fellow traffic as an elaborate obstacle course with no rules. BUT! Don’t worry because wearing your seatbelt (only if you are in the front, of course) is much more important than perhaps trying to prevent three lanes of traffic going both ways on a two lane road, facing off in a stand still.  

Even though Dar is a relatively thriving city, the water crisis is still dire.  In the city, water can be hard to find outside of the rainy season and because it is located on the coast of the Indian Ocean a lot of the water has a high salt content.  Many of the residents have to pay to have {DIRTY} water delivered to their homes.  Dar es Salaam is an eerie contradiction of development and impoverishment. Our hotel room has a doorbell, air conditioning, wifi (most of the time), and running water, but every morning, from our window we watch people with handcarts fill dirty buckets, with dirty water, out of a dirty hose.  There are jewelry stores filled with diamonds and gold and people who are still only making $2.50 a day.  There are cars, and cell phones, and high-rise buildings, but barely enough sanitation to support it and no clean water.

Our contact in Dar has been primarily the members of Grace Primitive Baptist Church. This past week we visited in the homes of some of the members, bringing them filters to clean their water.  Everyone welcomed us with warm hospitality. Mama Victor made us a wonderful meal of rice and cabbage; she is a schoolteacher who supports her family. We drove 45 min, crossing a dry river, to visit Josephine; she rides two hours on a bus to her job everyday. She lives on the outskirts of the city in an unfinished house (which is very common) with a sand floor, two of the bedrooms in the back make up her living quarters, another open room has become a temporary chicken house, and in another she hangs her wet laundry.  She hopes to one day finish her house and have her son come and live with her. Another family of four that we brought a filter to warmly opened their home to us. They live in a single 12x12 room that contains a bed, a couch, and cabinet. Everyone was very kind, and very open to our discussions about water. However, education remains our most significant battle.

We visited another local church and met with the associate pastor, instructing him on how to clean their water using bleach.  Using bleach to make a chlorine mother solution in order to disinfect water is the easiest, cheapest way to provide clean drinking water. We hope that the church leaders will instruct their congregations in this method and the dangers of bad water.

Sunday we attended Grace PBC, where the singing was beautiful. After services Daddy gave a demonstration on mixing a chlorine mother solution, to the congregation. They asked very good questions and again we are hopeful that the information will continue to spread.

Last year, Sweetwater installed two chlorine generator systems, one at our driver Kenny’s home and another at the home of Obey’s children. Both systems required some maintenance and repair from routine use. We were able to fix both systems and they are now running again.

^^^Phoebe reading up on the installation directions

^^^ Neighboring little girl who was way to cool for us.

^^^ Totally safe.

^^^ "It's all about the bubbles"