"Habari Yangu"

“My News”

Tuesday, May 25, 2010


Good golly, Miss Molly time sure does fly. Less than a week left in May? I don’t believe it. It’ll be June next week and then I’ll have been gone for 8 months, been 21 for 7 of them and still haven’t had a beer at dinner with the folks. That’s a crime.

I thought I’d write up a little update on how everything’s progressing on my end of the world while I still have the time. This is week 11 of my 12 week internship and it’ll probably be finished by the time I get this bad boy on the web. My dad is coming in a week from Thursday and I feel like hitting the ground running with that old man so I can’t say that I’ll have another chance to update this here blog once we get set in motion. I’ll just go ahead and write this assuming I’ll get at least one more chance between now and then to set the record straight.

I might as well start with what I’ve already started with and say yep, my days are winding down quickly. I have officially changed my return date on my ticket so I will be departing Dar es Salaam on the afternoon of Wednesday June 16th. If I catch all of my flights, I should be touching down at PDX around midnight of the 17th/18th. Kevin Love himself has generously offered to pick me up from the airport so it seems like everything is taken care of on that end of things so I just have to figure out what to do with myself between now and then.

I have been a bit overwhelmed with my internship over the past few weeks as what started as just an inkling at the beginning of the month that I might not finish everything I had originally hoped to has looked more and more like a reality by the end of every week. We keep piling on new things like grant applications or necessary revisions to other work and then just because God has a sense of humor, the power will be out for at least one day every week effectively halting any work I need to be getting done on the computer. I am fortunate enough where this affords me another opportunity to go outside of the office and see another part of Arusha as well as another side of Juhudi. This I have really enjoyed and has been very educational for me though I’m having guilt about not contributing fully to the organization like I want to even though I’m still getting so much out of this experience.

I’m hearing back from all of the different departments and groups back home that I’m accountable to for getting credit for this whole shindig too. I’ve got to get moving on all of these reflective pieces and start wrapping everything up. Like I said, once I finish and my dad is in town, I don’t plan on spending a great deal of time sitting and working on my computer. Some of the stuff I’ve been sent also is about just returning back to the U.S. and how return culture shock is often worse than the initial culture shock of arriving in the first foreign country. Reading this literature, I’ve got some interesting ideas and opinions that I’d like to write more about on here when the time is right. They even sent me something to send to friends and family to help ease the transition. If I write about one more thing before I come home, I hope it’s that and I’ll share all that stuff but the time isn’t right for it yet so hopefully in a couple weeks I get that up here.

I started going to church the last couple weeks and will probably end up going again on this coming Sunday. This has brought a marked shift in the ratio of times I talk about going to church vs. the amount of times I actually go. It feels good to go and I am actually going for the whole God aspect of it though the cultural experience is something too though, I must say. I actually don’t even know where to start on describing that whole aspect of it… it’s all in Kiswahili, I’m the only white dude there, it’s Pentecostal which tends to feel pretty evangelical/gospel-y/etc. and I have been asked by too many people if I have been “saved”. It’s also just on a big concrete slab that is the foundation of the church to be but cannot yet be afforded so they just built some pole frame to hold up the tin roof that keeps us dry. I’ve felt very humbled by my time here in Tanzania and I am very thankful for the things I have in life and the experiences I’ve been lucky enough to have. I go with my neighbor who says about how God provides for him so he feels it’s right to give back as well. I like that.

The place I was able to go to during the first half of my time here where I could use really good wifi has not had any access for the past three weeks or so. This is why I haven’t been able to post those pictures that I wanted to yet or also another blog I wrote up that involves linking some youtube videos but I just don’t have the speed to find the links to them yet. It also caused some pretty severe problems and stress when it came time to change my plane tickets and register for classes for next fall. I got those taken care of but there’s still one pretty important thing I’m trying to get done real soon that has got me a little worried. I’m trying to get a projector that can hook up to a computer and show powerpoints and other things for the place where I’m doing my internship. I’ve set some people out to help me in tracking a used one from home down (it’s like $2000 here for one or $150 to borrow one for the day) but they’ve been quiet lately and time is winding down. I want to get this as a gift which will give back because if they can rent it out to other people and groups even for just one day, that will pay the rent of the entire center and office for an entire month. It’s such an easy thing for us to do at home and something we take for granted but it would make a world of difference here. If I did this and nothing else with my time here, I would feel like I accomplished something. So, I’ve got my fingers crossed on this working out.

I think that’s about all from my end. I leave this amazing place in three weeks from tomorrow. I admit I’m really looking forward to it even though I’m supposed to be really sad to leave. I said earlier that I’m feeling really thankful for the life I have and a big part of that is my friends and family. When I’ve got that to go back to, how can I not be excited?