Tag: Life in Tanzania Page 8 of 26

Road Tripping, Tanzania Style

On July 17, 2015

Road tripping in Tanzania is nothing like road tripping in America.

First of all, the roads are indeed paved, but all of them are only two lanes with no center divider. Which means that you share the space on the road with enormous buses and semi-trucks, at 70 miles at hour, many of them in chicken contests, passing into oncoming traffic. Heart attacks abound about every five minutes. There ain’t no cruise control out here.

Police stand on the side of the road with speed guns, which adds to the heart attacks since the legal speed limit is constantly changing. It often feels as if the color of your skin, not your speed, determines how often you are pulled over.

Bathrooms are as scarce as the ever-elusive leopard, yet when you do find one, you wish you had just used the bush along the side of the road. Fast food consists of mushy fries and tough meat…we ate a lot of peanut butter.

Yet when you see these pictures, I’m guessing you’ve never had these sort of sights on any of your American road trips. Makes it all worth it.

We have an intern, McKenna, visiting this summer, and we wanted to show her (and our kids) more of this breathtakingly beautiful country. We were not disappointed. It was a great week.

“Tree of Baboons”

Dinner

See the little bumps on the left? Baby. Oh yes.

Sure, let’s put a viciously aggressive King Cobra in a cage that has cardboard around the glass and holes in the wood. Then let’s provoke it so that it shows its hood to the visitors. Sounds like a great idea.

Occasionally in Africa, we do actually swing on vines.

Visiting a Masai village. Learning about the Masai is standard business in first grade at HOPAC, so we felt like it was important that our kids got to see the real thing.

….aaaaand they dressed me up. And then laughed at me. I can’t say I blame them. The Masai are some of the most beautifully elegant people I’ve ever seen. This white girl just can’t compete.

There she is in all her glory: Mount Kilimanjaro

We drove for a half hour on a road so bumpy we thought our teeth would fall out, but were rewarded at the end by a natural, crystal clear spring. Oh yeah….and monkeys jumping around over our heads, dropping seeds into the water. Utterly amazing.

California, This is What Real Water Conservation Looks Like

By Amy Medina

On April 14, 2015

In Other

The language learning pictures of the day were about washing dishes. I learned the Kiswahili words for soak, scrub, scrape, rinse. Then, as usual, Lucy made me a recording of the days’ lesson. Her recordings always keep me highly entertained, which is helpful since I listen to each one about a dozen times.

First, she made me laugh when she said (roughly translated): “Foreigners always scrape their frying plans with only a plastic tool. Because they are afraid of scratching their special pans.”

Yep. She’s got that right.

She also said, “Americans rinse their dishes ovyo–carelessly–because water is cheap in America. And they don’t have to carry it on their heads.”

Ouch. Unfortunately, she’s right about that one as well. As I listened to this recording over and over, pushing the new words into my brain, I also thought about my home state.

I’m originally from California, which is facing a water crisis of epic proportions. In fact, Lucy told me that she heard about the California drought recently on Swahili radio. That’s pretty crazy! I know that Californians are upset about letting their lawns die and their cars stay dirty and their toilets stay yellow. I get that–I would be upset too.

But here’s a little perspective from my friend Lucy.

Lucy lives in a household of 6. They are probably considered almost middle class for this country, because they own their own house and both she and her husband have dependable jobs.

Their house has no plumbing, along with most of the households in this city of 5 million. A neighbor, about half a block away, has a outdoor spigot. This is Lucy’s water source.

Every day, Lucy buys 25 gallons of water from this neighbor. Every day, she fills buckets and carries them back to her house on her head. This much water costs about 15% of Lucy’s take home pay.

Twenty-five gallons of water is what this family of six uses every day–for drinking, cooking, washing bodies, washing dishes, washing clothes. And that’s on the good days. On the days when money is tight, it’s only fifteen gallons.

And you know what? Lucy considers herself blessed, because she only has to walk half a block to get water, instead of the miles that many women in Tanzania have to walk.

Just in case you’re starting to feel way too judged, let me assure you that even though I write from the same city as Lucy, I’m much more in the category of Californians. We do have indoor plumbing, and we probably use 10 times more water a day than Lucy’s family, yet our water bill is only about 1% of our take home pay.

The average American person uses 100 gallons of water a day–400 gallons per family of four. Every day. In California, residents are beingasked to cut that by 25%. I know it won’t be easy–it wouldn’t be for me, either. As an American, I am used to using water ovyo–carelessly.

Living in Africa has taught me to appreciate things I used to take such advantage of: paved roads, electricity, libraries, Cheerios…and water. Maybe this water crisis will do the same for Californians.

Mungu ni Mwema.

By Amy Medina

On February 3, 2015

In Other

Recently I read here that World Bank development indicators have placed Tanzania the fifth most dangerous place in sub-Saharan Africa for a woman to give birth (out of about 50 countries).

So it was a happy day to visit my friend, Esta, and her brand new baby boy, Emmanuel. Baby and mama are safe and sound, after a few scares and months of prayers and bed rest and a c-section.

(This picture doesn’t accurately reflect her joy!)

He has the best dimples ever, but he slept so much I just couldn’t get a picture of them.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

Comparing Lasagna and Tarantulas

By Amy Medina

On January 31, 2015

In Other

Emily sat in my kitchen last week and watched me make ricotta cheese for lasagna.

“Wow,” she said, “I sure wish I could do that.”

“Well, first of all, it’s ridiculously easy,” I told her. “But second, you wouldn’t have been able to learn out in the village. You are too busy living in a house without running water and killing tarantulas. Besides, out there you don’t even have access to fresh milk or to an oven to make lasagna. You win the prize for living in Africa.”

“Not compared to Michelle,” she responded, referring to a new friend of ours. “In Congo, she had to cook over charcoal, and she gave birth to her first child in Africa. She wins the prize.”

Emily has been my very good friend for 12 years, so this exchange was all light-hearted. But it led to a deeper conversation. Why do we always have this tendency to compare? Why do we always judge our spirituality, or our effectiveness as a mom or wife or housekeeper, by looking around at others? And why is a harder life necessarily equated with a more spiritual life?

In Africa, we expatriate wives compare each other’s living conditions. In America, maybe it’s ministry commitments or school choices. We make unnecessary martyrs of each other and ourselves, when really we need to just get about the business of obeying God with what He has put in front of us.

To choose to suffer means that there is something wrong; to choose God’s will even if it means suffering is a very different thing. No healthy saint ever chooses suffering; he chooses God’s will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not. No saint dare interfere with the discipline of suffering in another saint. (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest)

Can we simply come to the conclusion that God has called us to different lives, and that we are all gifted differently? That each of us will have our own good things and hard things in the lives He has called us to? My measure of success, and my measure of spirituality, is between God and me, not me and Every Other Woman.

Even though I’ll always admire Emily’s tarantula-killing skills.

———————————————————————————

Emily and her family stayed with us this week, which is always super special because our friendship goes back to our first year in Tanzania. We adopted our kids at almost exactly the same time, and they are all best friends.

They also are starting an extremely cool new agriculture project, which you can check out here.

Grace and Caleb have been friends since we brought them home, so I had to throw in my most favorite picture of them, when they were two years old.

Yesterday: Caleb and Grace, age 9

Tropical Christmas Season….in Pictures

By Amy Medina

On December 26, 2014

In Other

Just in case there’s any question as to what we are dealing with down here under the equator, here is the proof:

Please don’t be jealous of us. I’m not.

But here’s our Christmas season, sweat and all.

We don’t do Santa, but Josiah took it upon himself to put this together. Yes, there’s a pillow under his shirt and yes, that’s a sock hanging from his mouth.

This is what happens when you buy a box of Christmas lights, and the writing on the box is all in Portuguese. It’s not actually a string at all, but more like an octopus of lights. Eventually, we sort of just draped it on the tree.

HOPAC’s Annual Christmas Fair

This is Apollo, the incredibly talented and radiant deaf man who made our Christmas cards from banana leaves.

HOPAC’s annual Christmas production. The kindergarteners always steal the show.

First graders were Jamaican. You had to be there to get it.

HOPAC alumni visiting us….always such a joy to our hearts!

As a Christmas present this year, we took our workers and their families to the water park. Even though it’s just a few miles away and about $4 a person to enter, they had never been. It was such a joy to see the absolute delirious excitement on the kids’ faces!