Dear Cherished Interested,

17 January 2022

Writing this even without internet.

Without internet but pleased to report that after the first night in Hilda’s house left her mosquito bitten to a fair-the-well that the local big young ones who have claimed us as their own appeared with mosquito net and frame for last night and sleeping was good.

Hilda’s house is on the campus of Usa(pronounced ooosa) River Academy. This campus is being used by a local NGO for their growing English medium / language Primary School. Silver Leaf Academy has both day students and boarding students.

About 30 of the littles in care at the Children’s Village travel by bus down each morning now to Silver Leaf Academy for school. Hilda and I just had our second morning ride with that same bus back up the hill to the Children’s Village collecting staff and local preschool littles for a day of preschool there.

Yesterday our work kept us at the Children’s Village until time to collect the Children’s Village Students down at Usa River and that is how we get back to where our trunks are now empty. Trunks empty, refrigerator with pictures of two of our grandchildren so far and when we obtain more magnets or tape.. those precious pictures of all of them, their parents and even some of their artwork we were able to bring along.

It is a blessing to be cooking for ourselves. It is a blessing to use furniture others chose and gathered for us. It is a blessing to be far back off the road at the back of the campus where we hear moving water, a thriving population of frogs, birds, and other nocturnal and early morning throats we have yet to identify.

Today we left the key to the house at the entry gate as we left. I was told that they wanted to get the hot water working. Vulnerable once again it seems as those most precious few things that are now out of the trunks and have helped us have our connections close in familiar ways once more are not under our control while away.

Also not under our control anywhere is how The Word is preached. Swahili Preaching is known for its fire, its rapid pace, its dogmatic approach to defining faith through observable behaviors. Naming things sin, that which separates us from each other and from our creator, and letting that naming come out hard repetitiously and definitively.

The sweetest kindest person will be listening to fire and brimstone preaching while they go about their day. In the context here there is some good in this style of delivery.

Whether it is like alcoholics making fun of the one or two “friends” they keep around who are known to fall over drunk or pass out, I don’t know. That has always seemed ugly to me, using others overt physical problems with alcohol abuse to crutch and justify ones’ own abuse that may show less overt physical problems.

However honesty demands that with regards sin, those things that separate us from each other and from our creator, we are all failed and broken. We are all falling down, passed out disconnected from what could be a best for us as exemplified by the life of Jesus recorded for us in The Word. Recorded for us about God throughout the entirety of scripture.

If the alcoholic analogy is too much to take, consider that the alcoholic needs healthy relationship. The alcoholic needs connection based upon something in common but turned around. Something in common and turned around in hope of something better. Hence the twelve step program. One step for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. One step for each of the twelve apostles.

Sometimes we forget that at the earliest times Christians built hospitals first. We built places where the diseased and broken could find healing because bodies distracted by disease and trauma are most often matched with minds equally unable to focus on hope for something better, something connecting to what can be best.

So lives here in this place are lives lived within the hardness of want. There is no escaping it as there are no resources to enable that escape. So if living is hard and The Word comes preached as hard, then perhaps that is what it takes. That is what it takes for The Word to be heard and felt in the midst of hardness as real and relevant to those sweet kind hearts living in the hardness of deep want like we in “the western world” most predominantly no longer do.

Dear cherished interested ones, there is an engine brake inside me. You know those noisy exhaust throbbing things that class eight trucks use to slow down in addition to the friction brakes?

Only I can hear my engine brake though.

I hear it whenever even the best intended developed world opinion or description of the state of things here is uttered in hope of doing something today to make tomorrow better. I heard it recently again about the local practices of preaching the word. I heard it from an amazingly loving and living outside himself European here to strive like Hilda and I to make a difference.

Go into deeply impoverished North America and listen to how The Word is preached. It’s just not nice enough for the rest of us who can afford to seek comfort and self-actualized self-worth first. Well here those who can afford comfort are the rarest most deeply catered to minority. We come presuming we know what The Word should sound like in order to be what we need.

We don’t know hard. We may think we do but hard living left most of us and our families a good couple generations ago. I remember just a touch of hard.

I remember a time in High School while still growing and sacrifice for the sake of the church oil tank left us eating not the cow planned but a greatly reduced caloric intake of small portions of fish. We had many in college. It was winter. The farm took more calories than we were choosing to consume. It was a very long winter and I remember my belt getting longer and longer and always being so hungry.

My parents were doing everything they could to keep those educations going and taking turns with other families keeping the church from freezing up. I could never admit to those who had survived the depression and WW2 that I was hungry. I watched them and learned. I listened to their stories of their times and learned.

Thanks to these precious ones here and now, I am still learning.

That engine brake throbbing away inside whenever it seems that my thinking, my guiding whisper, that still small voice may be adversely affected. Adversely affected by some self-assured, even huge hearted, well intentioned voice that may be speaking well yet like my own voice may be here. Speaking well, yet, out of context.

Seeing the presumption in one style of proclamation over another. Seeing the presumption in what sounds and is hard. Rather than holding on to the likelihood that any presumption lies with those who can afford to have them.

I have dared to walk alongside local pastors. Their hearts are not hard. Their times and places are. The Word comes out hard so it can cut through to give meaning, some value, where survival speaks even harder.

Is there room for other types of proclamation? Yes. Perhaps that is part of why we are here.

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1/19/22.. No hot water yet.. no internet yet.. we are well.

Time for something that sounds like a North American joke?

8 people went for a trip to see animals in their wild environment:

3 Tanzanians

1 Kenyan

4 Africans

2 Italians

1 Argentinian

2 from the U.K.

1 from Canada

4 from the U.S.

1 Dane

1 German

2 Dutch

6+ teachers

2+ preachers

4+ farmers

1 logger

1 truck driver

1 born Muslim

2 Catholic

2 ordained presbyterian deacons

3 Lutheran

4 Christian

2 Jews

1 Jewish Cantor

2 Christian worship leaders

1 Evangelist

7 working through NGO’s as well as their faith

Love led the way .. All had a wonderful day -

After 11 weeks we were taken so Hilda could finally see deeper African Bush, elephants, ostrich, lioness, mongoose, wildebeest, cape buffalo, dik dik, impala, eland, water buck, giraffe, zebra, too many more to mention.. Now back to work.

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What to pray for:

Whatever is on your heart and mind for us –

That rains continue –

Gratitude for the rains that have come –

Visas –

Pieces to reveal themselves and come together regarding my education –

Thankfulness for local pastors and inclusion –

Thankfulness for inclusion in purposes outside the church that cherish life and point unrelentingly to God, our Savior, and The Holy Spirits endless prompting and empowerment –

Thankfulness for a house –

Thankfulness for a bed –

Thankfulness for a mosquito net –

Thankfulness for running/dribbling water –

Thankfulness for intermittent Power –

The hope of internet at the house -

Thankfulness for Hilda –

For our children and grandchildren missing us –

We miss them too –

Makumira Secondary School –

The Children’s Village –

Silverleaf Academy –

Too much good stuff to list..

Thankfulness for each one of you –

Thankfulness for each one of your prayers –

Thank you, Thank You, Thank You.. Prayers, your prayer, makes all the difference..

Vern W

May Life be as Music to your Heart - May Music be as Heart to your Life 

- May Heart be as Life to your Music -

Dear Cherished Interested,

I make the claim that your Praying efforts make all the difference.

They do.

The plan was for us to be in Hilda’s house by the 3rd. Our plan, thankfully, was changed through the house not yet being ready.

Instead of laying down after moving on the 3rd, I laid down right where we have been laying down each evening since arriving in TZ but, after blooming a fever, chills, and other symptoms.

Thanks to yet another precious someone arriving literally two days before from Europe, we were given a Covid test kit. I tested positive for Covid Tuesday evening. Hilda did not test positive at that time but by Thursday evening developed symptomology parallel to my own.

Thankfully, I have been getting better as she has been taken ill so we have been able to trade places with me hovering and getting food from downstairs. Mrs. Ndosi’s staff have been checking on us. Mrs. Ndosi has been checking on us. All those amazing connections, including the new one arriving with test kits in her bags, you prayed us among have been checking on us.

So, it was not the right time for us to be setting up house in a different area just a few kilometers away with new neighbors.

We are supposed to be ill. We are supposed to be ill right now and right here so something good can be demonstrated through our need and vulnerability.

I remember watching my parents interact with medical professionals over the years I had them. Nearly every interaction included them using some of that time with the medical professional, time they would never have gotten were it not for some illness or injury in the family, to evaluate and invest listening and care into the life of that same medical professional.

That is part of why we all seem to face illnesses and traumas. So we can be given just a second or two here or there around our problem to address the fundamental precious humanity of those who dedicate at least a piece of their lives to serve us. Sometimes those seconds turn into minutes. I have experienced even longer times of use in the lives of care-givers who have let trust grow through my need and vulnerability into something deeper for them as well.

The blame seeking Jesus confronts in John Chapter 9 still blows through our relationships with each other and with our Creator. Blame seeking is a waste of time and energy, we are called to seek after the precious that God is doing in our many shortcomings.

Look out! Love might be shown, healing of things we might not have known were in need of healing might just start or rush to completion in an instant. Love might be shown and healing given not just to patient through care-giver but to care-giver through patient.

As much as I despise being weakened away from my plans, there may be more important plans afoot for us and those around us. Let God be God. Then point it out so that any of my baby boomer whininess can collapse and be as nothing under the beauty of it all.

The beauty of God living in the care-giving hearts of others. The beauty of God living in the care-giving hearts of ourselves. Let it out because the exercise of those things in and among weakness and vulnerability builds strengths that outlast our here and now. It builds relationships that are strong for our work together in this precious here and now too. Paul in both of his Corinthian Letters shares profoundly about weakness for us to follow.

The weakness chosen by our Creator and Savior birthed by human mother, crucified by mere human authorities that are now millennia dust.

The endless strength in the vulnerability remains.

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I promised our son that I would try to write about some of the amazing people your praying has pulled and kept us among. I believe the concern he now shares with many who love us has to do with our ability to find a path for returning physical health.

Well firstly we are blessed to have each other. We have an each other that we both actually like and are comfortable being uncomfortable in. Knowing that even if the rest of humanity were swept home to God before the end of this sentence, If we were either two or one of us left here, even then we would not be alone.

Tanzania is not America. There are some freedoms here that have been destroyed by a legal system at home that is required to measure losses and assign blames.

Without the oppressive liability avoidance scheming birthed from our system, we have found a local Tanzanian pharmacist who sells you nothing.

Nothing, that is, without first knowing and understanding your medical background, current symptomology, what you have already done with and for your symptoms, and your own level of ability, and of those around you, to monitor and care for your illness.

Only then comes prescribing, dispensing, and directing the use of medications all provided by a pharmacist who seems to have instantaneous recall of every article of medical information, every pharmacological catalogue, every medical or pharmacological periodical either historical or from the very mornings eager study.

We are blessed. This pharmacist would be wasted in America as exercising the gift present in that empathetic brilliance for the sake of others would be denied there.

Tanzania has too few resources to tie a pharmacist’s hands like we do so many of our well trained and gifted folks at home. This is a type of freedom I remember living among yet realize my children may only know our current system.

So, no, we do not have to go to a medical doctor to find a pathway way back to physical health if we demonstrate self-awareness, knowledge, and competence in what confronts us. So far we have and do.

Where medical doctors are few and exceedingly pressed with caseload our personal responsibility for ourselves is required to allow them to care where self-care cannot suffice. This too is a freedom I remember living yet realize my children likely do not.

This un-denied freedom of self-responsibility which we have found here is so community minded that ones’ responsibility for oneself flows seamlessly into ones’ responsibility for family, friend, neighbor, tribe, nation, guest, stranger all predicated upon ones’ ability and inclination.

This too is familiar..

Here it can be seen in Pastors who remove young women from trafficking situations.

Pastors who turn out their pockets quietly out of sight of the world for something to give the infirmed, widowed, alone driven to their door. Strangers who empty their purses of what little was therein for others unknown to them.

Ministries started, food taken, risks lived.

Risks lived all free from knowing the fear of having to check to see if our churches insurance policy is up to date and covers our activities.. activities often demanded in the moment..

I remember the freedom to walk into the horror another person is facing. We did that working in the woods for anyone else there. Even if they hated us out of the woods, we were all they had when things went wrong in the woods.

That is what Jesus does for me.. That familiar, that close, that risky.

No wonder those who can call. No wonder they approach, even without masks, some throwing their arms around us.

They are gifted and capable. Young and old alike they have lived uninsulated from hardship pain and want, know what those things are, and have never known the fear of being wealthy enough to avoid consequences.

Consequences that none could afford to pay. That economy, that bargain, that gamble, does not exist in any meaningful way here.

I’m stuck. Everything points to God and Jesus. Jesus, who pays the consequences for all our consequences. Even those consequences we can’t take to a medical doctor or buy insurance for.

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What to Pray..

Whatever is on your heart and mind for us –

Our prior requests –

Gratitude and Grace for and from all I may offend with my imperfect mirror –

For each of you in your situations –

Gratitude for you too –

Thank you, Thank You, Thank You.. Prayers, your prayer, makes all the difference..

Vern W

May Life be as Music to your Heart - May Music be as Heart to your Life 

- May Heart be as Life to your Music -