Dear Cherished Interested’s,                                                                                     November 25^th, 2024

Traveled to a graduation in Moshi at KCMC, Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center.  This graduation was for Wachungaji, Pastors.  Pastors of all ages who have over the past many months been studying CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education, so thoroughly that each and every one of them has written a large book on the topic.  That book published and presented to each on their graduation day, in church on campus, as part of a worship service.

Patience while here alone is harder for me.  I was asked by one of those Mountain Village Pastors attending training, to please come by 2:00 pm to gather him and his things to take him home as his training will be complete.  I agreed.                                                                                                                                         9:00 pm the night before, that Pastor’s daughter started texting me about coming along to collect her father.  I agreed and we sorted out where and when to collect her.  I was at the agreed place before the agreed time.  While waiting for the daughter to get prepared other local ones started piling prepared food in pots and pans on the back seat.  Then, only about 30 minutes after agreed departure time, Daughter and her son got in and begged we collect what became three other ladies and another child and more food.  Three more stops to make that happen.  We were late for the worship service at 11:00 am, but as is typical were able to simply wander in and sit.

There was a celebration after that involved the food and gathering in praise of the pastor completing his studies.  The master of ceremonies, also a pastor, was preparing to wind me up for a donation of cash, also typical pastor behavior here, when the wife of the graduating one I had come to collect stood suddenly to deflect the normal public squeeze for cash that was about to be applied to me. 

 She did that with such sweet authority and kind affirmation of her husband that any grasping after my empty wallet was forgotten.

.. She is an angel..

The trip back to this graduating pastor’s home had the bed of the truck loaded with stuff and that back seat filled with five people.  Two riding shotgun in the passenger front seat.  Success..

This is something you have done by praying too.  Thank you

-------------------------------------

Just broke the news to the last two of Hilda’s local Angels who have been helping me. 

We are praying that in spite of what we can obviously see, that I can be back in America with Hilda before or by Christmas.

In order for this to have happened, the book has to be done and delivered to those who have only wanted God’s word from me.  That is still rumbling back and forth between this house and the printer as they build it for printing.

And, there was another requirement Hilda and I set that has been amazingly met by what God has chosen to do.                                                                                                                                                         The other requirement involved the precious one who came to cook for us after Hilda was settled in Greeley.  This precious one is the same person who three years ago saw me studying outside her kitchen at a home for children who have no home.  Her job was to feed the office staff.  While doing her job she still made time to come out from her kitchen and help me learn enough Biblical Swahili abbreviations to start serving the adoptive Mama’s of those children.  She is the one who helped me crack the most important part of a churches secret code.  How they identify parts of the Bible.

She, in conjunction with her health, have since been abandoned by the blind leadership of that place where we first met.  The same place that expelled both Hilda and I from being onsite as they fear Tanzanian Immigration discovering us there.  That did not stop us serving those Mama’s and through them the children we used to bring Sunday School to.  Those Mama’s have gotten the written messages they have asked for, every Sunday since the 12^th of June 2022.  Those messages are delivered each week to them, and to children in a nearby church boarding school who are the more grown life work of those Mama’s.

Well, this precious one, on the out’s like Hilda and I, was suffering from long term extremely high white blood cell counts, uric acid crystals affecting her ambulatory(both knees) and leaving her left arm chronically swollen and unusable.  She was filled with pain and as is too often the case here, had no way to afford pain management of any kind.  She doesn’t even drink alcohol.

Other long term and unattended symptomology in conjunction with what I have already shared left Hilda and I concerned that this dearest of dear ones was possibly terminal without any hope of any oncological evaluation or support.                                                                                                                                                               We discovered and then took the opportunity to include this one by having her shop for and prepare meals for the rest of the team.  This they all regard as cooking for me.  But even the one helper who is now in school and not earning active pay from me, still comes to eat meals most week days.  They all go home full and with food enough to get them back for breakfast, except for weekends.    

Hilda and I decided after I returned without Hilda that I was to stay with this precious one likely until she died.  I was to employ her and facilitate her finding and getting care but that in Hilda’s experience, in our experience, all I would be able to do was hold her one functioning hand until God gave her permanent freedom from degrading joints and pain.  Hilda instructing me that I was to be here, stay here no matter the expense until that happened, even far into next year.  Instead, we are now praying that I can leave this home, to come home, soon.

The details of miraculous healing that started occurring in earnest over a desperately fearful weekend of emergency visits, IV treatments and then verified by impossibly clear and shockingly normal bloodwork.   Bloodwork done daily over only two days and then twice more since.  Bloodwork to guide emergency treatment and ongoing treatment into beautiful recovery with vastly reduced medications nearly over.  Nearly down to no medications at all.  Her knees are without pain.  Her left arm which had been given up on by medical practitioners and herself is now being used automatically and without thought, also without pain, all swelling gone.  Even her skin tone has recovered.                                                                                        She has started raising chickens and has sold enough of them to have recovered all her expenses with over five dozen left to sell in that first batch; the second batch coming on well.  This around working for me three days a week.   

Your prayer does things like this too.  Please believe that..  Thank you.

------------------------------------

Closing Africa house and returning to Hilda I pray will be easy, no matter how impossibly hard.   Deserting the loved ones there/here is extremely painful.  Perhaps, with today’s tech, it won’t be as complete a desertion as it was in the past.  We’ll see if there is interest here for connection in the face of perceived rejection. 

Long way to go, still..  Your prayer deeply sought for this work too.  Thank You.

------------------------------------

Keep our feet to the fire, please.  Thank You!

We may live dangerously, but we are alive.  Thank you for praying us the courage to live this way, if dangerously.  We don’t see it that way.

-------------------------------

You who read and pray and suffer along with us.  Please believe what we get to see.  Thank you for praying our strength and guidance for each moment with each face.   Folks like you are beyond precious. 

vwilliamson@sprynet.com

Really blessed while deeply under attack..  all of it is spiritual..  I wish I could teach that to everyone so they could truly know it.  I didn’t know it for far too long. 

Please keep crumpling us up and throwing us at God.  That is where we need to be.  God will sort us out.

One day at a time.  Just like how you each live.  Just one day at a time. 

Thank you, each of you.

                -------------------------------------------------------

What to Pray for:

Our armed forces families, our leadership, our people, whole world round, all of Gods kids -

All the tough and blessing expressed above –

The love of folks –

Whatever is on your hearts and minds for us –

For our children and grand-children who miss us?.. 

For Makumira Secondary School looking to share stories and partner in some way with a foreign school, Great leaders, teachers, students, programs, strong backs, minds, and hearts –

For our health to stay ahead of whatever is before us –

For each and every one of you –

Each and every one of your prayers, your precious conversations with God –

Prayers, Your Prayer, Even your groaning prayers 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’s,                                                                                     November 4^th & 11^th 2024

I had been disheartened when delivering a message to the guard station I pass when travelling to and from the Secondary School on Friday.  Two weeks of prior messages were laying on the ground in the mud.  So I asked the only guard on site if he wanted the message for Sunday, he bent collecting the prior messages from the mud and nodded verbalizing an affirmative, so it was placed in his hand.                 

On the way to church, dawn just breaking, I stopped at the small gate to the university and hopped out.  Two young guards came out smiling and I folded the message open to the beginning of the Swahili, handing it to the elder of the two.  As I was getting back into the truck and fastening my seatbelt, I heard the older guard reciting the Swahili message to the younger guard.  Cool..

Another copy dropped off at the main university gate for the invisible hands there.  Beautiful open smile from the woman on duty.  Cool..

Yesterday, Sunday was men’s day for running service(s).  Four or five at the Cathedral alone.  The Pastors were all away.  The last Pastor who had come to start things, leaving, as I arrived for English Service about half an hour early.  

I was directed by the men officiating the English service to read the Psalm at beginning of service.  Then as a young elder with several young children started his sermon for the people, I was asked to stand and define what family is.  This before what turned out to be a challenge to fathers, to be fathers, to not give up, to not shirk, to hold on knowing that God wants fathers to love.  To lead in love in ways that point to what God does to bring us into eternal family.  Not bad for a group of us men..

Before service started, there was an ity-bity sitting with her mama in front of me who turned around in total shock.  She looked at me and I smiled back.  That was a mistake.  She couldn’t crawl into her mother’s arms fast enough, just a wailing in fear.  I walked forward and got a couple worship books handing one to the shaking, crying one’s mother and another to a young lady sitting in the same pew as me.  Her mother and siblings directly behind her.

As the services were all laity-led, one service and officiants would be departing and another would be in the wings gathered and ready to lead the next service in the Cathedral space.  While leaving, I was facing that next group of officiants walking to enter from the front of the church.                                                                                Faces from up the mountain, had come down to join the work.  Faces that saw me and stopped processing to smile huge and greet me shaking hands and speak to me in the little bit of Meru they knew I could share with them.  The stodgier strait-faced attendants of the Cathedral proper shocked that the white guy who chose to worship among them for years now, would be greeted in their mother tongue in such overtly accepting and loving ways by those coming down to help.   

It became open laughter and a moment of challenge accepted with smiles of happiness and smiles of chagrin all around.  The Mountain men calling me their Meru given name for me, joyfully receiving blessing from me in that briefly shared language, and then still laughing, processing in a jog to worship leaving the more proper-practiced to catch up, also laughing.

That’s cool. 

A little way along the track, alley, to the house, another ity-bity all by himself next to where motorcycles and other vehicles pass, stretched as high with his waving hand as he could to say high to the hairy thing from up near the end of their dirt track. 

This is something you have done by praying too.  Thank you

-------------------------------------

Friday I collected a young husband and father who had come and found me for help.  A contemporary young Maasai Mchungaji looking every part the developed world person trusting me to help him do something that took time and fuel but no cash.                                                                                                                              We are out of cash.  We left everything that was ours to leave with God’s growing family here.  We have also left everything you have trusted to us.  Thank you for that trust.  In order to get Hilda safely situated in Colorado we had to borrow money again, like young people.

We left with daybreak heading for the bush community Maroroni, south of both Maji Ya Chai and Kikatiti.  It only takes a moment after turning off the blacktop of the big road out to the National Parks to be rolling over cobbles and dust rubbed loose from gouges and ruts from rainy season washouts.  Tracks, not roads.      

Children are everywhere.  Most little primary students pack jugs to collect water to and from school.  That and the firewood they work together to gather both ways to take home too.                                                     People still believe in life here.  People still regard children as blessing even as those children have what may be seen as inconceivably hard lives from our home cultural perspective.  I grew up on family farm, learning mechanized farming from the generation who had stopped using horses and brought the first tractors onto the farm to roughly coincide with the World War 2 effort to feed half of the world’s Army’s and shattered civilian populations around the globe. 

My world did not make logical sense to my classmates growing up, let alone my children, but my eyes included training by people born in the 1800’s.  That has been extremely valuable here.

We carefully got around or through flocks / herds of goats and cattle, lean large eared donkeys laden with a hundred liters of water or more apiece among nearly everything else possible here.  One donkey cart full of older children going to secondary school, beyond logical capacity with people jumping off or running up behind to jump on.  Two jersey cow sized donkeys doing all the work with no reins of any kind, only long whip-ended stick from the eldest boy perched on the cart front. 

We gathered this young pastor’s spouse and infant daughter from his parent’s home, after sharing cups of Chai.  This young mother had nearly not survived childbirth.  This infant girl had nearly not survived her coming into the world.  Both mother with surgical incisions impeding every step, every move, and infant daughter got into the back seat of the truck with a living angel.  A Maasai mother-in-law who guarded, attended and facilitated silently with huge smile of affirmation every step of her daughter-in-law.  I had brought Tylenol with me so that young mother had taken two about 15 minutes before trying to climb into the truck.  This was the first and only pain management she has had.

An hour later they were together at Hospital.  Wonderful news is that they are both doing extremely well.  Good news is that they are safely back home having survived the trip out of the bush and back.  The best news is that mother-in-law.  Strong, determined, joyful, infinitely loving of a young daughter given her by her son.                                                                                                                                                                   We stopped at the market day in Kikatiti on the way home, both she and that young pastor went off to collect supplies to the bed of the truck.  When we got them home the loose ndizi, plantain, in the bed of the truck needed gathering and this grandmother took off like the wind, leaping around like those young secondary students earlier in the day, gathering buckets from around the homestead for filling without missing a single step of her daughter-in-law.

I was fed Loshoro, cold gruel of sour milk and puffed swollen, not popped, corn kernels, before I was allowed to take that young father back to university.  Even the stick figure cats and kittens were unafraid of the people in that home who shared that gruel with them. 

One of the better fed village cats just ran by through the razor wire on top of the wall outside being chased by a monkey.  Here, in town, both monkeys and cats get kicked and stones thrown at them.  It was wonderful to get back into the bush where living things are included as they can be.

Your prayer does things like this too.  Thank you.

------------------------------------

Plan for Tuesday is to take what we have managed to translate and go visit local print shops.  God has to do this too.  Pray Hilda and I can afford this even here, no way in America.  Thank you.

First snow hit the ground around the campus in Greeley this weekend.  I have to get back to Hilda.

Closing Africa house and returning to Hilda I pray will be easy, no matter how impossibly hard.   Deserting the loved ones there/here is extremely painful.  Perhaps, with today’s tech, it won’t be as complete a desertion as it was in the past.  We’ll see if there is interest here for connection in the face of perceived rejection. 

Long way to go, still..  Your prayer deeply sought for this work too.  Thank You.

------------------------------------

Keep our feet to the fire, please.  Thank You!

We may live dangerously, but we are alive.  Thank you for praying us the courage to live this way, if dangerously.  We don’t see it that way.

-------------------------------

You who read and pray and suffer along with us.  Please believe what we get to see.  Thank you for praying our strength and guidance for each moment with each face.   Folks like you are beyond precious. 

vwilliamson@sprynet.com

Really blessed while deeply under attack..  all of it is spiritual..  I wish I could teach that to everyone so they could truly know it.  I didn’t know it for far too long. 

Please keep crumpling us up and throwing us at God.  That is where we need to be.  God will sort us out.

One day at a time.  Just like how you each live.  Just one day at a time. 

Thank you, each of you.

                -------------------------------------------------------

What to Pray for:

Our armed forces families, our leadership, our people, whole world round, all of Gods kids -

All the tough and blessing expressed above –

The love of folks –

Whatever is on your hearts and minds for us –

For our children and grand-children who miss us?.. 

For Makumira Secondary School looking to share stories and partner in some way with a foreign school, Great leaders, teachers, students, programs, strong backs, minds, and hearts –

For our health to stay ahead of whatever is before us –

For each and every one of you –

Each and every one of your prayers, your precious conversations with God –

Prayers, Your Prayer, Even your groaning prayers 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