The following is a letter Lyn wrote for family. It's revised slightly for our blog.
We
don’t have much on the schedule today, so I thought I would get a short message
off to you.
We arrived in Dar es Salaam at about 11pm on Jan 10 with a
large contingent of medical folks, as well as two couples coming to Iringa to oversee
the operation of Day of Grace from Jan 13 thru 18. We were supposed to have two buses meet us at
the airport to get us to our hotel for the night, but only one showed up. We had to load all of our luggage on the rack
system on top of the bus and cover it with a tarp. Luckily, it was not raining, as the tarp would
have been unlikely to keep the luggage very dry. The next morning both buses were there and we all started the long (9-hours
or so) bus trip west toward Iringa. The medical
team’s journey was a bit shorter as they were staying and working primarily in
Ilula (which is about 38 km east of Iringa) at the Ilula Lutheran Hospital. This is the hospital that has been upgraded
from a health center to a regional hospital through the efforts of the
workgroup that we have been a part of since 2002. The landscape is beautiful,
particularly during the rainy season when everything has greened up. Several parts of the trip are through river
gorges that are rather spectacular – see attached photo taken by Jim Wolf.
We arrived in Iringa just before dark and are
staying in a nice apartment with fairly reliable electrical power and hot
water.
In addition to working at the hospital in Ilula, the medical
team came into Iringa on the three days on which they provided medical
assessments for pastors and their spouses as part of Day of Grace. My job was to take pictures of all the pastors
and their spouses, as well as pictures and videos of other aspects of Day of
Grace.
On Jan 19, Mollie and I and most of the medical folks headed
out to visit our companion congregation at Tungamalenga on Saturday afternoon
and Sunday morning and then went on to Ruaha National Park for a couple of
days. Although Tungamalenga is not much
more than 100km from Iringa, the bus trip takes well over three hours due to
the poor condition of the road, which is dirt for most of the way. We visited several preaching points, including
Mahove, which is a Maasai village. It’s the
place that I've talked about concerning possible construction of a water
line from the adjacent hills. The line
has been completed and is working nicely.
Attached picture shows two Maasai girls at the spigots, with
the new chapel in the background. Some
of the Maasai men can be seen in next picture.
Our time in Ruaha was great in spite of some rain. In addition to seeing lions, we
finally were successful in seeing a leopard.
On our previous two trips, we had failed to
find a leopard despite spending quite a few hours looking for them. Upon our return to Iringa, we’ve been out to
Tumaini University a couple of times to take pictures of various student groups. We’ve also visited the Ilula Hospital, the Huruma
Orphanage, and the Image Secondary School (our church provides scholarships for
a few of the students there). On Jan 27,
we attended a service for the ordination of seven new pastors. The service lasted over five hours, which is
typical for Tanzania.
More later, Lyn
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