Update - Aug 30

Sorry for not blogging in a while! We got back from Tanzania 6 days ago. Tanzania is a conundrum. It is the least comfortable place to live (rodents, reptiles, scary guard dogs, mosquitoes, ants, bats etc) and the Tanzanians can be tough for the doctors to deal with. There are no ‘servants’ there. There are only 3 guys that work there, Michael (accounts), Fady (doctor) and Waseem (pharmacist), and the workload is so much that they don’t have time or energy for spiritual stuff like Bible studies or prayer meetings. And to top it all off, hardly any servants are sent to Tanzania, so the fellas a lonely. It takes a special person to survive there, and these three guys have been hand-chosen by God for this mission. They are the sweetest bunch of guys I have ever met. Each one of them is sweet as sugar and I am really glad we got to know them well. From day one, we would all have breakfast and lunch together. At night, we would have a prayer meeting with Bible study and songs, followed by dinner. We behaved as one unit and this helped our spiritual uplifting. After 5 days, we all formed a tight bond, and we were very sad to leave Tanzania because of them. Guys, if you are reading this, please know that you are loved by us and by God and that we will see you again, and I hope you are maintaining the prayer meetings :)

The priest there is a young Kenyan priest called Father Joshua. He is one year older than me and became a priest at around the time I became a deacon (~2.5y ago). He is an extremely sweet man and has this heavenly smile. He is the brother of one of the IT guys here in Nairobi. He is so cool – he doesn’t have a car, so he rides a bike around town! It was the first time I have ever seen a priest, in the black robe, riding a bike. Like the boys, I think God chose him specifically to serve there. He is the only priest in Tanzania and he has the charm needed in order to develop a relationship with the people.

During one of the prayer meetings, Abouna said the sweetest thing. He was talking about marriage. He said that even though it sounded silly, he truly believed that the wife was made from the rib of the husband. He looked at Christine and me and said that we were so perfectly matched, that the only explanation is that God took one of my ribs and made her.

Abouna has this old-school IBM laptop. I used to have one of these when I first went on-call at TransCanada. It is a big, heavy laptop and it runs Windows 95. He asked me to take a look at his laptop because every time he played music on it, the music would skip. He asked me if it had anything to do with memory. So I spent a few hours trying to increase the performance of this beast, only to eventually discover that the music skipping was due to a scratched-up cd! I am so smart, S M R T! I cleaned the cd with my shirt and saved the day! You know, I couldn’t even find ‘task manager’ in Windows 95 – did it exist back then?

The visitations in Tanzania have been my favourite so far. The people are very welcoming and there are lots of sweet children. The children are always happy to see muzungus (fobs). They are a bit shy at first and all it takes to get them to interact with us is for us to do something silly. I tried to make this one bunch of kids laugh by talking to this duck that was hanging around. I said to the duck, ‘habari’, which means ‘how are you’, and the duck turned around and took a dump! The kids loved it. Whenever we would walk by a bunch of kids, they would all start yelling ‘muzungu’. Eventually, I started calling every kid a muzungu. I would say ‘habari muzungu!’ to every kid, and they would just stand there, stunned and confused – it was payback baby!

On the last night in Tanzania, we had movie night. Abouna brought his kids and we all watched ‘Evan Almighty’ which is a comedy about Noah’s Ark. Ironically, part way through the movie, this monster rain storm began and took out the power to the complex. At first it was fun to see all the rain, but after half an hour of sitting in the dark, we got worried and started singing worship songs (mostly for the kids ;) During the singing, the power came back! Abouna said that God was waiting for His invitation to movie night :) Christine made this awesome chocolate cake with strawberry filling. That night was the last night of St. Mary’s fast, so we didn’t eat until midnight, and then we feasted on cake and ice-cream and coke! It was soooo good. I just want to add something cool I learned about fasting. One of the reasons we fast is to attract God’s attention. Abouna Elisha in Maseno put it best. He was talking about Easter time when all Christians fast. He said that when this happens, God looks down on the world and sees that things are not normal. He tells Archangel Micheal to go see that is going on. He tells Archangel Gabriel to go see why we are not eating. He tells angels to go take care of his children. He says this and that and points here and there. Heaven is shaken. This is what happens when you attract the attention of God.

Before we left, we talked to Abouna and encouraged him to start a spiritual schedule with the fellas. They are spiritually starving and really really need it. He thanked us for the advice and said he would be willing to do it. I hope it has already begun.

Tanzania exposed us to many creatures. If you don’t already know, Christine is deathly afraid of all insects, rodents and reptiles, but her perspective totally changed after Tanzania. Now when she sees a cockroach, she doesn’t freak out. She says that after living with rats, insects ain’t no thing but a chicken wing. I am grateful for this.

We are back in Nairobi now. We shared our experiences with the other servants and we have started to have ‘sharing time’ each morning, where we share what we got out of quiet time. This has totally motivated all of us to do quiet time and it’s been a great way to start each day. I think that Nairobi is as much spiritual warfare as Tanzania. In Nairobi, the amount of administration work we do takes us away from spiritual activities and we have to fight for it. The devil is clever and will use anything at his disposal to separate us from God. I discovered something interesting in Tanzania: When we were in Canada, the devil used ‘comfort’ to drive us away from God, and in Africa he is using ‘discomfort’ to do the same thing. Let us all be wise to his wiles and put on the full armour of God to protect ourselves. Let us ask God for spiritual laser eye surgery, that we may continually see everything through the eyes of God and not through the eyes of the world. Finally, let us ask God to Christify us (I came up with that word), that we may be imitators of God, that we may act like Him, sound like Him, look like Him, walk like Him and love like Him.

God Bless.