Hackfall

Whilst in the UK John and Monica Moonie (the in-laws) and Avril and I had a smashing day out to Hackfall. We had a lovely walk in the countryside and spend some time together.

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May’s last minute photos

Yeah, we’re off to England in just a few days now – we’ll be in Blighty by first thing on Friday morning. And we’re looking forward to it now too.

In the meantime, please enjoy the following pictures. I apologise for the poor quality – my phone has a poor camera in it, but I always have it with me, you see.

Progress on the missionary home site

Yeah, our friendly build team have broken ground a few weeks ago. Concrete has been poured for the footing, which is pretty deep and very solid looking, reinforced with pre-fab box sections of re-bar. Now the foundation is being build up using breeze blocks. I suppose by the time we get back to Tanzania it’s possible that the walls will be erected as high as the ring beam over the windows.

Rick Stringer, our CO and local missionary brother

Yeah, Rick and Malin Stringer’s visit finished yesterday. Rick is an experienced missionary with 26 years of missionary service behind him. Rick went to Gilead as a single brother, one of the last bachelors to be invited. Just a few short years ago, whilst in his assignment here in Tanzania, he met Malin, a Swedish need-greater, and they got married.

The visit was a great success, with plenty of support for the field ministry. 102 people attended the public talk, and we heard that our congregation has reached 72 publishers, including 7 completely new publishers since the last visit in November. Our publishers average over 14 hours in the field service, and on average conduct 1.5 studies each – not including the pioneers. (The regular pioneers’ average is nearly 8 studies.)

Avril taking her life in her hands

This was a snap from our field ministry. You may imagine that we were in the ‘rurals’ here, but no, this really is quite an urban location, ten minutes’ walk from the Kingdom Hall. Avril and I were preaching together during the circuit visit last week.

Jofrey Joshua

Jofrey is nearest the centre of the picture, holding the small child.

On previous occasions I have written about my student Joshua, and mentioned his 18-year-old son Jofrey. Joshua, as some readers may remember, was attending nearly all the meetings and becoming quite keen to publish himself, but finally gave in to opposition from his wife and has now returned to finding new ways to feed his 6 children. Life is hard, but I still feel sad that he couldn’t find a way to put the kingdom first.

Just as this was happening, Avril noticed that his eldest son Jofrey was becoming interested, and it took her a while to convince me that he was worth studying with. Finally, on her advice, we began the study together. One difficulty in particular is that, like many young people here, he studies at school six days a week, and the only day free is Sunday – prime time for bible studies with many in our territory.

His progress became manifest, and though he doesn’t often make it to Thursday meetings, I was thrilled when Jofrey was accepted as a congregation publisher. So he is now one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, with the privilege of bearing His name and talking to people himself about the good news of the kingdom, as all Christians are meant to do.

I double-booked myself with Joffrey and my other publisher student on Sunday, and so Lucas assisted with Joffrey’s study, then Joffrey assisted with Lucas’. We did the studies at the kingdom hall, as is my custom on Sundays. We had a good laugh, then the three of us went to look for two other students out in the field.

Avril and I are happy about this for a personal reason too. After a couple of years struggling with the language and the culture, we feel we are both beginning to make an impact in our territory (with a lot of help from the local brothers and sisters.) Jofrey is the first study that we’ve started ourselves that has taken the step of preaching. A rewarding morale booster for both of us.

Culcha, init!

It’s funny the things you miss when you’re far from home. Often, you don’t even notice them until you get them once more.

Avril and I have long had a fondness for music, and especially live music, of practically any kind. Though I lost any taste I once had for rowdy rock concerts, a little bit of real live musical entertainment is a treat.

There isn’t really anything like that around these parts, that we know of. Few people take the time to learn to play an instrument – certainly, it would be the preserve only of the rich and the determined.

Our team of builders includes two British brothers, along with their wives, and both of the brothers are rather talented musicians. Glenn Cole plays the guitar and sings, while Dan Bath plays drums. Though there isn’t a proper drum kit available, Dan makes do with a few little drums.

Valerie and Glen Corey dance to one number

Claire joins in with her flute

On Tuesday night Charles and Sonya invited us round to their house, where the build team is staying, and we all appreciated their renditions of our favourite numbers from Blighty. Claire Salvage, a sister involved in the kingdom hall build projects and who travels throughout Africa with her husband Mark, joined in with her flute.

We haven’t had a treat like that for some time, and we enjoyed it more than we expected. The concert went on until fairly late in the evening, but we were sad when we went our separate ways that evening. We hope we’ll be able to do it again before too long.

Things we miss from Blighty

Yeah, our trip home is now only two weeks away, and we’re looking forward to it quite a lot. Avril was home in June last year, but I haven’t been home since Dad died in August 2007 – nearly two years.

There aren’t too many things that you can’t buy here, but some staple items you would buy in the UK we can’t afford here. Butter is about £2.50/lb here, though milk is not expensive. Yes, we’re working on preparing our own! Cheese is another thing. Cheddar is available, as well as a slightly out of the ordinary locally prepared Gouda. Neither are particularly nice or cheap. We certainly can’t afford the brie, camembert, stilton, or roquefort that we so enjoy.

Another complaint is that crisps (potato chips) just aren’t the same here. Pringles are available and not too expensive, but for some reason any other kind tends to be a bit soggy when you get them. We’ve perfected the art of home-made salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps, but we’re looking forward to crinkle cut, Discos, Doritos and other flavours too.

Avril says she misses fruity yoghurts. She makes yoghurt every week from fresh local milk – bought still warm from the farmer. But it’s just not the same somehow. (She likes that ‘factory’ taste, I suppose.)

The chocolate here, some of which actually bears the Cadbury’s logo, is grainy and lacks chocolaty-ness, defeating the purpose somewhat. One of the major items brought to us from Britain by guests has been chocolate, as well as good ground coffee. It surprises many to hear that. You see, Starbucks buys all the best coffee from here and we can’t afford it. Mars bars, Bournville, Lindt dark chocolate and so on are amongst ‘most missed items’ too.

The beer here is good, though it has nearly doubled in price in the nearly three years we’ve been here. Local varieties are called Kilimanjaro, Safari and Castle, and there’s a Guinness franchise as well. Tastes nothing, nothing like Guinness back home but I still love it. It tastes of marmite. We’ll still be queuing in Tesco’s with San Miguel, Guinness and maybe even Scotch.

Number one, though, on the missed list, is undoubtedly Red Wine. We only buy red wine once every six weeks or so, and save it for special occasions. We sometimes make a bottle last three nights. It’s usually from South Africa and is not too bad, though it beats me why no one takes advantage of the ideal climate here to grow wine grapes.

So if any of you, our readers, sees us in Tesco over the month of June, you’ll no doubt predict the bizarre combination of items that’ll be in our baskets!

English Lessons

As we mentioned, our newly-secured visas stipulate that we actually do some volunteer work, and I’ve found myself teaching an elementary level English class.

The class has up to fifteen students in it, and they’re all adults. The average attendance is about ten, and consists mainly of workers who are associated in some way to the work of the charity. There’s a pastor in the class from a local church. The lady who runs the charity for whom the class is held gave him a dressing down one day. She’s one of Avril’s bible students, though she herself is a Muslim. Overhearing the pastor trying to give doctrinal advice to someone there at her office, she interrupted, saying, ‘If you’re really going to give advice about the bible, you need to sit down at the feet of one of Jehovah’s Witnesses first and learn!’ Though of Islamic persuasion, she was keenly aware of the inaccuracy of his ‘Christian’ teaching. In many vocations, including the clergy, people are not as qualified even as they might be in the UK. I have no doubt that there are clergymen here that have never received any structured vocational tuition at all.

In each of the two weekly one-hour lessons I teach I try to keep the students involved. So we play games, do involving exercises, and work in pairs. This helps to make sure that shrinking violets in the class receive less practice than others. A game some may remember from their childhood, ‘Simon Says’ is ideal for teaching verbs, and is endlessly expandable. We play bingo to help with numbers. The students prepare their own flashcards to help them remember nouns. The hour always seems very short. I am also instructed to give the students plenty of homework, and I am happy to oblige with this. Two hours’ language tuition is not really enough without zealous private study and practise.

Special Day Assembly Highlights

Our extendable kingdom hall was host once more to a special assembly day, which was very successful. For Avril and I it was an enjoyable programme which we enjoyed to the full, since we had no share on the programme ourselves.

Once more we were pleased to invite our dear friends from Mbulu, Modesty and Jamaica Kobelo. They are the couple that we went to visit in the town where they are assigned, out in the middle of nowhere and at 2,000m above sea level. We have made it a habit to invite them to stay during each assembly, and we enjoy their company very much. Each time, they bring their humble gifts, usually vegetables that grow in the fertile soils from around Mbulu. This time, among their gifts, was a fruit called topetope, whose name in English we don’t know. It tastes like a slimy pear, but has a tough lumpy green outer skin and seeds that look a bit like cockroaches. It’s quite nice really.

On the programme, we enjoyed hearing the experiences of the local brothers and sisters, many of whom are very zealous in the ministry. For example, there was one regular pioneer sister who was interviewed. Though she is a local girl, she was asked a few months ago to serve where the need is greater in a village called Mto wa Mbu, or in English, Mosquito River. That unappealing name does not prevent tourists by their thousands from visiting this village, since it stands at the gates to two world-famous national parks. In contrast to the UK, where practically all the area of the country is assigned to some congregation or other, no doubt a large majority of the area of this large country is not assigned and not regularly preached. Mto wa Mbu has perhaps never been thoroughly preached before. She went there with a companion and started preaching, just the two of them. The nearest meetings are fifty miles away, but the sisters got a good response from the field and now have 30 studies to conduct between them.

She even managed to start a study with a pastor in the area, and as the study progressed, they reached chapter 11, paragraph 5 in the What Does the Bible Really Teach book. On reading the cited verse in Job 34:10, the pastor exclaimed, ‘Oh, when people find out about this, we clergy are done for!” Something no doubt said in the hearts of many of his colleagues around the world. It certainly is a privilege to expose bible truth and Christendom’s lies, and all the better when individuals respond humbly.

There was a young lad who made special efforts to start studies at school during his free periods. He was able to begin a study with a classmate, who had many questions to ask. The classmate made rapid progress, and was baptised last year. The youth’s family perceived fundamental positive changes in the lad’s behaviour and personality, and they also started studying and now attend meetings regularly themselves (- Ephesians 4:23, 24.)

Among the attendance on Sunday was my student Geoffrey. I have spoken of his father on a few occasions in the past and I am disappointed to say that he’s no longer studying himself. He had many pressures, including his common-law wife who opposed him but who is the mother of his four youngest children. It’s not easy feeding all those mouths with an ordinary job or home business. He succumbed eventually to these pressures, while his eldest son began studying earnestly. It took me a while to see his potential, and now we study on Sundays each week. He struggles to answer the questions well when he doesn’t prepare for his study, so sometimes he refuses to study, asking for a little more time to prepare.

He tells me often about the hardship and opposition he faces because of taking his stand as a witness. Not only does he face opposition from his step-mother, but also at school, where his colleagues mock him for not being a part of a ‘proper’ religion. They make fun of him because Jehovah’s Witnesses, to them, seem like a small, pathetic church compared to the Catholics, Muslims and Pentecostals here. Witnesses expect that kind of persecution, I tell him, and that it’s a further proof that he’s in the right religion (- John 15:20; Matthew 5:10-12; 2 Timothy 3:1, 12.) The elders will meet with him this week to see if he’s ready to preach with the congregation.

Another student, recently passed into my care, is Moses, and he too was there, with his two small children. Though his accurate knowledge of the bible is not advanced, he has great zeal for the scriptures, and though he had not even begun studying the first chapter, he asked me what I thought the unforgiveable sin described at Mark 3:29 actually is. He works as a shoe repair man in a tiny hut by a busy thoroughfare, and in between resoling and stitching people’s shoes, he’s there, reading God’s word. We sit there, studying together, interrupted by his customers as they come to ask for his help.

Lake Duluti

Our dear friends Tony and Ann Porter from South Africa recommended that we take a trip to a place called Lake Duluti, for a day out, while our Swedish friend Anna Sanberg was here visiting with us. We had heard of the place, but we didn’t know where it was or anything else about it.

We found out that it was quite an easy place to reach and struck out for our destination one warm Saturday afternoon in January, the warmest month here.

When we arrived, we found that there was a nominal entrance fee, which seemed to be promising. As we entered, we saw a bar playing noisy music, right there on the bank of the beautiful tree-lined lake. How relieved we were when we found out that we could rent a rowing boat for our party for a few dollars. We bought some cokes and clambered aboard the boat. Since there were no seats in the boat, the staff had taken some plastic garden chairs (the kind you see literally everywhere around here) and hacked the legs off them. Then they are placed on the flat ‘deck’ of the boat – perfect!

 

Once you are out of earshot of the bar, the lake is tranquil and beautiful. We quietly rowed all around the lake, taking in the sunshine and the extraordinary variety of bird life. There are diving birds and storks and herons and other birds, either enjoying the sunshine, drying their wings, or actively engaged in hunting down a tasty tilapia or bass.

We were quite sorry to have to head home after so little time, but we loved it so much there that we went back a few weeks later. a perfectly relaxing way to spend a sunny afternoon.

A couple of interesting photos

Today Avril and I spent a long morning together in the ministry conducting her series of ‘Tuesday’ bible studies in a distant area of our territory called Engo Sheraton.

On our way to the territory, we saw a touching site, which we would like to share with you our loyal readership.There was a tiny kitten, dozing gently at the breast of a young dog. The kitten woke up and stayed with her larger friend, a very ordinary ferral dog of the kind often seen round here. They were obviously very close friends!

Later in the day, a student of Avril’s convinced her to accept a kind gift: a live hen. The student tied the hen’s legs together and dropped her into a plastic bag, with a hole for her head. Here she is!

Now our hen, whose name is Mnomno, an adjective in Swahili meaning ‘very fine indeed’ and used particularly in reference to chickens, is running around our little compound, clucking and eating bread and pooing. She’s quite loveable, really.

Real Joy!

A number of months ago I wrote a blog about Shanilla (A picture of her is on that blog). An eleven year old girl with whom I was studying. Initially I studied with her Mum and when she stopped Shan carried on. She had made wonderful progress, attending the meetings and bringing her friends along with her until she was bundled off to live in the middle of nowhere with her Gran.

I saw her a short time later, her mother had brought her home for a weekend. She said that she had found the KH in the area she went to but that it took her two hours to walk there and thus couldn't go each week. I encouraged her to try and find out if there was any bros and sisters living near her. I didn't know if she had succeeded or not til today. I was not able to help her as she couldn't describe where exactly she lived.

Today the other half of our circuit assembled for the special assembly day, we had ours last week. As it is held nearby I attended as I hoped some studies would attend. Happily they did. But even happilier (if that's a word), Shan was there. It seems that she found a group 1/2 hrs walk from her home and a sister in the group is studying with her and she is able to attend sunday and thursday's meeting each week. There are 14 publishers in the group. It seems that Shan, determined to find any witnesses in her area, went out one sunday morning and stood on a main path and asked anybody passing, who looked like they had a meeting bag, if they were witnesses and unsurprisingly Jehovah blessed her efforts. She met Sara, the sister who is now conducting her study. The sister told me that Shanilla has been severely opposed by her grandma who has beat her and threatened her not to attend the meetings. The reason is that many churches have an arrangement to give out money and her Gran wants her to attend one of those. One neighbour of Shan's was so curious as to why she was so determined to go to the meetings with the witnesses that she decided to go to the meeting herself but the Gran has frightened her off so she has not as yet attended. Sara said she thinks this lady is too curious not to attend and they will see her soon at the meeting. Shanilla insisted that I meet each of the 14 publishers in her group, two are pioneers, one an elderly bro and the other his son who is married and has a little boy, there is an elderly ministerial servant who leads the group. No elders. I asked Shan if she felt loved by the people she lived with and she said no but she said that the brothers and sisters in this little group do love her and I could see that as I talked to them today. Shan had slept overnight at one of there home's in order to travel early with them to the convention today. I really felt a loss when Shan left to move away and prayed to Jehovah that she have contact with witnesses there. I should have had no doubts that Jehovah would look after Shan! It is really faith strengthening.

Visiting Home

For the third time in two and a half years, the fourth for Avril, we’ll be headed to Blighty for four weeks beginning on June 4.

We’re flying to Newcastle Airport via Schipol, avoiding London altogether. We’ll be at Newcastle District Convention. Starting on June 22, we’ll be spending a week or so in Dunoon with the congregation there. Otherwise we’ll mostly be in Northallerton and perhaps briefly in Stockton-on-Tees.

Apart from spending time with family (I haven’t been home myself since Dad died in August 2007) we have a further motive for returning.

We’ve been quite focused on applying for Gilead Missionary School since we got married, and our desire to attend has become stronger as the years have passed. We see Gilead as a chance to perpetuate our circumstances here in Africa, serving Jehovah our God in the fullest way possible. It would also be a privilege to gain such a wonderful training over there at Paterson, USA.

However it is not presently possible to apply for Gilead from countries that accept Gilead missionaries. Why take people away from useful assignments only to send them back again? So it’s necessary for us to go home for a little while and fill out our applications as UK residents.

Our Gilead application will be more significant on this fourth occasion because generally the brothers invited are elders (almost without exception) and this will be the first time that we’ll apply whilst satisfying that criterion.

Barbeque Chicken?

I received an unusual gift on the ministry on Tuesday, a live chicken! The Bible study who gave her to me lives about 2 miles away so I had a lovely walk home with her under my arm, the most difficult bit was keeping my balance crossing the plank over the river, not usually easy but infinitely more challenging with a chicken. To be perfectly honest she didn’t really make much fuss unlike all the people I passed on the way who evidently didn’t think it was a usual thing to see a white lady wandering round with a live chicken.
I think the idea is that I was supposed to slaughter and eat her but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I had to take her with me to two Bible studies I had planned on the way back. The first is with a lady who sells coal from a shed. She usually throws a piece of fabric over a bag of coal as a seat for me. I don’t usually come out clean. She actually keeps chickens and said that she could tell that mine is an unusually nice chicken who would lay eggs this week. Her husband came in partway through and said that he believed his wife was right about the chicken. He could tell “by the look on the chickens face”.
She is currently living in the garden, the chicken I mean. I don’t know if it is odd but I quite like her wandering around, clucking away. I am trying to decide whether to buy her a boyfriend. I have tried to do some research as my knowledge of chickens is based on the film “chicken run” and I suspect that this knowledge will not suffice.
The cat is terrified of her and has spent hours watching her suspiciously from a distance. The chicken seems to have a penchant for sitting on the barbeque. Is that prophetic?
The picture is me sitting on the goat (the Tanzanian tool for preparing coconut), in my garden, trying to do the coconut without permitting the chicken to steal all of it. She was quite determined.