It’s Saturday, so today we took it slow in the morning and eventually made our way out of the compound with Daudi to see his son’s Frank and Jonathan, who are away at primary boarding school. The school is about 20 minutes away from Kasulu. 
Some of you may remember when Daudi and Olivia were here at St. Paul’s Church with their newborn Frank. At that time Daudi was attending Nashotah House Seminary through a grant and with support from St Paul’s Church and others. Frank was baptized at St. Paul’s and Cathy and I became his God parents. So it only fitting that we got a chance to see him, if only for a short while. Cathy brought a small gift for him (pencil’s and a coloring book).
From there we visited the Saturday Kasulu Market. It was crowded as you can see. It’s an amazing spectacle of items that are for sale by people who walk here from villages all around the region, some of who started their journey in the early morning hours to get here.
After visiting the market we visited a new church in the Murusi area of Kasulu. Murusi already has a large and very strong church in the vacinity, but even so, people come from long distances to get there, so a new church plant was started in the area. It has grown to a congregation of about 300 worshipers on Sunday morning. The church building is basically a built on the bare ground with wood posts that hold up the sills for the roof to rest on. The shell is then closed off with materials such as big blue tarps. At the moment the church needs to find a new location so they are in the hunt for land that they can use to move the church building to and eventually build a brick building with cement foundation.
Afterwards we came back to the compound to relax for the afternoon. < I worked some songs with Cathy and Shaw worked on his sermon. Shaw is going to preach at the 6:30 AM service at the Cathedral Church in Kasulu and Cathy and I will sing two songs, including the congregation in while we sing with some lyrics that we translated into Swahili. The two songs are “Sing for Joy” and “Forever Reign”. The chorus to the first song is:
Sing for Joy to God our strength
which translates to:
Imba qwa furaha na Mungu nguvu yetu
The second song has a bridge which says:
My heart will sing (no other name), Jesus, Jesus
Which we translated to:
Moyo wangu utaimba, Yesu, Yesu
I mention this because I want to give my friends back at St. Paul’s fair warning. I will be leading many of the worship songs on the Sunday after we get back (May 12). And we will be singing these two songs, ALSO with the Swahili words for the choruses. Don’t worry, they are very easy to learn!!!
It’s time to go to bed for the evening. We have an early morning and two church services to attend tomorrow. The Lord bless you all in your worship also tomorrow. Until the next post!
Bill
Yup! As you can just imagine, we got to the Bible College and found out that the entire town of Kasulu was without power. It’s a national holiday today so the power company decided to do some maintenance, as best we could figure. Did I panic? No, I really laughed. It’s just the funniest thing that challenges come up like this. Test of faith? Spiritual attack? I really can’t say, but being here in the Lord’s hands, doing what he has called us to do just makes it seem ….. well… OK. I knew that if not today, than tomorrow would be the day to start. In the mean time I began to set things up with the help of Elisha, the young man from Burundi who takes care of the computers and Internet café. We got the server assembled and one of the new PC put in place and by that time, Daudi and others had gotten a gasoline generator running so we could begin to boot things up. The server installation when through without a glitch. It was one of the quickest installs of Windows 2008 I’ve ever done. By the end of the day we had just about installed all of the software we need for the system and even had time to do some testing with some wireless repeaters we brought along. Those worked great as I had hoped they would. The repeaters will allow us to have Internet access throughout the Bible College classroom facility and offices. Most important of those is the staff room where we will install a new PC for the staff to use for private preparations and such.
That took up most of the day. When we got back to the compound, we had a wonderful evening with Alastair and Helen Sammons. They are two missionaries from Britain who are stationed here for two years. Helen is the Academic Dean for the Bible College and Alastair is a surgeon who is helping out in four hospitals in the region. I tip my hat to them for the work they are doing here. It’s hard living in the rural region, even with the recent advent of 24/7 electric power and such.
Tomorrow we are going to visit our God child, Frank NDahana, Daudi’s son and do some browsing around Kasulu on market day. I’ll hopefully get some time to post some pictures tomorrow as well. Tonight the cellular Internet connection is not working well so I’ll be doing good to get this text post out.
Please continue to prayer for us. We know we have felt the power of those prayers each day. Please know that we have been blessed by them and feel a closeness of the Lord’s presence because of them. We will get back to work on the computers on Monday, so I’m just looking forward to a nice weekend of fellowship and worship together with our friends here in Kasulu.
Bill