4:35 PM – Sorry for the delay my friends. Travel takes a couple of days to get to Kasulu and we did not have much time to write anything besides a couple of Facebook posts. So, Safari Njema!! That is swahili for “Good Journey”, and it was for sure. I’ll tell more about it this evening. For now, I just wanted to report that we got here safe and sound.
More anon!
8:20 PM – OK, I’m back!. So let’s see. Where did I leave off? Ah, yes! Let’s start with yesterday.
We arrived in Dar Es Salaam at about 2:00 PM. Meeting us at the airport was our good friend and driver Mashombo. We met Mashombo several years ago when he first drove us from the airport to our hotel in Dar. We quickly became good friends and he has been our preferred driver ever since. We are able to contact him from the USA via texting to his cell phone, so it’s usually very easy to connect with him before we travel. We arrived at the hotel in down town Dar at about 4 PM. Once we got to our room we relaxed for a while and refreshed ourselves before heading up to get some dinner at 6:30 PM. Our experience is that dinner takes a while in Tanzania, so with that, we were able to head for bed at 9 PM. That was good because at that time jet lag really starts to set it. The good thing is, we are going to sleep at the right time to adjust our body clocks overnight. The next morning we woke up refreshed and ready to start the next leg of the trip, which is our Air Tanzania flight from Dar to Kigomo. It’s a 2 hour flight from the eastern side of Tanzania to the western most city.
When we arrived in Kigoma we were greeted by Baraka. He is one of the staff members at DWT involved in the finance department. We drove into Kigoma city and had some lunch together. Afterwards we stopped off to get a cell phone SIMM chip for my Android tablet. We use the tablet for Internet access by tethering it to our other devices. Once we had the tablet all set we began our final journey to Kisulu.
When I first came to Kisulu in 2005, there was only a dirt road going from Kigoma to Kisulu. The trip took over 3 hours back then and the road conditions were unsophisticated in terms of comfort. It was a rough ride! Now in 2022, the road is completely paved over. The ride is smooth and it only takes an hour or so to make the trip. What a difference! You have to appreciate what folks have endured to travel around these parts for so many years. I have to say, we arrived in much better shape than we ever have before.
So here we are in Kisulu again, our home away from home. Cathy and I have missed this place and the people here over the past 2 1/2 years. I appreciate the Lord provisions in our lives that have given us the resources to travel and come here over that past 17 years. I’m looking forward to what the Lord will have us do while were are here over the next couple of weeks. For sure, there will computer work for us to do. But, I’m also looking forward to our times of worship together with our friends at DWT.
Tomorrow, we will spend some time at Lake Tanganyika College, mainly to deliver the new computer equipment we brought with us. We may or may not get time to install the systems, but if not, we will get to it on Monday. In the mean time, we’ll be visiting nearby Murusi Church on Sunday morning. We’ll be participating in the worship service with our voices and guitar in hand. I’m looking forward to that.
Here we are ready to go at JFK Airport. We had a small surprise this morning when our driver did not show up at the agreed pick up time. After about 20 minutes, I texted his number and waited somewhat patiently for a reply. There was no reply at first, so I started to look up long term parking for JFK, just in case. Then a phone call came from our apologizing driver. “No problem”, I said. We really did have plenty of time to get to checked-in and make our flight. So again, here we are. We are ready to go and appreciative of this opportunity to help our friends and serve the Lord in East Africa for the next few weeks. We will probably make our next post in Dar Es Salaam as there is a short lay over in Dubai.