December: O Come, Emmanuel!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from the rainy season in TZ!

PRUF:
-Praise God that we are feeling more settled in, and starting to figure out life here. As Bek has put it: “I don’t hate it here EVERY day…” This truly is a praise, and a prayer request the so called “ticket days”(so named because if you had a ticket on that day you would get on a plane!) grow fewer and farther between.
-Praise God for our growth in language, but we’re definitely realizing how much we have yet to learn here. Please keep praying for our language acquisition, humility in learning, and perseverance!
-The holiday season certainly reminds us of what we’re missing back in the States. Please pray for comfort and a reminder that the true significance of Christmas is the reason we’re here in Africa in the first place!
-As we begin to settle in, we are thinking more and more about what ministry in Kigoma looks like long-term. We need wisdom to plan our steps here!

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December brought the start of the rainy season, and folks have said it will last for a few more months. It’s wonderful! It rains almost daily, but usually for only an hour or two at a time, and it cools the temperature by at least 15 degrees every time it moves in. The crops are shooting up and everything is turning green!

I(Josh) started at the hospital in November, shadowing Dr. Pepper(on the adult ward) and Dr. Meggie(on the pediatric ward) for a couple of weeks each, then Meggie went back to the states unexpectedly, and I covered the pediatric ward solo for a couple weeks. The pathology and severity of disease here is incredible. In the first week I saw cases that I had only ever read about in textbooks, like:
-Organophospate poisoning
-PJP pneumonia and diffuse Kaposi’s sarcomas in an AIDS patient
-Severe malnutrition with kwashiorkor, and severe malnutrition with marasmus
-Encephalopathic malaria
-Cholera
The time on the wards was simultaneously interesting and terrifying- really highlighting just how much I have to learn about everything!!

We celebrated Thanksgiving twice- once with the expat community here, and once with the team. We roasted a turkey that we brought frozen from Nairobi, which was an indescribable treat(as far as we know, there is no word for turkey in Swahili). This month Rebekah has been striving valiantly to make the season feel Christmasy. Some our holiday activities can be found in the gallery below, including Salt-dough ornaments, Jesse Tree ShrinkDinks, a home-made stick Christmas Tree, gingerbread house contests. We’ve also been working through the cinematic classics like The Polar Express(3/5 stars), Miracle on 34th Street(4/5), White Christmas(5/5), Elf(5/5) and the Muppet’s Christmas Carol(5/5). What are your Christmas movie favorites?

Part of our settling in included planting a garden. We got help from our dayworkers(we have a rotating schedule with the men who also function as our night-guards). Here’s a crazy stat- 80% of Tanzanians are subsistence farmers. Nearly open green space here is planted by someone, with something. As a results, just about everyone knows how to farm and grow a lot of food, because most of the Tanzanians you meet have to farm to survive, and have since they were young. The most common crops to see is maize, the primary staple. We brought a variety of seeds from Nairobi, so we’ll see what we can get to grow here.
On the flip side, sometimes you assume that locals know things and regret taking their word for it: we have a large Traveller’s Palm in the front yard, and it had a number of dead fronds hanging. We planned to go at them with a machete, but one of our guys recommended setting the lower branches on fire, reassuring us that they burn out before they can do any damage to the living parts of the tree. One large fire and a week of steady rain later, and it looks like the palm may not make it, but the fire was impressive. After a minute or two of burning, the sap/water from inside the truck built up pressure to come out like a hose! We’ll see if it’ll make it…

One of the ministry outlets we have joined in here is “Buckets”. This is a ministry of making house calls to housebound or bed bound people to distribute Send Relief buckets, a kit with a variety of supplies useful in caring for an ailing person(such as gloves, bed pads, vaseline and lip balm, etc). We’re able to shard the good news of Jesus with people in their homes and minister to their physical needs at the same time. It’s been a blessing to go and meet with people, some of whom have been abandoned by society. One picture below is of a lady who is bed bound after a severe stroke(unfortunatley, “wait and see” is really the only treatment for stroke here). Picture is shared with permission.

That’s it for this update. We are praying for you all, that you would experience the grace, peace, hope and love of our Savior this season! We are celebrating with you that His life, death and resurrection for our salvation started in that manger 2000 years ago!

One last thing- this is the season of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, the annual gift that supports missionaries like us all over the world. The remarkable thing about the LMCO is that 100% of giving goes directly to support work like ours- all administrative costs are covered through other income streams. So if you want to support us and those like us, consider making a year end donation here: Lottie Moon