Jambo rafikis! (Hello friends),
My name is Grace Ristow and I am a junior nursing student. We are just finishing our 6thday in Tanzania. Today we all dressed up in skirts and nice blouses and went to an African church about 20 minutes outside of Arusha. It was interesting to see that everyone dressed up in their Sunday best which is often the best set of clothes that they own. It is much like we used to do but nowadays are a lot more casual. Sometimes I wish we still did that! A lot of what the women wore was so beautiful! One woman wore a silk red African dress with gold threading and I could tell it was most definitely her Sunday best. A lot of men wore suit and ties or at least a button down shirt and nice slacks. The church service started at 10:00 a.m. and was supposed to be all in Swahili as the church service at 7:30 a.m. is the one in English. However the people were so nice and welcoming and translated it in English for us after each sentence in Swahili. There was a lot of joyful singing and dancing. Everyone was so passionate, especially while praying. Their praying would go on for ten minutes at least with everyone praying out loud! The service was only supposed to go two hours but it was almost four because the sermon alone was two and half hours! The pastor that was speaking was a guest speaker and was very dynamic! It was a very good sermon though. It was about going out and evangelizing and giving money and food to help evangelize people. At the end of the sermon he asked people to give money and almost everyone in the church even though they had nothing, gave everything they had. This was quite a difference from America where sometimes it is like pulling teeth to get people to give to the church. It was also extremely powerful when the pastor asked people to kneel down and ask God to forgive them for not going out and evangelizing. Overall the church service was quite enjoyable and a change from our sometimes mundane church services in the United States.
After the church service we hurried back to Ahadi Lodge to change and eat lunch. Our lunch was a traditional African dish called samosas. They are like African egg rolls with a similar outer shell and vegetable or beef on the inside. We each had vegetable ones and beef ones. Once we got changed, we got in the Safari vehicles to go to a place called Mulala. Mulala is a village that is also a tourist place. It is a family farm that makes their own cheese, coffee and honey and sells it to the city of Arusha. Mama Anna is the lady who started it to help the woman of the village. Someone gave Mama Anna a calf and she gave the first borne calf to someone else that needed a cow and that person did the same thing and so on. They ended up producing so much milk between everyone that had cows that they needed to do something with it and that is where the cheese production and selling came in. So while in Mulala, we learned how they make cheese, how they make coffee from the coffee plants they grow, and all about the traditional Mulala village, including facts about the banana trees there. There are four different banana plants that they have. Two of the kinds are small and sweet for eating and cooking. The other two are bigger and used to make banana beer. The road to get up there was more than a little bumpy, imagine hundreds of deep potholes in a row, but it was well worth it!
Tomorrow we leave to go to Tudor Village which is about two hours away. There might be little to no internet there, so if you don't hear from us, just know we are safe and will try to post when we can! God bless!
-Grace
