Thursday, June 20, 2013

Adventures in Dar es Salaam and Maasailand Part I

I’m in this small rental car with Felis and we’re on our way back to Julius and Jade’s house from Miriam’s house. It’s around 5:00 pm and we are in the city of Dar es Salaam, and it’s been a really long day for Felis and me. We were really tired and just wanted to get back to Julius and Jade’s to rest. As we are driving on the crowded street during rush hour, a motorcycle tries to pass us on our right in a really tight space, causing Felis to swerve left. All of a sudden, BOOM!

Dar es Salaam is a crazy place. I spent a whole week in Dar (from Monday the 10th to the 17th) with Felis, Jacob and Wilfredi, and our mission was to promote Kahawa Records (Pamoja’s record label) by appearing on television stations and radios, talking about Kahawa Records and the Maasai choir that Pamoja supports called the En-Kata Choir. Felis and I were graciously hosted by Julius, a Kenyan who is a missionary out of Canada, and his wife Jade, who is a Canadian-born missionary. They opened up there house for us and were great hosts and I am so thankful for their hospitality. Since Julius and Jade only had room for two people, Jacob and Wilfredi stayed at a hotel downtown. Anyways, I was in Dar to shadow Felis, the general manager of Kahawa Records, and take pictures as he talked to different radio stations and television stations about the record label and his vision for it. While we were on more of the promotion side, Jacob and Wilfredi were on the distribution side. They were trying to distribute the En-Kata Photo Book and the En-Kata CD and DVD to different bookstores and music stores across Dar. It was a really awesome and successful trip because Felis was able to appear on a national Tanzanian radio station called Clouds FM to talk about Kahawa Records and the En-Kata Choir, as well as a local gospel television station called Sibuka Television. The distribution side was also very successful. Jacob and Wilfredi were able to sell several copies of the En-Kata Photo Book and the CD’s and DVD’s to different stores around Dar. It was really cool because one of the stores that ended up buying some of the Maasai CD’s originally told Jacob that Maasai music would never sell in Tanzania. That really discouraged Jacob, but God provided and the store ended up buying several CD’s, and just a couple of days later, the store had already sold four copies! God is truly amazing. This trip was such an awesome experience for me and I am so glad that I went.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about Dar es Salaam the city, and what makes it so crazy. First off, after spending a week in Dar, I have no right to complain about crazy drivers ever again. It seems like there are just no rules on the road in Dar and it’s pretty chaotic. Not to mention, all of the traffic. Dar es Salaam is not technically the capital of Tanzania, but it might as well be because pretty much everything is in Dar. This means that the city is like a constant traffic jam. Needless to say, Felis and I spent a lot of our time in the car trying to get to wherever we had to go. That brings me to the beginning of the post. As we were driving, a motorcycle tried to pass us and Felis, who was driving, had to swerve left to avoid a collision. However, to our left was a boy on a bicycle riding down the street, and as we swerved, our mirror collided with the boy’s bike handle causing the passenger side mirror to shatter, and throwing the boy off the bike and into a ditch. As we hit him, I honestly thought that there was no way the boy could be alive. We hit him hard and he flew off of his bike into the ditch on the side of the road. We slowed down and tried to find a place to pull over on the side of the road to make sure that the boy was ok and as we were doing that, some random guy came up on a bike and started yelling at us in Swahili, and telling us that we need to check on the boy. Once we found a place to pull over, we got out of the car and Felis calmly explained to him that we couldn’t just stop in the middle of the road, and that we were going to check on the boy. I looked back and saw the boy getting up and walking toward us. That in itself was such a relief to me, but we saw that he was holding his arm weird; making us think that he had broken it. When he got to us, we looked at his arm and saw that it was a little scraped and bruised, but not that bad. He was tough and wasn’t complaining at all. We drove him and the guy that was telling us to check on him to the hospital just to make sure that he was okay, and it turned out that he didn’t get hurt at all other than a minor abrasion, and he told that he didn’t even need to go to the hospital. I couldn’t believe it. It was such a God moment. I thought that the boy was going to be dead, and he didn’t even get hurt! It was a very stressful situation, and Felis and I prayed a lot, but once we found out the boy was okay, we were so relieved and thankful. Even though the mirror was broken on the rental car, it could’ve been so much worse and we were so thankful that God had control over the whole situation.


So that is just a tidbit of what Dar is like, and have plenty more to talk about with my experiences in Dar, and my trip to Maasai land, but those will have to come in my next couple of blog posts. Until then, thank you so much for reading!

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