First week in Tanzania

I was hoping to start on this sooner, but it took me a while to get internet. It was a frustrating process, but we got it done! It’s going to be hard to explain what my first couple of days in Tanzania was like in a blog post, and it was impossible to make it short, but here it goes anyway!

It’s 8:00 at night and I am outside of an open-air church in a village in the middle of nowhere in Arusha, surrounded by Tanzanian kids. It’s very dark. What the heck am I doing there? Well, I am with a group of four people and we are showing to whoever decides to show up from the village a two-hour Swahili musical called “Nipe Jibu” that preaches the message of hope through Jesus Christ. Over the sounds of the movie, I hear fruit bats chirping, monkeys making whatever sound they make and dogs barking, all while a gentle rain falls from the dark sky. This is not how I was expecting to spend the night of my first full day interning with Pamoja Ministries…

This is not my first time on a mission trip out of the country. It is, however, the first time that I traveled alone. I have to say that I was very nervous about the whole airport situation with going through customs and making sure that I got my bags, but surprisingly to me, everything went smoothly. After several poor excuses of “meals” that KLM provided on the plane and watching movie after movie, I finally arrived at my destination, Kilimanjaro Airport. I was in Africa, specifically Arusha, Tanzania. I couldn’t believe it. I made it. It was my dream to go back to Africa, and it finally happened.

Pamoja is a Christian media organization that disciples cultures through media. “Nipe Jibu” is Pamoja’s first feature film, written and directed by staff at Pamoja, and it was shown at the Zanzibar International Film Festival in 2010. To promote the film and to spread the word of God, Pamoja sends a group of usually around three to four people to show it at different churches, schools and villages, where anyone who is interested will show up and watch. This is what I was doing on my first full day.

I was invited to go along with Paul, a volunteer from Louisiana, Natasha, a missionary from Australia and a Tanzanian volunteer named Wilfred to show the movie. Paul and Natasha are both around my age so that was nice. We all packed into a safari car, with Paul driving, and left the base and headed to the church. I was pretty nervous because I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting in to and I didn’t really know the people I was with yet since it was my first full day. In the car with us we had a projector, a screen, a portable DVD player, speakers, a generator and a gas tank, as well as two wooden stands tied to the top of the car that are used to hold up the projector screen. It took us about 20 minutes to get to the church, driving on a road that could compare to the Devil’s Marble Yard. It wasn’t my first experience with rough roads and I wasn’t expecting the roads to be good at all, but it still surprised me.

 We got to the church around 6:00 p.m., and the pastor was outside waiting for us. Paul, Natasha and I started unpacking, while Wilfred began to talk to the pastor. We were worried about rain, since we were showing the movie outside, so we stopped and prayed. We were also having problems with getting the generator started, so we asked the pastor, who doesn’t know English, if would pray over it, and he did. The coolest thing happened after that. Right when the pastor finished his prayer, the generator began to work. It was a small, but amazing miracle. I saw how powerful and effective prayer can be and it was astounding to me.

 Once everything was set up, we started playing music videos on the screen and kids from the surrounding village began to show up. They sat on the benches that we brought outside from the church.  Since it was my first day, I was in charge of taking pictures. The pastor gave me permission to take pictures of the people that showed up to watch the movie and of the surrounding area. After the showing “Nipe Jibu,” the pastor gave a short message to the people who watched the movie, summing it up and preaching the power of Christ. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I could tell it was powerful. In the end, around 80 people showed up to watch the film. Then, we packed everything up and headed back to the base. It was after 11:00 at night and I was tired. Remember I am still pretty jetlagged! It was definitely an amazing experience for me, though and it was only my second day in Tanzania. I knew that living in Tanzania for two months would be life changing, but I was not expecting to be impacted so quickly.

Life on base is pretty awesome. The base consists of three families: Sig and Joy Feser, the founders of Pamoja Ministries, their son Jeremy Feser, the Director of Operations, along with his wife Christine and four rambunctious and adorable children, Jacob, Natasha, Paul and Benjamin, who are seven, five, three and two, and then Jacob Mills, the Director of Ministries, and his wife Kim, along with their precious two-year-old son James. Natasha, the missionary, is here for long-term missions. I’m not the only volunteer at Pamoja. Paul, who I mentioned before, has been here for about a month, and so has Adam, a 30-year-old from Canada. We each live in triplexes on the base which each include a hot shower and a nice bed, whereas the two Feser families and the Mills family each have houses of their own on base. Along with everyone who lives on base, there are almost always people visiting, so the atmosphere is very hectic. I love Jeremy and Christine’s kids already. They are so energetic and are always doing something. It didn’t take long for them to warm up to me, and now they won’t leave me alone (I love it though). Little Natasha even made me a schedule yesterday consisting of 10 things that I had to do with her, which included playing with Legos, playing I Spy and swinging on the swing set. I already feel very welcomed by everybody and I feel a part of the family. 

My first few days at Pamoja have been full of so much, but I have loved every second of it so far. Since Thursday, I have been working with Jeremy to help update the Pamoja Magazine by editing it and making it more eye-catching and appealing to the reader. Its purpose is to attract volunteers to come and work, and to entice possible supporters to donate to Pamoja, so it is very important for the magazine to be entertaining and readable, while also doing its job of displaying a message that makes people want to volunteer or support Pamoja. I am really excited to see how the finished product turns out.

That is all for now, but in a week from Monday, I will be traveling to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania to do some work, and I’m sure that I will have a lot of new experiences to share. Until then, thank you for reading!