Dear all,
It’s been a little while since our last posting but it seems
that an awful lot has happened since then so this one should be a bit longer
than normal.
The rains have now ended
and the colour everywhere is turning from green to beige while the temperature
has dropped enough for us to put a blanket on the bed. We celebrated Christine’s
birthday in May with a trip to the pizzeria (requested by the boys) and managed
to smuggle in our own birthday cake made by Paul & the boys seen here.
We thought it about time to change our profile picture so
got a friend to take the following photo while on a walk at the dam on a public
holiday – a favourite place of ours which has featured here before.
Paul has had a busy end to this semester with a few projects
on the go on top of the usual teaching commitments. As part of the second year
Physics laboratory classes we ran a 2 week IT workshop where the students had
to perform 7 different datalogging experiments. We’ve been doing this for the
last 2 years but having received some shiny new kit from Labaid and some new
computers in the container over the past year, this year’s workshop was all
whistles and bells like nothing ever seen before in Dodoma. The photo shows
students analysing data from one of the experiments.
Paul’s main project over the past few weeks has been the
fundraising event mentioned in the last post. An enormous amount of work was
put into preparing for the event by the team Paul headed up especially
immediately before the event when our guest of honour pulled out at short
notice. Thankfully Professor Meshack, the retired Vice Chancellor of the
university stepped in and despite their being a low turnout we rather
miraculously still managed to raise over 5 million shillings (£2000). A great
achievement but not an experience Paul wants to repeat in a hurry. The picture
shows our guest singer Jennifer Mgendi who was a big hit with the other choirs
who attended the event. The project will still be ongoing (but at a less
frantic pace) as we seek to raise or borrow the remaining funds and start
contacting building contractors. Your prayers are appreciated.
One weekend recently we decided to try to scale radio hill,
a local hill that we once before tried to climb but at that time it was too
much for the boys. This time, a little bigger and stronger they made it to the
top (along with mum & dad of course) and the two pictures here were taken
as the intrepid explorers made their way down to base camp (the car).
At work Christine has been busy planning for 2 big events,
firstly a fundraising event for the studio project in July, and secondly a
national youth conference in September which will be a huge event held here in
Dodoma. Please pray for these events that they will be successful and glorify
God. Please have a look at the ACT youth office blog on the link above for more
information and also a video about my work.
The university year is now coming to an end and once again we have had to say goodbye to a large part of our English choir as some of our longstanding members graduate. A few weeks ago we had a lovely but quite sad party in our garden to see them off, as shown in this picture.
Lots of Love and Blessings,
Paul, Christine. Daniel and Isaac.xxx
