Isaac's Birthday

Dear all,

Isaac turned 3 at the end of March and had a lovely day. This is him opening presents in the morning, and enjoying his elephant cake with his friends at his party. Now he is 3 he is able to start the nursery class at Daniel’s school. They have just broken up for a 2 week Easter break but after that he will go each morning from 9 until 12. He is very excited and looking forward to it. Unfortunately this means 2 morning school runs for Christine as Daniel’s school day starts at 7.45. However, it also means Christine will be able to increase her work days and plans to work every morning from 9 til 12, which will give her much more time to get into the work. Work is going well and the loans project is progressing nicely. We are also trying to plan a big youth event later this year which will be held here at the university. Please pray that everything comes together for this event and especially that we are able to raise the funds that we need for it. Praise God that we have found a new staff member for the office, though she hasn’t started yet as she is having a baby very shortly. We decided to delay her start date until after the baby is born rather than employing her and have her leave immediately for 3 months maternity leave. Her name is Beatrice and coincidentally she is married to a member of staff here at the university. Please pray for her and her family as the baby is born and she prepares to start work, and pray that Christine and Beatrice will work well together and develop a good friendship.

Daniel has had a good term at school and came home with a certificate for getting “the most smiley face stickers for good behaviour” over the term which we were all very pleased with. His teacher says he has done really well this term and developed well both academically and socially, so thank you all for your prayers for him. At the end of term we had 2 big events – firstly the Reception class “Easter hat parade” and Easter egg hunt and then the school Easter show. The show was very impressive and had a very powerful Christian message which was wonderful to see considering around half the students acting it out were muslim, and their parents were all there watching too. Christian staff and students at the school are a wonderful witness to the rest of their community. Please pray for them.

Paul is recovering from a rough couple of weeks but is thankful to God for seeing him through it unscathed. The beginning of semester was manic to say the least with timetables to sort out, new courses to plan and last semester’s exam results still to be finalised. A few too many short deadlines meant that Paul overstretched and overstressed himself and succumbed to some sort of virus which kept him off work for a week (the longest he’s been off work in many years). Once nearly recovered Paul decided to go for a walk with the Boys and our friend Brandon at a local mountain however in a remote area we were robbed of everything we had on us by a group of youths in a fairly unpleasant experience that shook us all up for a while. Fortunately the Boys don’t seem to be affected much by the incident and Paul is now back to full health and feeling a lot more at peace such that he’s starting to take on more teaching (special relativity and teaching methods) and found some time to work on his shed whilst at the same time taking great care not to over do it again. Please pray for peace and perspective in Paul’s work and that he manages to find time to prepare all practicals for this semester’s Physics lab.

During March Revival choir visited a different church each Sunday, mostly in villages around Dodoma, which was exhausting but a great experience and wonderful to be able to share in fellowship with village churches and be a blessing to them. One of these trips was a weekend visit to Kilimatinde. We were very well received there and had a wonderful time. It’s great to see a real friendship building up between Revival and Masada choirs. This picture shows some of Revival choir at “the point” in Kilimatinde. Isaac came with us on this weekend too and Paul and Daniel had a nice boys’ weekend at home.

For a few months now Christine and a group of other missionary ladies in Dodoma have been meeting regularly for bible study, to pray for each other and especially to pray for the many muslims we know in Dodoma. A few weeks ago our friend Amani (see earlier blogs) came to speak to the group about his conversion to Christianity. It was a wonderful evening and a real blessing both to the group and to Amani. Following this some of the teachers from CAMS (Daniel’s school) who were at the meeting invited him to sing in the school assembly and to tell his story in several classes, which was very well received. Last week we held a fun night with the group and invited a muslim family from Dodoma to come and join us. Two ladies, Rose and Anna, and 3 girls came and we had a wonderful evening together. Please join us in praying for this family and our other Muslim friends, and for Amani and his family, many of whom are Muslim.

Lots of love,
Christine, Paul, Daniel and Isaac.

Babies and bananas

Dear all,

The University is relatively empty at present with students enjoying an inter-semester break along with many staff. Paul is still active though, having spent time off around Christmas, and is now working on exam results, timetables, course outlines and Physics practicals. He is still finding space to work on his masters course and the workshop/shed he is building is near completion.

In January we became God-parents to twins Joshua and Jospehine, pictured here with their parents. Their dad is an electrician here at the university. The second picture shows Josephine feeding cake to Isaac, a Tanzanian tradition! Please pray for them as they grow and develop.

Christine has now started work with TAYO (Tanzania Anglican Youth Organisation) at the head office of the Anglican Church, though the start has been rather more of a challenge than expected. The plan was that she would be assisting a Tanzanian project officer who has been in post for a few months before Christmas, having had all the work of TAYO handed over to him by a USPG mission partner who has now returned to the UK. However, this project officer did not return to work after Christmas so Christine has been on her own trying to keep the office running with little knowledge of what needs to be done, and little support. However, she is now getting to grips with the work and is excited about some of the projects she will be involved with. Initially, alongside the general running of the department and its activities, the main project is a small loans project for youth choirs in 2 dioceses to help them with income generation projects to develop their groups. We do need to employ a new youth co-ordinator for TAYO. Please pray that we find a good and reliable person to fill this role and who Christine can work alongside easily. Please pray for Christine as she gets used to the work and that her work permit will be processed quickly.

We had a long gap in the rains after an encouraging start and people were worried that there would not be enough for the crops. However, the last few weeks we have seen good, continuous rains, and though the crops will not be as good as they might have been had the gap not occurred, they should be sufficient. Our garden is flourishing, and our banana tree is doing very well.

Daniel is now back at school and loving it and Isaac gets on very well with our new house help Rosie while Lidia is on maternity leave. Each week they go to “Childrens Church” run by Michaela a 9 year old friend who plans all sorts of activities for the kids and occasional adult who come along. Michaela and her brothers Schuyler and Zachary are children of Jeff and Wendy an american pentecostal missionary couple here in Dodoma who are great friends of ours (and the boys).

Sadly the Alpha course has not taken off. We have arranged to start it on a couple of occasions and people have not turned up. We are not sure why but need to think of a better way to approach it. Please pray for guidance on this and for the plans to start an English language alpha for students.

Tragically, Leon, the youngest son (2 years) of our parish vicar died a couple of weeks ago after falling in a hand dug well outside their house after heavy rains. It has been a very sad and difficult time for the family and the church. We were both able to attend the funeral and other services which were very moving occasions. Please pray for the family including their other two children.

Last week we had a weekend break in Kilimatinde together with our American neighbour, Brandon. We had a lovely weekend just meeting up with friends. This shows us at the Kilimatinde guest house with our good friend Daniel and his wife Teresia, and another friend of theirs. We may look a bit tired as we had just had a very energetic walk down to the valley where Daniel lives and back up again. The road we used to drive on regularly to the valley is now impassable in most vehicles.

This picture is taken from Radio Hill overlooking Dodoma. The hill lies above the dam where we often go for picnics, which you may have seen in several photos before. The views there are wonderful and it is a lovely spot for a quiet Sunday afternoon walk.

Revival Choir’s shop is doing very well. We have a new shop-keeper, one of our choir members, who is honest and reliable and we have started to make a good profit (though the last couple of weeks have been poor as the students have not been around). In March we have a month of visits to different churches around Dodoma each Sunday, and one weekend in Kilimatinde. Please pray that these visits will be a success and that we are able to share in fellowship with and encourage the churches we visit as well as reaching people with God’s word.

With love

Paul, Christine, Daniel & Isaac

Grandparents, a tortoise and lots of elephants

Dear all,
Apologies for not updating the blog for so long (though hopefully you have had a link letter in between! – please email us if you're not on our link letter list and wish to be), here's a longer than normal post to make up for it. Happy new year to you all and we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.

We were very busy in the run up to Christmas. This picture shows our English language choir (students and staff) before the carols by candlelight service at the cathedral in Dodoma. We were asked to lead the worship at this service which was quite a privilege. We also organised a big ecumenical carol service for the university which again we led with the choir. It was a great success with all the denominations of Christian students coming together in a joint service of worship for the first time.

Daniel also spent lots of time preparing for his Christmas show at school which was a wonderful event. This is him afterwards with his best schoolfriend, Kirby. Daniel is now much more settled at school. He loves his reading and writing. He had a good report saying that he is doing very well academically and is now starting to relate much better with other children. Kirby has been a great help with this. Thank you for all your prayers for Daniel and please continue to pray that he continues to progress.

Shortly before Christmas we went to Kilimatinde for the wedding of our good friend, ex-student of Paul’s, and ex-choir colleague of Christine’s, James Msawile. He was married to Monica and it was a lovely day. We ended up taking the wedding video and providing the wedding car so it was a busy day too!

Having been here a year now we thank God Paul is fairly settled in his work, enjoying both the teaching and administrative tasks (except marking of course) as well as having developed good friendships and working relations with colleagues. His role is still a little unclear – teaching within three different departments as well as taking on administrative duties – but he is starting to enjoy this flexibility and stress levels are low. He is currently coordinating coursework data entry across two faculties, preparing Physics practicals for next semester, writing next semesters timetable, starting up a Physics Teachers Network for the Dodoma area and planning a science teaching methods course for next semester. Just one more week of teaching and then the exams start after which it’s marking followed by a short break before the second semester starts in March. With one module completed (result pending) Paul is just about to start on his second of 7 modules which will make up his MSc in E-learning. We pray that this will not just be an academic exercise but something that he will be able to apply here at the university in the not too distant future as we develop our e-learning systems.

We have a new addition to the family – this is Tricky, our tortoise. He was sold to us by some local children for 75p! We don’t see him very often as he finds lots of cosy places to hide in our garden but the boys enjoy hunting for him!

Over Christmas Paul’s parents came to stay. We had a lovely time with them. The boys were very happy to have them with us and enjoyed bonding/rebonding with them over lego and stories etc. having not seen them for a year. Paul and his dad kept themselves busy creating a rainwater catchment system on the house and started work on a shed! They ended their time with us with a safari to Mikumi wildlife park where we managed to see many animals close up even from our chalet and Isaac’s love of elephants was confirmed!

After they had left we had a visit from Grace (our friend and church youth worker from St. Austell, and Isaac’s God-mother) and Claire (another friend and church youth worker in Cornwall). We had a lovely time with them too and finished their visit with another short holiday on the beach in Bagamoyo.

Now we are back to our normal routine! We hope to start the Alpha course very soon. We have been praying for more people to join before we start. We have about 7 people already so we think we will now go ahead. Although it is a small group, if it is the right people we believe God will do great things with them. Please pray for this as we begin and for a possible student alpha in English that may run this year.

Christine (seen here with Greatlove our neighbours baby after her christening) hopes to start work within the next couple of weeks, working for TAYO (Tanzanian Anglican Youth Organisation) based at the Anglican church headquarters in Dodoma. At first she will just be working for 2 mornings a week until Isaac starts nursery at Easter. Our house help, Lidia, who we had thought would look after Isaac on these mornings is having 3 months off whilst she has a baby. Please pray for her and pray that we find a suitable person to help whilst she is away.

Revival Choir’s shop is continuing to do well. We have had a number of issues with the running and management of the shop but it is a steep learning curve for many of the people involved. However we are making a big profit and have been able to increase our stock so now we are in a position to start returning our loan and saving money to buy instruments. We raised enough money to buy a new keyboard which arrived from the UK with Paul’s parents much to everyone’s delight. Praise God for this and pray for the shop project that it will run smoothly from now on.

Our house back in St. Austell continues to be a worry. We still have no tenant despite dropping the rent and due to the financial crisis there are now a huge number of houses on the market for letting so there is big competition. We are very grateful to our wonderful friends Helen and Nigel Furneaux and Richard Staples, who have been working very hard to maintain and improve the house to try to attract tenants. Please pray that we will soon find a good tenant.

videos

Finally managed to upload these. See the previous new post (New university year and Daniel's birthday) for explanation!

New University Year & Daniel's birthday

Dear all,
The university campus is suddenly buzzing as students have been returning over the last couple of weeks, more than double the number that were here last year as we are now into the second year of the university. Apart from helping out with registration (as seen in the picture being assited by Daniel) Paul has been very busy finalising timetables, allocating students to seminar groups and taught his first lecture today in a new "Maths for Scientists" course which he discovered he was to teach a week ago. The Physics is also kicking off soon as Paul has been joined by a Mr Kingu who will lecture in physics and maths. Paul is also now in his third week of his masters course and managing to keep up with all the reading/blogging/discussion boards etc. involved in the distance e-learning course.

Daniel is on holiday from school for two weeks so we are having lots of fun playing with friends and swimming (as the weather is now hotting up!) and enthusiastically practising reading and writing ready for the new term. Daniel had a wonderful 5th birthday. Isaac was also very excited, possibly even more so than Daniel! We had a lovely party in the garden with local friends and friends from school, as you can see in the video. Both boys are well and happy, and enjoying their local friends very much. Daniel has also made a new best friend at school, a Tanzanian boy called Kirby. He has really struggled to make close friends but his teachers say that it is good to see a real bond being formed for the first time.

Christine has had further meetings about her future position at the provincial office, and assuming her work permit is processed in time hopes to start work after Christmas for a couple of mornings a week and then every morning after Easter (when Isaac begins nursery at Daniel's school). We continue to enjoy helping at the nursery school in Ipagala. The picture shows one of the classes with their teacher and Rev. Erasto Mwambeje, a Tanzania Assemblies of God pastor who set up and runs the nursery. He is a wonderful man of God with a great vision for the school and for church planting. We also attended his church a few weekends ago where Paul preached and we were made very welcome. We are now preparing for a prayer and fellowship meeting on Saturday for teachers, parents and supporters of the nursery, where Paul will again preach and Christine will lead the sung worship.

Christine has been very busy with choir Revival recently. We have now started having rehersals at our home, as the church will be used as an extra classroom for theology students this year. It is great to welcome everyone to our home and it also solves the problem I had of getting babysitters! We also attended another Assemblies of God, church as a choir, to worship with them recently, and it was a wonderful service. This week we have been given a small shop on the university campus to use as an income generating project for the choir. It is very exciting and the shop is in a great position to get a lot of trade from students. It is taking a lot of prayer, organisation and money to get it up and running, but we hope to open next week and we pray that it will be successful and profitable as it will be great to be self sufficient in the long term. Alongside her duties as choir treasurer, Christine has also just been elected, together with another member, to organise the spiritual programme for the choir. This initially will involve our regular prayer and worship times (which hopefully will now be more regular!), though in the future I hope to run an alpha course with the choir too.

On the 20/21st September we went to Kilimatinde for the jubilee celebrations of the building of Kilimatinde church 80 years ago. CMS missionary Canon Ralph Banks, who was vicar of Kilimatinde at the time oversaw the building of the church. The jubilee was a great event. On the Saturday there was a very big youth event with lots of choirs singing from all over the diocese of the Rift Valley, and then on the Sunday was a big service of celebration held outside the church on a new platform constructed specially for the event. The first picture shows Masada Gospel Singers singing at the Sunday service, and the second shows Bishop John Lupaa (left), bishop of the Diocese of the Rift Valley, and Archibishop Valentino Mokiwa, the new archbishop of Tanzania.

Hope you enjoy the videos. One is of Daniel's birthday party. The other is some snippets of the wedding of Amani and Faraja, friends from Kilimatinde, who were married in July.

.... sorry the videos aren't here yet - having trouble uploading - will be here soon - watch this space! .......

Please pray:

n For Rev. Erasto, that God will bless him in his work provide for the needs of the nursery.
n For choir Revival and our new shop, that it will be successful and enable us to become self sufficient and further develop our work to God’s glory
n For Daniel and Isaac, that they will continue in good health, continue to develop lasting friendships, and grow in their love of God.
n For Paul as he tries to manage time commitments and develops working relationships with new staff

With love and prayers,

Christine, Paul, Daniel and Isaac

Grandma's visit

Dear all,
We had a lovely few weeks with Christine’s mum in August, starting with a few days on the beach in Bagamoyo, where Isaac can be seen proudly displaying a freshly fallen coconut. We spent most of her visit just relaxing in Dodoma and enjoying all our usual activities with her.

Daniel is loving school and is very excited about learning to read. Whilst mum was here we had the annual sports day at school. These pictures are of Daniel and his classmates on the day. Daniel had a great time, though unfortunately the yellow team came in last place! Isaac continues to enjoy life too and we are particularly enjoying volunteering at the local nursery school.

Christine recently met with the general secretary at the provincial offices of the Anglican church about a possible future role. It was a really good meeting and hopefully she will start working there sometime next year as a “consultant” involved initially with a youth development project focussing on small loans for youth choirs to carry out small scale income generation projects. Later this may extend into similar work on other projects within the youth and development departments.
Paul has been continuing to prepare for the new semester whilst doing the occasional teaching practice observation.



Two weeks ago a large consignment of apparatus arrived from Lab Aid UK. It felt like Christmas opening up the boxes and cataloguing all the pieces from resistors to binocular microscopes and now the increase in many essential items means that we are much better prepared to deliver practical science to our ever growing number of students.

Last week our friend, neighbour and colleague, Elizabeth Taylor had her 60th birthday and we had a wonderful party in her garden with over 100 guests, at which Christine sang with choir Revival. The picture shows Elizabeth at the party.

We recently said goodbye to our good friends and fellow CMS mission partners Simon and Laura Walton, their girls Grace and Esther and their newly adopted son James, who have returned to England. They will be back though after an extended break back in the UK.

Our house in Tanzania has seen some forward and backward developments this week. It is now encircled by a new concrete path and patio which has become the boys’ cycle race track. Unfortunately whilst this work was going on our roof tank leaked flooding several rooms. Most things were saved (we have no carpets) although we now have a few crinkly bed time story books and rather unsightly patches on the walls and ceiling. Plans are now afoot to install an external tank and redecorate.

We are still selling CDs by Musa Njagamba and Amani Shaban for £7 each (see last entry) If you would like one please get in touch.
Please pray:
n for Daniel's birthday on Thursday, that he enjoys the day and his party
n for the new students who will be enrolling at the university in the next two weeks
n for our house back in the UK, that a tenant is found soon
n for Elizabeth, her work and life here at the University

St. Austell Visit

Dear all,

Sorry for not up-dating the blog for some time. We have had a busy summer! (or winter here!)

At the beginning of July the long planned “tamasha” (sort of fundraising concert) with Revival choir took place. It turned out to be smaller than expected our special guest singer didn’t turn up, but several choirs joined us, including Masada from Kilimatinde, and we had a great weekend and managed to raise a good amount of money to help buy some new equipment.

For 3 weeks in July we hosted a youth group from Holy Trinity, St. Austell, who came primarily for a mission in Kilimatinde and surrounding villages, involving singing, drama, preaching the gospel and playing with local children. It was great for us to meet old friends again, and a great experience for the group, many of whom had not experienced such a different culture to their own before. The trip was amazing and many Tanzanians told us how touched they were by the work the group did and how wonderful it was to see such spirit filled young people, who were so eager to pray, worship and preach the good news. The trip was not without it’s problems, mainly involving transport, which is always difficult here in Tanzania, but God provided for us and protected us.

Since returning from the mission we have started to get back into our usual routine. Daniel has started in the reception class at school which he has enjoyed but has been poorly recently so has not been able to participate fully. Christine (and Isaac) has stated volunteering once a week at the local Pentecostal nursery school (see earlier entries) which is great fun. We are now looking forward to a visit from Christine’s mum later this week, and a few days on the beach.

Paul has been spending the university break doing a variety of jobs getting ready for the new semester which starts in September including, preparation of apparatus for practicals, writing prospectus entries and planning the university timetable for the coming year. He has also managed to travel around the Singida region supervising and observing/assessing university students that are out on teaching practice.
Come September things will be get very busy with the new Physics course starting (with currently no other staff but Paul appointed to teach it), the university more than doubling its size and Paul starts his distance masters course as well and so he is planning to make good use of the few weeks of break left for both preparation and relaxation.

Two of our good friends have recently made CDs of their own Christian music which we are helping them to sell. One is by Musa Njagamba – some of you may have bought a CD of “The Njagamba Band” which Christine recorded with Musa and others back in 2001. This is now his latest solo album. The other is by Amani Shaban who you can read about in earlier blogs. Both CDs are excellent and we are selling them for £7 each. If you would like one or both please contact us by email and we will send you details of how to pay us. If you are able to let us know soon we can send the CDs back with Christine’s mum when she returns to the UK at the end of August. Thanks.

Please Pray:
n For the university and for Paul as the new semester approaches
n For the people with whom the group from St. Austell met here in Tanzania, that seeds that were sown will bear fruit.
n For Christine as she discusses her future role here.
n For Daniel as he starts reception at school and for his health
n For our parish of Kikuyu and our new vicar, that the change will bring positive developments.


With love and blessings,
Paul, Christine, Daniel and Isaac