Dear Brothers, Sisters and Friends in Christ,
Well, three weeks from today, Lord willing, I will be back in this same Mbeya Internet café to report our soon departure on a 13 hour bus ride to Dar-es-Salaam. We leave here (Mbeya) at 6:30 AM on June 20th, stay in Dar until the morning of the 22nd, and fly out of London about noon on the 23rd.
We want you to be in prayer for our travel, especially the first couple of hours by truck over the dirt roads, and maybe especially for the bus ride, which only makes two stops for a bush toilet visit and 15 minutes to grab a lunch-to-go from open-air vendors.
Be in prayer also for our strength in the next three weeks to get all the loose ends tied up; typing 44 Terminal Exams, scoring over 800 exams, packing up the house in storage bins, and saying a thousand “Good-buys.”
That last item has been occupying the afternoons lately, as we visit “one last time” the ghettos of our students.
Pictures speak a thousand words . . . can you imagine your 14-18 year old son or daughter moving away from home to attend high school?
He/she would be living in a small room (maybe 7x7) with his/her clothes hanging from a rope stretched between nails (often eaten by rats),
sleeping on a grass mat, cooking on a charcoal stove once or twice a day . . .
and eating the same meal every day . . . ugali by itself, or with boiled beans or greens, and perhaps some fruit, if it is in season and they have a few cents available for that luxury.
Oh, and they do it with laughs and smiles and warm welcome for you to share their lives.
Now, consider the joys we have in serving these hard-working and desperate-to-succeed students! Most of the VSI schools have much better living conditions available for their teachers, so please pray about God’s call on your life to join us. We need more teachers. Steve talks in his updates about the number of missionary teachers that have come, but the vast majority spend only a few months in the country.
Annually, only 9-12 English teachers come from outside Tanzania. With 22 schools open and a dozen or more in the works…do the math. The Lord needs laborers in His harvest fields.
Oh, great news . . . work is moving forward on the three new schools in the Mbeya Region. There is a meeting today for the work permit for the Ichesa Secondary School. I was there at Easter and reported that they were still enthusiastic. Right now . . . they are bouncing off the walls with excitement that things are moving forward!!! We had a visit from a couple of men just last week, pictured at the top of this update with their gifts to us of wild honey, bananas, peanuts and sponge gourds.
Lord willing, we will see you soon, face to face.
Love and hugs,
Gary and Joanne Grenell
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