Kutembelea

-One Hundred and Three-

I left Ilula last Friday, having already spent one month there. With that as a base experience, I’ve moved on to Phase II of my summer in Tanzania. From the hospital I’ve headed out to villages for two weeks before returning to Iringa for a week with the chaplain in the Government Hospital. The goal in doing so is to experience the breadth and variety of ushauri wa uchungaji that takes place here in the ELCT.

Pastoral Care in villages –even those with a dispensary – is primarily concerned with home visits. Each week, elders/ lay leaders of the congregation are expected to meet with all members to talk through their hopes, dreams, fears, and pains. Those requiring extra attention are referred on to lay evangelists and –if need be- Parish Pastors. It was with one such evangelist, a gentle soul by the name of Habakuk, that I’ve done my own round of visitations.

With a knock on the door and the call of ‘Hodi!,’ we were invited into people’s homes, their lives, and their private worlds of pain and sorrow. There were the grieving widows – each having lost husbands and nearly a dozen children between them, the young mother -35 and paralyzed, the middle aged brewer of local pombe – another likely victim of AIDS, ,the young wife who ran away from her husband of a different tribe, and the gentle old woman plagued by bad back and constant shaking.

While the setting is different – the smoke-filled interior of a handmade mud house with a charcoal fire keeping the highland cold at bay – the emotions and burdens of those in need are all too easily recognizable.

Joining a caring community to bring prayers and hope to those clinging to life in the metaphorical and physical dark has been eye-opening and heart-warming. I hold a deep sense of gratitude and respect for each threshold I have been invited to cross as Habakuk and I walk the red and dusty roads of Pommern.