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Volunteers
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multitude of banana plants, their broad leaves almost touching. These vegetables form the staple diet for many in the area where we served.
Our team’s two-week visit was sponsored by the Shiloh Baptist Association, as part of the TanzaniaVirginia Partnership program, and included six men from four Baptist churches in the area. Our mission: to construct rOofs on two locally built churches in the extreme northwest comer of Tanzania, each about three hours’ drive by jeep from Bukoba.
Thanks to our having two licensed general contractors (Lloyd Sims and David Chambers, representing Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church) on our team, we completed our assignment in three days and thus had time for other work and service projects initiated by the U.S. Missionary, Rick Hagar.
The churches on which we worked were built up to the eave level by local parishioners, who had formed and fired the mud bricks on the site before our arrival.
The buildings were generally 24 feet wide and 40-50 feet long. The bricks were of varying hardness, and the mortar was of random consistency. Several bricks fell from the w all as we worked on the roof.
Our first church was a quarter of a mile beyond the end of the nearest “road," sG*we had to carry each piece of timber and every sheet of metal roofingjby hand to the work site.
Sims and Chambers quickly organized the other four of us into work teams, some of us putting roof trusses together; others cutting and fitting the longitudinal timbers, or purlins; still others readying the corrugated metal for hoisting onto the roof. Lumber was rough-cut and of random dimensions. Roofing nails lacked the waterproofing rubber gaskets, so we had to make these ourselves out of strips of bicycle tire tube.
The younger members of our team, including Garry Charles (of the Washington Baptist Church) and John Bantam (of Novum Baptist Church) climbed aloft on the filmsy timbers, while we “old timers” stayed safely on the ground, passing boards, nails, sheet metal and other material up to them.
Using the first church roof as our
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