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“training session,” we were able to install a complete weather-tight roof on the second church in just five hours and 20 minutes! We thought this was some sort of a record.
The people we met were kind, friendly and hospitable. Crowds, mostly children, gathered around to watch us work. Pedestrians waved to us as we drove by on what passed as roads in the remote areas. The pastor’s-wife at the first church prepared a welcoming feast for us of beans, bananas, rice, potatoes, cabbage, casava, pineapple and chicken, all cooked over her charcoal brazier. As a special treat, she added two local delicacies, sennenay and kumbi kumbi (fried grasshopper and fried ants).
After returning to the missionary’s home in Bukoba, we were able to help finish the parsonage under construction there and to make windows for later installation at one of our remote churches, as well as some much-needed repairs to the Hagars’ home, overlooking Lake Victoria, th^ second largest lake in the world. The lumber, as I said, was rough-cut and green and had to be planed by hand to make the church windows.
Edward “Chick” Van Every (representing tne Good Hope Baptist Church) and I each celebrated our birthdays while there: Nov. 25, Chick observed his 60th, while 1 turned 66. The Hagars had a birthday party for us, complete with cake and funny hats.
Visiting a country under these circumstances is far more rewarding than joining a “tour,” staying at a plush, air-conditioned hotel and eating at a five-star restaurant. We met, ate with and worshipped with people who lack what we have come to expect as the “necessities” of life. But they possess something which many of us may never have known.
One local pastor whom we met had just lost his son to yellow fever, and his son-in-law died while we were there. Yet he talked about working to enlarge his congregation after the new church was completed. “I love Jesus and will do my level best,” he told me.
This article was written for, and origin-ally appeared in, “The Voice of Experience,” a publication of the R a ppalm nnock-Rapjdan Community
rreftijces^ff-uler’s Agency on Aging. It is reprinted with permission.
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