Note: This is out of order, but I have not had time to finish typing up Saturday and the rest of Sunday. However, I wanted to send this on so that you could read it! I will try to send the rest tomorrow!! Take care! Love, anna
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Today was the greatest day! Christy and I got up early to go to church with Jessica. I was nice and clean, and off we went. Well, no one told us it was a two mile walk to church!! We walked very fast and I was dying of the heat, but it was wonderful. We walked on narrow dirt roads and through alleys framed in flowering vines. We dodged chickens and goats, and cut across newly-cleared fields of maize. At one point, we walked by a small store and picked up Jessica’s cousin, Baby. A young teenage girl, she kept telling me, “Oh, you are very fat!”. It would have been upsetting, but here, that is a very big compliment! Men walk up to me on the street and tell me I am beautiful! Seriously! It turns out that the size of a woman reflects directly on her husband. If she is thin, the village people tell the man that he is stingy and not feeding his wife properly. When a woman has a baby, for six weeks, she does nothing but breast feed. Her husbands job is to bring her food and wait on her hand and foot. At the end of six weeks, all of the men in town know that this is the day that the woman will wrap up her baby, put her basket on her head, and go to the market. They line up at the bars along the road and wait for her. She literally sashays down the road and if she has gotten fat, all the men clap her husband on the back and tell him he is a good man. How great is that!!?
Anyway, I digress. When we arrived at church, there was a large roof held up by concrete posts. There were easily 400 people sitting and standing under the roof singing. The church only owns a few benches, so most people bring a small stool from their home to sit on. Christy and I, being the only two mzungu there, were regarded as guests of honor, so several people went to get a bench for us to sit on.
You have to picture it¦a bright blue sky, cool breeze, and green trees and palms all around. Cows from neighboring homes are mooing and the sound of chickens and goats float through the air. The breeze smells like a combination of freshly-turned dirt, sweaty people, animals, and hay. The people look like a grand splash of every imaginable color known to man! Everyone is in their finest and there is nothing in this world that can rival the sight! Women wear multi-colored kanga and kitenge, two or three at a time, with no thought of them matching in the Western sense. Most women also have head wraps or scarves on, so the sight was quite brilliant.
This is a Catholic church, and mass was two and a half hours long. In Swahili.
At one point, I thought that they were saying the Lord’s Prayer, but an hour later, Jessica leaned over and said “This is the Lord’s Prayer now,” so I have no idea what was going on earlier. The singing was, at the risk of sounding terribly corny, heavenly. It was not like the music that I have heard in other masses. It was two and three-part harmony African singing. It was the one time on this trip I wish that I owned a tape recorder so that I could share that sound with everyone at home. Sickness, illiteracy, and poverty melted away. Hundreds of people singing together, in a church that they were building with their own hands¦.you could feel the joy emanating from the congregation. It might well be one of the most special things I have ever experienced.
Twice during the service, we all processed up to the make-shift altar to make an offering, once for the normal offering and once for a fund to complete the church construction. Each time, as I walked back to my seat, elderly women would reach out and grasp my hand. These women look like the pictures you would see in a magazine of any tribal elders. Wrinkles deeply etched, toothless smiles, and hands malformed by years of hard work and arthiritis. As I met each ones gaze, she first looked surprised and then delighted when I smiled at them. They seemed so grateful that I greeted them, but the truth was, I was the one overwhelmingly grateful.
Later, Jessica said that many people wanted to come greet us, but that they were ashamed that they could not speak English. Can you imagine?! I am in their country, and they are ashamed that they cannot speak MY language?! I am trying to speak as much Swahili as possible, so as to put people at ease. Until 20 years ago, there was a 98% illiteracy rate here in Tanzania. In the last 20 years, Tanzania has built many schools and a university, so the literacy rate has increased dramatically. However, it is a good chance that anyone over the age of 40 has had little or no education, and they are painfully aware of the fact. This is very evident when we meet people, and I am struggling with how to let them know that my meeting them is a much greater honor than they can imagine and that I am in awe of them regardless of their education.
This email has become kind of long, so I will continue it in the next one. For now, it is enough to say that this amazing day is just getting started!
Love, Anna
“When all is said and done here at the ending of the day, I look out on this world and it still takes my breath away…”
“Robin’s Song” Small Potatoes
