My Sister Church

My Lincoln church (Southwood Lutheran) began a partnership with our Uswaa, our sister church in Tanzania in 1994. Each year we can feel the bond growing stronger and stronger. I want to share with you a little about Uswaa and some of the people.

It is tradition that those who go to Tanzania teach Sunday School at Uswaa. We can expect anywhere from 250-400 students. We went this time not really certain with what lesson we were going to do. We decided to make fish necklaces and had a song, I WILL MAKE YOU FISHERS OF MEN. When Mama heard us talking about that song she knew it and taught us the song in Kiswahili. I'll include a video of the students singing the song with Mama and one with them singing it with my interpreter. Mama also helped us figure out how to make the string look nicer by twisting it on our legs. I've included a picture of Scott and Mama twisting the string. Every walk we took we came across kids who would hold up their fish necklaces. A simple lesson turned out to be a wonderful message.

The reason I went in August this year instead of July is because our sister church was having their 100 year celebration on August 12. It was so much fun to be able to go and be a part of this jubilee. They anticipated 5,000 people attending. It was a wonderful honor when they finally didn't see us as guests anymore and saw us as family. We knew that day happened when they let us help prepare the food for the jubilee. Some of us peeled bananas, some peeled garlic, and some cleaned rice. I got to clean the rice. We were taken to this group of women with rice in these bamboo basket lids. They were shaking and tossing the rice. They didn't speak English so they couldn't tell us how to do it. We just copied them and eventually we think we got the hang of it. Well, maybe we didn't get the hang of it. The next day during the jubilee all of us admitted that we had little stones in our rice. Oops. All of the food was donated. It was amazing how much food there was.

Click here to listen/watch the video of Mama singing with my students.

Click here to watch the dance which was the same as the one Heidi and I participated in, during the jubilee celebration. This video shows the dance where the lady came over and gave me the plant top... as seen in the picture above. I couldn't understand them when we were dancing with them, but I'm fairly certain they were making fun of the tall Mazungo (white person).