Enlarging the Circle

Sunday, February 24, 2019

It was cloudy when we woke up this morning, so we expected it to rain later in the day.  However, we made it to and through church without any showers. John was the speaker this morning, so we didn’t get to sit together. Mary Lou and I were late in entering the building and ended up sitting on the other side of where we usually sit. The changes in where we sat made everything seem a bit weird to me, which prompted me to consider how habits can become unconsciously ingrained reality.

The glorious Sunday bouquet.

The smallest Sunday School watoto singing for us.

Irene, our fashion queen, and Mary Bura.

John did a fine job though he ran a bit long. I’m up on March 17, so I made sure to purloin a large print Bible to bring home. Our rat-chewed Bible got left behind at Uru Shimbwe somehow, but since it smelled bad, it’s probably to our advantage that it is missing.

We had decided that we would go to the Ethiopian restaurant, Spices and Herbs, for lunch after church. Our friend Eric Rowberg had told us that there would be some sort of fashion show there today from 11:00 to 5:00. However, when we arrived, there was no sign of any kind of show, so we just got a table and ordered our food. Not long after, Eric and his wife, Bernice, came and sat at a table with a gathering of wazungu and black Americans. John and I went over and greeted them and then returned to our table to complete our meal.

How we looked before we got completely messy eating with our hands.

A pot of Ethiopian coffee.

 Just before our coffee and dessert arrived, Eric came and invited us to their table. Most of the other wazungu had left, but we were introduced to another man also named Eric—he said he was a winemaker—, and three African-Americans: an older man named Pete, his son, Paul, who lives in Niger, where his wife works in the U.S. embassy, and a younger woman named Erica who is in Tanzania for two weeks to visit her Uncle Pete and see the sights. The Ethiopian restaurant owner also sat with us. Eric and Bernice have known all of these folks for decades and so there was a lot of story telling and bantering. After we had been chatting together for an hour or so, most people went out into the courtyard to look at some art that was being loaded into a van, but Paul and I remained at the table. It was then while asking Paul about his experiences in Africa that I discovered that Pete is Pete O’Neal from the Black Panthers, who has been in exile here in Tanzania for almost 50 years now.  What an unexpected encounter! He seems like a very gentle person and is a great storyteller. He definitely has built a very worthwhile life for himself here in Tanzania. (https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-black-panther-20120129-html-htmlstory.html)

While we were at the restaurant, it began to rain. John walked to Kijenge to get us a cab even though Eric would have been happy to bring us back to Kundayo. The electricity was off when we returned, but the rain soon lessened and did not really pour again until nearly 10:00 p.m. The electricity, however, returned about an hour after we returned.

As usual on Sunday evenings here—Sunday mornings in Spokane—we tried to have a video chat with our granddaughter Peri. Getting connected took several tries and about halfway through the half hour, the video went off. We could still converse, which was only semi-okay, as a great part of the joy of these times are seeing Peri’s silly antics. We can tell that she is really growing, and we are likely to be surprised at how big she is when we return to Spokane at the end of March.