CoD V.1.7.4- The End is near! And then the Beginning...

One week to go before almost all the physical details of my life change- it's a strange feeling.

Well, in preparation for my forthcoming departure, I thought I'd make this more of an interactive post- I'm hoping to write about as many details of my new life as I know, and then leave the post open for any advice you may have for me/any words of wisdom/anything at all. So here goes:

As I've written before, I'm going to be living in the Pwani (lit. Coast) region of Tanzania, working with a people group of around 700,000 people called the Zaramo. Now, due to the Arab slave-trade of the 18th and 19th centuries, Coastal Tanzania is predominantly Islamic, and so are the Zaramo.

Seeing as the Zaramo are unreached and have no strong diaspora, there's been no way to begin learning KiZaramo (their traditional language) back here (no one speaks it), so we've been asked not to do any language work at all yet- our first couple of weeks there will be spent in some intense language-acquisition training.

More specifically, we'll be living in the area around Mzenga (marked out in the map); an area where around 5-10,000 people live. My teammates and I will be divided into pairs and spread out through a few different villages, each one of us about a 20 minute walk from the others. My team, however, is down to three single guys now, so it could be that the three of us will be living together. Should be fun. My likely roommates for the next two years will be Jeremy from BC and Kulola from Tanzania.

Security, I believe, is an illusion. I could step outside my home in suburban Brampton, be hit by a car, and loose my legs or more. Or I could be attacked by a feral groundhog in the park down the street, develop rabies, and die if not treated in time. The area I will be living in is Islamic, but missionaries in Tanzania have not traditionally been threatened by the people. The traffic, however, is horrible - possibly the greatest danger we face. Thankfully, we'll be living in a very rural area, and hopefully will be able to survive being run-over by a bicycle. I'm not too sure how wild the wildlife gets, but my teamleaders once sent us a picture of them with a wild zebra in the background. Again, thankfully, zebras are not carnivorous or nearly as vicious as those evil little groundhogs. If you scroll down a couple of posts, you'll be able to see a picture of Tim's landrover stuck in a mud road surrounded by jungle.

One of TIMO's values and a central part of our philosophy of ministry is the adoption of a simpler lifestyle - among other things, this helps us to identify with those to whom we minister.

To that end, our living situation will be as close as possible to the that of the Zaramo. For example, out homes will be made of mud and cement (there's an example to the left), with roofs made of thatch and tin.
The homes will have an attached long-drop toilet (which is a deep whole in the ground), near which no lit match shall go. We'll also have one faucet inside the house attached to a rain-dependent water tank. In the dry season, we may have to go on a bit of a hike to get our water.
Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average national income of $700 a year, and rural areas would generally be on the lower end of the curve. I would imagine this is probably quite a luxurious home by Zaramo standards.

The area in Tanzania where we'll be is also home to several hundred thousand mosquitoes. These mosquitoes would carry everything from yellow and typhoid fevers (for which we've had innoculations) to malaria, (for which there are no innoculations yet, but we have a preventative daily tablet). These mosquitoes are mostly active in the evening, at dusk. Having no electricity, it's likely that we'll be retiring for the evening soon after the sun does, but it'd still help to wear long clothing. We'll be sleeping under mosquito nets. Also, no fresh water in East Africa is safe for drinking or swimming in by people who have no immunity to the myriads of bacteria and parasites in them, so unless we can boil a whole lake, we won't be doing much swimming.

The area where we'll be is around 100 kms from Dar es Salaam as the crow flies. As the car drives, it's likely a bit longer, and as the car drives in mud roads, it'll probably take us several hours to get to the city. We'll be likely going there every few weeks/months for some supplies, hospital visits, etc. While in Dar, we'll have a lot more access to the internet, so I hope to catch up with you all in those times. Besides the language and cultural acquisition which will be so important in our first few months out, TIMO also has a lot of training for long-term missions. The first Unit of this training, our Orientation unit, will include a technology fast, so we'll likely have no email at all for the first few months once we've landed. So once again, write to me! Our smail-mail address is on the top-right corner of this blog page.

Well, that's about all I can think of right now, if you have any questions, leave me a comment and ask- if I can answer them I certainly will. And if not, lay on the advice! One of my aunts has warned me of the mosquitoes and has given me a can of Off- Deep Woods, to keep them at bay. Someone else told me that if I take vitamin B complex tablets (one a day), the mosquitoes will ignore me completely. I'm certainly hoping to try this out. So any other advice you may have about anything, would be greatly appreciated. If you have no advice, then just leave a note reminding me of what a ruggedly handsome guy I am :D. Hope to hear from you!