With Love From Tanzania

Thank you so much for your prayers and support for my recent visit to Tanzania! A huge thank you to everyone who generously gave items needed by the women and beekeeping groups I was working with. During my 4 weeks away, I met with many community groups and churches and I bring back so many greetings and grateful thanks from them all!

I bring greetings from the Mama Hive women! They were delighted with all the supplies which will be so useful. And Laurencia and Jeni, the two seamstresses, were particularly delighted with new accurate tape measures and good scissors! While I was with the group, we enjoyed selling at fairs in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza and were able to explore new market opportunities selling their honey and beeswax products. We had good conversations about moving the social enterprise project forward, with a potential workshop space to renovate near the shop and three potential new team members with albinism all needing support. It was wonderful to hear some of the current group sharing about the incredible difference the project has made in their lives and how they want to give this to others. Naomi, a women with albinism struggling to provide for 7 children has now joined and we hope that we might be able to offer support at some point soon also to Sikujua (literally translates “I didn’t know”) and a young teenager called Grace. It was wonderful to see the women engaging in a new Bible study program recently started through translation work of a friend of mine and pray together about how God might use this project to bring light and hope.

Greetings from the beekeepers in many different villages! We were able to provide several groups with bee suits, which is a huge blessing! And some are being saved for a new group to start up soon. Please pray particularly for the group of beekeepers in Mchangani, a rough place on Kome Island on Lake Victoria, and for Nehemiah, who has recently arrived to pastor the small congregation there. His vision is to see people educated and we pray for the wisdom and resources for him to be able to do this!

I was with Beacon Mission Christian Centre, a city church that our family has long been connected with in Mwanza. This church (which is providing accountability and support to the Mama Hive project) is incredibly missional and it was exciting to hear about their church planting stories of transformation. Please pray for Shekinah, a school they have established supporting vulnerable children in education.

Greetings from the village church in Nyamiswi! This church has grown from 15 to 80 recently and they have moved into the bigger space you see in the video! Please pray for this church to continue to be a light in this little market village strategically placed in the middle of Kome Island. Pray particularly for two young people, Anna and Salele, both blind. There are 6 visually-impaired people here, and it would be wonderful to think of a way that the church might be able to better support them.

Thank you so much for all your prayers while I was away … especially on the long bus journeys travelling across crazy roads through the night, it was wonderful to read your messages on the prayer WhatsApp! I am incredibly grateful for God’s leading and protection during my month there … there were many times that plans seemed confusing or difficult to work out, but every time, God made a way for where we should be when! And with late night honey processing to early morning seminars, from one bed (or floor) to the next, by God’s grace, I had energy and health for it all! From the start at the Artisan Fair in Dar es Salaam selling the Mama Hive products, to time with the women with albinism in Mwanza, to the three different villages on Kome Island with the existing beekeeping groups, then to the villages visited in the Iringa region working out new project plans for bees and elephants, it was encouraging to see all that God is doing and wants to do through these groups in these places. Our heart is to see God’s light and hope being shone and shared, to see transformation in the lives of the least, the last and lost. And we want to encourage local churches in these places to pray and work towards this through practical serving in their communities. Truly God works with whatever we offer and it is always exciting to see how He does this!

I am blogging a bit more about some of my adventures which you can find here: www.themongers.blogspot.com