John and Shaban left at 5:45 am this morning to drive to the Kenyan border at a Tanzanian town called Sirari.  The border can be a confusing and dangerous place.  They got there at 7:30 am but argued and fought with officials (who wanted more money in bribes) for two hours.  Finally, close to 10:00 am they got the pump across the border and into the car.  It came in many bags and with many lengths of well casings so they had to make sure it was all there before they left.  John had contracted with a government water official to do the assembly and installation of the pump, including the welding to slow down theft.  This means we have to get a welder, a generator, and all his welding stuff up to the well site.  The pump is normally just held down by bolts which makes stealing it fairly simple, so John is having the bolts welded.  When maintenance is needed in about four years, they will just bring a cutting torch, cut off the bolts, fix the pump and then reweld it.  The government official is working out the arrangements for the welder, so it will be next week before the pump can be installed on the well.  We didn't have all the money to do it yet, but we have been having paperwork problems getting the new treasurer on the One Book Foundation bank account, and I have to sign some papers just emailed to me and send them back.  We took money out of our savings to get the pump now, knowing that we will soon have the money from the foundation.  Apparently, red tape is universal whether at the Kenyan border or an Arkansas bank.  There are several pictures of the pump you can see by clicking on the picture at the right.  Karen is so proud of John, I think she may pop.  God is good.

I mentioned in a recent blog that the church in Muranda had been "meeting under a tree" which is an expression here that means there is no church building.  Sometimes there is no tree, just tarps stretched between poles.  Most of the active churches are busy making bricks and gathering stones for the foundation.  Muranda has done just that and has the walls up beyond window height and need a lintel (a concrete, reinforced layer that holds the walls together for strength).  Lintels need concrete and steel reinforcing rods which are very expensive (for here).  A single bag of cement that sold for $10 when we moved here is now $20 a bag, and they need five bags plus the rebar or about $200.  I gave the money to Pastor Festo (the circuit pastor for Muanda that has an evangelist for services) two days ago and today the lintel is in place.  I'd have pictures but the rains have washed out the roads to Muranda.  I do have two pictures of what it looked like for its first service.  The one at right shows the tree and exterior and if you click on it--it will take you to a shot of the interior.  They now meet in the new building and pull tarps over the open roof area for shade and protection from the rain after walking up to five kilometers just to get there.  Think about that the next time you complain at not getting to park near the front door of the church.

The social structure here has taken me quite a while to understand, but the more I learn, the more I like it.  Every village has village meetings once every two months or more often if needed.  Even a bigger town, like Bunda, is divided into village size blocks with a man in charge of each called the "belozi" who is a sort of judge or arbiter of property issues.  A meeting will deal with things like thievery, especially cattle or livestock, and other problems.  One of the villages near the new well had a guy who had been caught stealing two cattle.  So they made him bring all his cattle to the meeting and allowed the man whose cattle had been stolen to pick out the two fattest cattle for replacement.  They then voted that if that man stole any more cattle he would be beaten and driven from the village (sometimes they beat the thief to death).  They also discuss those who have died and have a list of those who didn't attend the funeral or help out with food, and that person is fined $10 to $20 which is a lot of money for these folks.  That's why when one of our workers has a neighbor who dies, they take a day off to attend or they will be talked about and fined.  If things are stolen, the meeting has the power to search a suspect's home for the stolen items.  If found they are returned, and the thief is punished right there.  They very seldom involve the police because the police are corrupt and whoever has the most money gets the prize.  It's a system that's been around a long time and works pretty well.  From what I read on the internet it sure works better than the U.S. Congress, but that's just one opinion.

The new church at Murenda has been meeting under a tree for three years now, but has come together as a congregation and made bricks and built a foundation and walls for a church.  Now, they need a lintel to hold the walls together while they raise money to build a roof.  If they don't get this done, the next big storm can bring the walls down, so Pastor Festo is coming by tomorrow to get the $200 they need to buy the cement and steel reinforcing rods to make the lintel on Friday.  I love helping the churches that do so much on their own.  I was there for the first service of this church and baptized about forty people that day.  God is good.  Juliana met with the principal of the vocational school this morning, and it looks like her son can stay but on probation.  We are asking for prayers for Fabiani, her son, that this will work, so he will have a decent shot at life.  The Chinese are rebuilding the road between here and Musoma and today they severed the fiber optic cable carrying internet and cell phone service to Musoma.  Musoma has no internet or cell phone service for one company (others were not affected) and it may be a month before they get it restored.  We still have it for now, but the same road crew will be working south of Bunda in a few weeks, so we may be next.  It is never boring here.

We got the first new desks today back from the fundi (carpenter) today.  We will deliver them to St. Wiggins Academy in Lamadi (about 20 miles from here) later this week.  Right now most of the 200 kids sit on bamboo mats placed on the dirt floor and have to write in their laps.  This will bring the number of desks to 22, so that 66 kids can be at desks and off the floor.  We need many more, but will build them as the money comes in--about $35 per desk (wood is very expensive here now).  On a sadder note, Juliana's son, who we paid the school fees to go to vocational school has been getting in fights and was smashed in the head with a piece of firewood on Saturday and needed stitches.  He and Juliana have to go see the principal tomorrow.  Her son may be expelled which means he won't be able to get into any vocational school in Tanzania after this.  It hurts not to be able to help, but the young man seems to be self destructive.  We hope and pray that he can learn from this and maybe not get expelled, but it is not our place to interfere even though our hearts hurt for Juliana.  By the way, our solar lights are working perfectly and we know how much they are saving us because the electric company raised its rates by 40% and our bill remained the same--so we are saving 40%.  It is still comforting to know that no matter what, we still have fifteen security lights burning at night whether the power is there or not.

For the next several Sundays, I'm reprinting a series of articles I did for an Arkansas newspaper:  A Piece of Lint
Ever think much about lint? Not the liturgical stuff before Easter (that one’s spelled Lent), but the stuff that gets on your clothes? Me either.   At least not until my son, Keith, was complaining about it the other day. Everybody seems to complain about it. I don’t think I have ever heard a single person say anything nice about it.
Well, I didn’t know much about it except that our dryer has a filter for it and, boy, does it fill up fast. If the filter ever wears out, I could probably use one of my black suits in its place because they sure collect a lot of it. Once I got to thinking about it, I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and discovered that by definition it is a “particle of fluff.” Not just fluff, but a mere particle of it. Fittingly, it was first used in printed English in 1665 as follows: “Driving the lint from his black Cloathes With his Wet Thumb.” Seems we have always had trouble with lint.
You would think that something as small as lint wouldn’t be as big an irritant as it is. We are talking about particles here. Pretty small stuff. Yet, some of us have an uncontrollable urge not only to notice it, but to even reach out and pick it off of other people’s clothes! Lint pickers.
Oh, I’ve done it myself, so I recognize the symptoms. Once we start looking for it, we find it. And once we find it, it bothers us until we pick it off or get someone else to do it. Of course, while we’re seeing the lint, we are not seeing much of anything else. Just that little piece of lint.  Some folks think this is a gender thing – that women naturally see the little bitty stuff and men see the great big stuff. This is not the case when it comes to lint sighting and lint picking. Some of the biggest lint pickers I have ever known were men.
No, we can’t lay this off on anything but our own predisposition to look for flaws in or on other people. It’s almost like we have our own lint filters in the lenses of our eyes, narrowing our focus until all we can see is the lint.
My own belief is that because we each know that we, ourselves, are flawed, we seem to need to find the flaws in others in order to reassure ourselves that we are OK. Kind of an “If you’re not OK, then I’m OK” equation. But this really isn’t healthy, and picking metaphorical lint off other people only deters us from cleaning up our own acts.
I don’t know if they had lint in Jesus’ day, but they must have had something close to it. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to stop trying to pick the mote or speck from our neighbor’s eye when we’ve got a log in our own (Matthew 7:3-4). You would think that having a log in your eye would seriously cut down on your ability to see, not to mention making you rather stand out among your peers.
It would also be a difficult thing to live with. Every time you turned around you would be smashing somebody or something with that log. Pretty soon, most folks would be avoiding you like the plague, except for one group – the folks that also had logs sticking out of their own eyes.
As it turns out, this is pretty much the case today for those of us with metaphorical logs in our eyes. It does, indeed, keep us from seeing the bigger picture, and it does keep us focusing on the little stuff.
Lint is lint. It is not important. It is small and petty and insignificant, and when we spend our time looking for it on others it makes us small and petty and insignificant.  We can live with lint. It is not like cancer or radiation or other small things that can harm us. Lint is benign. It doesn’t do any damage to anything, yet many of us seem to have devoted our lives to lint picking. What a waste!
Jesus calls us to be more important than that, to be significant in God’s eyes by reaching out a helping hand to others – not one picking at lint. Almost all of us have suffered at the hands of lint pickers. You’d think we would have learned not to do it ourselves.  If we stop looking at the lint and start looking in the eyes of the children God created, we might find so many wonderful things we might never see the lint again. Life is full of flaws, and it takes no expertise to find them. What does take effort is finding the beauty in each one of us. That beauty is there because God created us.

John made spaghetti and sausage meatballs tonight.  His cooking skills have kept our diet from being mundane, that's for sure.  He made two loaves of homemade oat bread today.  Twice last week, he made his famous chili.  He also makes an incredible spinach and cheese calzone.  We can't get crackers here, like Premium Saltines, so John got a recipe and learned how to make them from just flour and water.  Stir fry is another specialty of which we never tire.  If we see something in a movie that makes us want it, John will be on the internet figuring out how to do it with what we have here.  Sometimes, he makes pizza, and sometimes, while we're watching TV, he shows up with melted cheese on crackers he has made.  Shaban wants his wife to come learn from him and the Juliana and Lusi have cooked several things for their families that John has taught them how to do.  What a huge difference it makes just to have that one special food to look forward to.  He makes our lives here so much more manageable and we love it.  Thank you, John.