Berega part 1

Once a year, all the grade 6-12 secondary students at Haven of Peace Academy (HOPAC) spend an entire week volunteering for others.  It's called Service Emphasis Week (SEW).  The younger kids stay at home and go to their projects around Dar each day, but the older ones live and work outside the city. I was privileged to be a chaperone for 6 days with 13 HOPAC kids, spend 15 hours in a bus, and help to care for 18 orphans aged 0-2 years old.

This trip took me into the Africa that many people imagine, but one which I had not yet experienced.  I am grateful to have gone, but almost every aspect of this trip took me incredibly far outside my comfort zone...

1.  The only bridge across the river leading to the orphanage was washed away in January, so we knew going in that we all needed to cross it on foot with all our luggage.  I personally thought that this "river" would be more of a "creek," but it turned out to be fairly substantial.  It had rained heavily in the mountains the morning of our arrival and so the river kept rising throughout the day.  We ended up hiring men from the village to ferry our belongings across (just try telling teenage girls to "pack light!") and crossed the swift-flowing river in groups, planting our feet against the current.  When the girls crossed, the water was up to their knees. When we leaders crossed, it was up to our thighs.  And by the time our bus driver parked the bus and tried to cross, it was impassable (neck high), so he had to sleep on the other side of the river.  Being responsible for the lives of 13 teens in this situation (one of whom was deathly afraid of water due to a childhood friend who had drowned), was among the scariest times of my life.

 
(not the best photo, which I took from inside the bus, but you can see the first group of girls crossing..and how wide that river was!)

2.  There was no running water and so we used pit toilets and bucket showers for the week.  Thankfully, my co-leader grew up in the village so she knew a nifty trick to burn grass in the hole to create a sweeter-smelling experience.

 (this made me chuckle every time I went to the "barth room" - which was actually used only for showers.  The door marked "toilet" was where the hole was).

3.  We were in the middle of nowhere.  The bus was parked on the other side of the river and although there was a hospital of sorts nearby for emergencies, we were really isolated.  We lost power the last night and it was just absolute blackness (on the positive side, the stars were amazing!)  I just realized how much of a city girl I really am.

4.  Leading a missions trip in the U.S. with U.S. kids is a lot different than leading a trip in Tanzania with international kids.  Of the 13 girls, we had 9 countries represented (Uganda, Tanzania, Finland, Germany, U.K., U.S., Spain, India, Greece).  We also had girls of Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths.  I got to see how the Indian kids brought their own personal spices from home to jazz up the food (and even braved some of their condiments!)  I tried to teach a card game to kids whose first language is not English and so the terms we throw around with mutual understanding such as "a hand of cards," "trump," "tricks" were just not translating.  Even leading with a Tanzanian co-leader was a very different experience.  Although we worked very well together, there were definitely cultural differences in how we viewed and responded to situations.

I'll talk about the work we did and those amazing, beautiful orphans in my next post!