Report on Mission Trip - August 2009

We left to go to Tanzania August 24, 2009 after chaning plans and spending the night in Amsterdam and Entebbe, we arrived in Mwanza, Tanzania and then drove 3 hours to finally arrive in Shinyanga. This trip had four major goals: 1) verify the feeding of the street children in Mwanza 2) construct a maternity wing at the clinic which we helped open several years ago 3) start construction of a mission guest house, and, 4) work on some water wells.

The trip was very successful. The oprhans in Mwanza are being fed regularly and several have been returned to their families. About 20 have been moved to a care facility run by Roman Catholic nuns. One of the local pastors told us that some girls have begun coming the the feedings and have been for several weeks. This week there were 7 girls, from about 10 to 14 years old.

In Shinyanga we made contact with a group called Compassion who have been helping to send pre-schoolers to a pre-school program at a local church. Compassion doesn't feed, but the Mothers Union was giving the children a cup of watery porridge every day. That was all they were getting to eat all day. We decided right then to start another feeding program for these 150 orphans. WE now feed them a simple meal of rice and beans every Wednesday. When they found out that we would be feeding them every week and not just the day we were there, the teacher was in tears. The pastor in charge has committed to have cooks volunteer to be available to prepare the food. We will increase the number of days that we feed these children as funds become available. As a quick update, in December 2009, we increased feeding these orphans to twice a week.

We also raised the walls on the maternity wing that is attached to the clinic that we helped open several years ago and placed the foundation for a missionary house. This will help when missionaries go there to do programs, as it is currently about 1 1/2 hour drive to the nearest guest house.

We have located several places for water wells and hopefully they will be completed before the end of the year.

As always we got more blessing from this trip than we every dreamed possible. Thanks to all of you who are helping make this possible.

The next planned trip is Summer 2023. We are still determining the different projects that will be worked on, but the two feeding programs have to have an annual visit to assure they are on-going and that the reports we get are accurate. Four different projects under consideration.