Getting ahead

It's hard work to get ahead in Tanzania.  On one hand, the communal caring-for and sharing that goes on within families is really beautiful, but on the other, it makes it nearly impossible for anyone to break out of poverty.  It's a system set up so that nobody with friends and family ends up hungry and homeless, which is great, except that it also prevents anyone from being really well-fed in a very nice house.

To give you an idea of how this works, I'll give you a little case study example from a young man with whom I was talking yesterday.  He's the second child out of nine kids, and the oldest boy.  His parents chose him to be one of the few in the family who would receive a good education, since they couldn't afford to send all their kids through school.  They, along with the extended family and the brothers and sisters who weren't chosen, sacrificed a lot to put him all the way through secondary school.  After graduation, he managed to get a pretty good job with a regular salary.

Now, however, he has a huge responsibility to take care of everyone in his family.  Just this past weekend, his sister had a baby, and he was asked to pay for her transport to and from the hospital and the hospital bill.  Also, his cousin's child got sick, and he had to foot that bill, too.  While his cousin might not have directly contributed to his education, she's still family, and she needed help.  Every week or two, there is a relative who needs something or other, and he's expected to pay.

He has been trying to save up some money for a little nest egg, in hopes of getting married and having his own family someday, but how can he refuse?  They put him through school, and without their help, he'd be in the same situation they are.  As the oldest and wealthiest male among his siblings, he's the one they are all going to go to for the rest of his life.  When his father dies, he'll be responsible for taking care of his mother and any surviving grandparents.  If any of his brothers die, he's the one in charge of providing for their widows and children.

This system ensures that there is always someone who can help you in your time of need, and it keeps the family relationships close.  There are a lot of good things about everyone caring for one another and being responsible for each other, and I don't think this young man would argue otherwise.  However, he's already feeling the frustration and pressure, and he's still in his twenties.  A lot of people are depending on him, and he's wondering if he really got the good end of the deal or not.  It's not always so lucky to be the "lucky" one!

Missing family

The other day when I dropped Zarya off at another missionary's home for the afternoon, she started crying a little bit.  The other mama, the one whose house we were at, said, "Are you missing your mama, Zarya?  It's okay to cry.  I miss my mama, too.  Sometimes I'm sad to be far away from my mama, just like you are."

The next day, a different missionary woman I encountered was having a rough day, because it was her father's 70th birthday, and she was missing the big family party.  She had a good attitude about it, and said, "You know, it's only a few days each year that I feel that the whole living here to do missions just might not be worth giving up being near my family, but this sure is one of them.  Tomorrow I'll probably be fine again, but today I really wish that I wasn't here in Tanzania, unable to be with my dad."

Sometimes Andrew and I talk about being far away from our families and how it's difficult that we can't just pop over for a visit.  We don't need to live two blocks away, but a little visit now and then would sure be nice.  In the picture of my dad and Zarya, you can see how little she is - that's how old she was when he last saw her.  She's grown up a lot since then, and gone through some super-cute stages that our families have totally missed.

It makes me sad that we can't do things with our families like put a puzzle together, like we did last Christmas.  We video chat on Skype once a week, we upload short video clips of Zarya onto YouTube for them to watch, and we e-mail regularly, but it's just not the same.  You can't snuggle a baby over Skype, and you can't spend the afternoon in the kitchen talking and baking together via e-mail.  Between the two of us, Andrew and I have five sisters, and if any one of them walked in our front door right now, Zarya would have no idea who she was.

Missionaries have to "count the cost".  We know we're called to be here, and we've chosen to obey and live in East Africa.  We don't regret or resent it, but that doesn't mean we're not sad about it sometimes.  Zarya is sad when I leave for two and a half hours (and, mind you, she's asleep for two of those), and likewise, we're sad when we leave our families for two and a half years or so.

Dad, Mom, Papa, Nammie, and all of our sisters and brothers-in-law and the plethora of nieces and nephews, this one is for you: we love you and we miss you!

Don't Pack Up Those Books Yet!

Andrew writing here (any gasps are understandable)...

Last Sunday I visited a Pentecostal church in a Zanaki village on my list of villages to get to for the first time.  (Actually, I thought it was a Catholic church until I arrived and was informed otherwise.)  I've visited a lot of churches over the last several months, which I actually quite enjoy once I get out the front door of the house and on my way.  This church visit wasn't really one of my favorites, but there was a highlight moment I thought was special.

At the end of the service I pulled out all of the books I'd brought with me for sale, covering about seven of the different languages I expected might be spoken in that village.  As usual, a mob immediately formed around me, consisting mostly of small children, but also including a few other individuals who had some level of interest in looking or buying.  After about fifteen minutes, I starting packing up the remaing books and most of the children had been shooed away by various adults.  At that point a teenage girl came running up saying she'd gone home to get her grandfather because she was sure he'd be interested in the Zanaki books.

Sure enough, as I looked up, a gray-haired man was walking into the church.  My encounter with him lasted all of about one minute.  He asked what Zanaki books I had, and I showed him the five options.  He selected the Gospel of Luke and a guide for reading the Zanaki language, paid for the books, and quickly left.

If I had to guess, I would guess this man is not a Christian, but he's proud to be a Zanaki and was motivated by the desire to check out what it might be like to see his language in print.  He seemed very uncomfortable in that church building, but we can hope and pray that after he reads the Gospel of Luke in his language that the Lord will change his heart.

If he IS a Christian and I just completely misread him....I'm sorry for my mistake, but I still hope that reading Luke's Gospel will bring a smile to his face.

Five years

Five years ago today (well, okay, so it's five years ago tomorrow, if you want to get really technical about it), it was September 16, 2008.  If there was ever a date that changed history, it's that one.  Hmm, to revise that, it was a date that changed the course of the Smith family lives!

For starters, my parents bought a house that day.  That's a big deal.  The address of that house is still our USA address and a lot of good stuff has taken place there.

Also on that date, my sister Alyssa gave birth to the first niece/grandchild in the Smith family - Alaythia Esther Vikesland was born!

Since I'm not sure how my sister feels about having her post-birth hospital picture on the blog, you get one of me, the hesitant new auntie, instead.  I'd never held such a tiny, brand-new baby before and was kind of anxious about it!

Five years later, Alaythia is a beautiful, smart (duh, did we expect otherwise from Alyssa's progeny?!), and stylish little girl.

Five years ago, Alyssa was laboring in the hospital, and now she's laboring again, frosting cupcakes and wrapping My Little Ponies for a big birthday shabang to commemorate the day she added motherhood to her list of accomplishments, just in case PhD wasn't enough (although at that time she wasn't quite a doctor just yet).

And, in case my parents and sister all doing something really big on the same date wasn't enough, Andrew decided to make it a pretty significant date for me, too.  On September 16, 2008, he asked me out on a date.  We'd met just four days earlier, and I'd never been asked on a date in my life, so that e-mail just about made me fall off my chair!  I don't have a picture of us together until November of that year, but here we are together at Thanksgiving:

Five years later, here we are on our second term together in Tanzania, and we have a BABY!  Crazy!  Here's to five fabulous years of twitterpation.

Zarya, age 10 months

Zarya loves playing on her obstacle course in the dining room.  Why take the easy way around the chairs when you're just now big enough to wriggle your way over the rungs and go right through them?

So cute!  So sweet!  So much fun!

Horsing around in Zanaki

Michelle, age 10, in the backyard on Fling

Last Thursday (Aug. 30, 2013, if you really care), the two Zanaki translators and I FINALLY FINALLY finished reading the ENTIRE book of Genesis aloud, doing some major spelling changes as we went.  There are 50 chapters in Genesis.  It's long.  You probably don't particularly care about that right now and it doesn't even matter in this story, anyway, except that the story below took place when we got to Genesis 49:17.

Genesis 49 is the chapter in which Jacob/Israel blesses/curses his sons.  Some of them are most definitely better blessings than others, and poor Dan got a bad one.  I guess being the son of a concubine takes one's blessing down a rung or two (or like 15, if you compare his "blessing" with what Judah or Joseph got).  Genesis 49:17 says: "Dan will be like a snake beside the road, a poisonous viper along the path that bites the horse's hooves so its rider is thrown off."

The Zanaki translators hadn't quite understood the verse, so had switched it around a bit.  The English translation of their draft was something like this: "Dan will be like a poisonous snake that bites the horse's hooves so the horse and rider fall beside the road."  All the right words were there, so it took me a minute to figure out what exactly was wrong.  Then it took much longer than a minute to convince the translators that it was wrong!

Usually, if the issue in the translation draft is one of actually being wrong, it's straightforward enough to have them read the Swahili and English translations, look at their own again, and then they themselves notice the issue and we work out a correction together.  This time, though, they argued and argued with me.  I was like, "What is the big deal about moving the phrase about 'beside the road' to being about the snake instead of the place where they fall, and making it just the rider who falls, and not also the horse?!"

More arguing ensued.  I still didn't get why it was so tricky.  I mean, seriously, this wasn't theology, just some sentence structure issues in poor Dan's blessing/curse!  Finally, a light went on when one of the translators said, "If the snake bites the horse, the horse will fall down.  If there is a person on the horse, then I guess they fall, too, but the horse has to fall."

I asked, "Has either of you ever ridden a horse?"  I didn't include "or ever seen one," but I wondered about that.

They both looked at me like that was a pretty dumb question and said, "No."  They could have added, "Dude, this is Tanzania.  We're kind of short on horses around here, duh," but they kept their answer short.

I said, "Look, y'all, I have.  And when horses get scared or hurt, they rear up, or buck, or run, or freak out, but they don't actually fall down very often.  But if somebody is sitting on that horse when it does some of the aforementioned (ha - like I really said "aforementioned" in Swahili!) antics, chances are, they are going to end up in the dirt.  So just trust me and change the verse."

They looked at me dubiously.  One of them asked, "So you've really ridden a horse, and you're sure?"

I assured them I had been on plenty of horses, although it didn't actually matter if I had or not, because the Hebrew says that the rider falls, not the horse, and we were supposed to stick to the biblical facts.  They shrugged, and one of them typed (i.e. pecked it out with two fingers) in the changes.

Usually, Zanaki culture is a lot closer to ancient Hebrew culture than modern American culture is, so they translators usually understand the context of Genesis better than I do (i.e. the importance of having sons, killing animals in religious ceremonies, marrying multiple wives, living in a dry place, etc.), but for once I had the advantage.  Who knew that my riding lessons at age 10 would come in so handy?!