Music in Tanzania

Music is a huge part of everyday life in Tanzania.  But, it might sound a bit different than what you would expect if you've seen movies of Africa with traditional African music in them.  It has definitely evolved over the years, as Western influence and availability of electricity have changed things.

Music is also becoming more and more a part of our work, as we look at ways to promote mother tongue literacy and creative, meaningul use of Scripture.  In an effort to share some glimpses of what music is like around Musoma, we've put three different video clips on YouTube.  Click on the links below to check them out!

http://youtu.be/OzbqiLB3JwQ

This is from a public event we went to on a Sunday afternoon in 2010.  Approximately ten different choirs, some of which had traveled from out of town, performed different songs with energetic dance steps.

 http://youtu.be/9cQzxJh3XyY

 We had a series of literacy workshops at the office in 2011, working with eight different language groups.  During one series, some of groups wrote songs based from Luke and performed them on the last day of the week-long workshop.  This is the Jita group performing a song based on Luke 24.

 http://youtu.be/gxsW3IcGvQQ

This choir performed several songs at the Zanaki Luke dedication in early December.  They were a huge hit with their creative songs, many of which were in Zanaki.  Since the dedication, they have been traveling to different churches to perform and are also hoping to make a recording soon.

 

This is the song book which is used in many Tanzanian churches.  All of the songs are in Swahili, and you might notice that most of the songs are translated from Western hymns.  Some have retained the original melody, and others are quite different.  You rarely see one of these books in good condition because they're used a lot!  Just in the last few weeks we've taken some initial steps to hopefully develop some similar songbooks in the Ikoma language.

First copy sold

Praying for the books at the dedication

The pastor whom the story below is about

This is a story I (Misha) wrote following the December 2 dedication of Luke in the Zanaki language:

On a day that was alternately hot and sunny and pouring rain, a dedication event for the gospel of Luke in the Zanaki language took place.  The dedication was held in the village of Butiama, which is the hometown of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere.  Perhaps in part because of Nyerere and the fact he was a Zanaki and a national hero, Zanaki people are proud of their language and culture.

The special guest speaker at the dedication was in the family line of the area chief and the top person in his denomination for all of East Africa, so was a very important local figure.  He was the one honored with task of cutting the ribbon and opening the box of Luke books.  After he opened the box and another pastor prayed a blessing over them, the next part of the ceremony was one of the translators reading a passage from Luke aloud.  When it was announced which passage would be the one read aloud, he grabbed a copy of Luke from the top of the box he had just opened and turned to the passage.  While the translator was reading aloud, he followed along with his finger on the page, listening carefully and reading it himself.  He was fluent in Swahili and could read it, but had never been taught how to read in his mother tongue.  But with the help of hearing it read aloud while looking at the words, he was able to understand the writing system used and figure it out.

Soon after this, the sales table opened and people eagerly came up to purchase copies.  The box which had been blessed and dedicated needed to be moved from the table at which the special guest was sitting to the sales table.  When someone came up to collect the box, he refused to return the copy he had taken to read, instead placing money to purchase his copy in the box, becoming the first person to ever purchase a copy of Luke in the Zanaki language.

Flowers

The work that God accomplishes in our yard is much more impressive than what we accomplish on our own!

Drachmas and cattle

Today I (Misha) came across a verse that made me laugh aloud.  Actually, it wasn't even a verse, it was a footnote.  Usually if I'm laughing at a verse (footnote), it means that something went terribly awry during the drafting stage (don't worry, this doesn't happen too often), but this time it was a good sort of laugh.

For context, the verse (which is in the context of sorcerers burning their sorcery books after believing in Christ) is as follows: A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas (Acts 19:19, NIV).  The footnote is to explain the value of a drachma (according to the NIV's footnote, one drachma is a day's wage).  In the Ikoma translation, their footnote says that the value of 50,000 drachmas is enough money to buy 250 head of cattle.  I guess each bovine is worth about 200 days' wages for an Ikoma person.  Now THAT is what I call making a translation good and relevant for the people group for which it is intended!

Lunch from the lake, at the lake

You know your fish is fresh when you're sitting about three feet away from the lake while eating it and fishing boats pass by periodically!  Andrew and I like to go out to lunch sometimes on weekends at a little restaurant right on Lake Victoria and get fish and chips.  One gets a whole tilapia fish, fried crispy on the outside and soft and white on the inside.  The eyes and teeth and tail and all are still attached to the fish, but we ceased to be repulsed by such things long ago.

So if you're ever in town, we'd be happy to go out for some fish and chips with you!  In 2011 we had two sets of visitors and we took both of them here to share the fun of living on the lake.  It can take a while to get your food (this is Tanzania, after all), but it's well worth it when it arrives!

Cheesecake

Chocolate Marbled Christmas Cheesecake!

I wanted to make a special dessert for Christmas, so decided to attempt a cheesecake.  Cheesecake is easy to make in places like Canada, the States, and England (I have successfully made ones in all those places), but slightly more complicated in Tanzania.  For starters, there is no cream cheese here.  And I have no cheesecake pan.  And there is no sour cream here.  So, what else is there to do but make your own?  I bought this strange thing sold here that can only be described as thick, chunky milk.  I have no idea how they make it, but it's sold in 500ml (for you Americans, that's a bit over a pint) containers and looks revolting.

Using a rag, a cat toy with a long ribbon (we didn't have any string on hand), and a small mixing bowl, I rigged up a way to strain the chunky milk like I was using cheesecloth or something more professional.  Letting it drain for about eight hours in the fridge got it to the right consistency.  I bought some yogurt a missionary friend made (from scratch... plain yogurt isn't exactly sold here, either) and strained a few cups of that, too.  In the end, after three days of draining and straining, I had enough "cream cheese/sour cream"!

And you know what?  It tasted great.  Maybe not quite like normal cheesecake, but it was quite yummy.  I mixed in some cocoa to some of it and made this nice marble pattern that was so pretty I got Andrew to take a picture before we cut into it.

Long time no post

Well, I apologize for the long delay in blog posts!  We have had some issues with the internet over here...

On December 19th at approximately 11:00am, the internet line was cut.  All landline phones and broadband internet went out.  At the same time, a water pipe was also cut and the water to a large section of town also went out.  There was road work to build a new bridge going on and a backhoe was digging away in a large hole.  As soon as it happened upon the phone line and the water pipe, and that was the end of that.  As soon as the water pipe was cut, it immediately flooded the giant hole in which the backhoe was working.  There was a huge mound of loose dirt around the backhoe and it turned into thick black mud and water.  As you might imagine, the backhoe didn't make it out of that hole for several days!  A brigade of local people with buckets scooped it out by hand.

The water was restored after four days and the internet to part of town was fixed six days later, on Christmas afternoon.  We were excited that we were able to call our families on Christmas - it was a very nice Christmas surprise to get it back!  After a week with no internet at home or at the office, we were feeling rather desperate!

One small part of town still has no internet, however, and our office is located there.  It is very frustrating (and difficult to get work done) without any internet.  The company keeps telling us it will be fixed tomorrow.  Many tomorrows have come and gone, but still no internet.  Unfortunately, all phone and internet is prepaid over here, and the way it works at the office is that we pay for a period of time (the internet at our office goes in 4-week payment cycles), not by usage, so we can't exactly threaten the company or withhold our money from them.  It's very frustrating!  Also, since they are the only company, we can't threaten to drop them and go with a different internet option, either.  We just hope that they'll fix it soon.

So in the meantime, I will do my best to do some blog posts from home and start updating y'all again!