We're Here!!!

We arrived in Tanzania about 9:00 p.m. last night at Kilmanjaro Airport. We walked off the plane into a beautifully warm African night - 75 degrees and a gorgeous full moon. Seemed hard to believe we were actually half way around the world! We made it through customs and got our luggage and were welcomed by Munisi and Allan. We had lots of help loading our bags onto the buses and headed off to the Uhuru Lutheran Hostel. (There are 31 people in our group from the NE Synod) After the 40 minute trip through the African countryside, it was great to be warmly welcomed here with some wonderfully refreshing cold fruit juice and the key to our room. It felt so good to get a cold shower and lie down on a flat surface finally about midnight. (We left Lincoln at 11:00 Thurs. am and arrived here Friday night with very little sleep in between - they are 9 hours ahead of Nebraska here.)
We were awakened at 5:00 this morning with the sounds of roosters crowing and storks squaking - sounds we aren't used to in Lincoln for sure! After breakfast here at the Hostel, we boarded vans and headed to the Deaconness Center, the Amani children's home and the Market! What an immersion experience! The Deaconness Center is quite a place - wow- a pretty self-sufficient complex complete with chickens, cows, pigs, fruit trees. They make communion wafers there among other things and we toured the Montessori training center. The children were off for the for the week-end but we saw plenty of other things going on and we all took lots of pictures. We boarded the buses again two hours later and headed for the children's home, a safe place/school for street children from Moshi and Arusha. We heard drums and singing as we got off the bus and some of the kids were dancing and drumming in the "play" area - and actually performed a wonderful dance for us before we left for the Market. Yikes - what a mass of humanity there! It's the African version of the Farmer's Market and much more of everything else than what we think of at a market in America, except money and convenience. Some of us walked through the market some of us stayed in the vans and watched the people. I stayed and observed people - Of all of the vibrant colors and designs of the fabrics the women were wearing no two were alike, so it was an extremely colorful scene - mostly lots of clothes, shoes, and food stands but occasionlly other items and lots and lots of people. It has rained here several times over the past week so there are quite a few mud puddles everwhere but at least it was not dustly and dry. It is quite hot and humid today, but just to suddenly be in the middle of summer after freezing cold is certainly a treat! My time is about up at the Internet Cafe for today! Thank you all for your continued prayers.