I wish I could explain how much Tanzania felt like home.
I wish you could all meet the women that I met this month. On Tuesday nights, the four of us girls had the great privilege of talking to the women. And I’m still amazed that they wanted to hear from four 20 somethings about life. Compared to them, we don’t know a whole lot, and yet they all sat around and eagerly took in everything we had to say.
One Tuesday night, I talked to the women about being women in the church. I spoke from the passage in Titus where it says older women should train the younger women. And I told them about my experience with this throughout the whole time I was growing up.
I’ve been blessed to grow up in the church, to have a mother who is way more than a mother, and to have multiple women that have invested in me over the years. To all of you back in Ohio, thank you for that. I got to share that with these incredible women. And tell them that they had this same awesome opportunity. Many of them have teenage daughters and I expressed the importance of not only investing in your own daughters but also in other peoples’ daughters. Sometimes we are more inclined to listen to someone that is not our biological mother (sorry mom! you know i love you!) That is what it means to live in community. It takes a village to raise a kid, and that’s so true in Africa.
I didn’t take into much account what I had said until our last church service with all of these amazing people. They stood us all up on the stage, gave us gifts, sang to us, and thanked us profusely. And the thing was, it wasn’t at all awkward. I LOVED these people, especially these women. They so reminded me of the Tuesday morning Bible study women back in Ohio I was blessed to spend time with last year. I honestly felt like their daughter. They had welcomed us, fed us, and treated us like their own children. And they told us girls how much those Tuesday evenings had meant to them. They thanked us for what we had said, and told us they were challenged to reach out to the younger women in the church.
You could have left me in Tanzania for the rest of the race. If I missed every new country and every crazy adventure over the next four months, I would not have cared one bit.
I was honored to live with family in Tanzania. I wish you all could have been there.
