FINAL DAYS IN EAST AFRICA 2016

                   My year in Tanzania has now come to an end and it may well be my last for any long term work here. It has been a wonderful 10 plus years of mission work and I will miss it dearly. I will especially miss the daily activities of Fr James who his just completing 60 years of mission work in Tanzania, most of it at Kowak village parish. We had two wonderful American volunteers these last few weeks which had made it even more enjoyable and eventful that other periods; Therese McCarthy a teacher from AZ and Dr Goetz a medical doctor from NY. We all just arrived in Nairobi on our way home.

            Fr Jim went home to NY and Green Bay again this year in early June to celebrate his 60 years as a priest so I took over a few small jobs of construction in June and July. I could have done more but Fr Jim so enjoys these construction projects and is much better at it than I am. Indeed he seemed to kick into high gear after he returned and had his celebrations here with the local parish and again with the diocese in August.

            I continued my daily projects of distributing mosquito nets, rosaries and photos to the new mothers in the maternity wards and miscellaneous financial projects to keep the money and materials and school fees flowing. I finished with distributing 150 nets and 200 rosaries at the hospital and another 50 nets to the secondary school. The remaining 100 rosaries from Queen of the Holy Rosary went to people in the parish.

            Our volunteers also brought many items to distribute and they donated over 700 mosquito bracelets to the secondary school students and staff and the hospital staff. Doctor Jim also brought 10 home-made children’s dresses and 10 pair of shorts which we distributed to needy children in the Alala village near Kowak. They were all thrilled. I gave away several of my books and some reading glasses to a few families that could read English and the clothes I was not bringing home were also distributed just before I left.

            Therese and I made it into the Serengeti Park one last time after a stop to visit my friend, Fr Joel Marwa, a young priest that I have helped over the years. He surprised us by showing us the new primary school he is building in his home village. That money came from donations he received during his ordination two years ago. I helped with a significant contribution along with a Maryknoll priest that helped him for many years after his parents died. This will be an English medium school to help improve the education there in his home village. This is badly needed all over Tanzania and many pastors are starting to do this since young Kenya teachers are available in surplus at this time and their English is much better than the Tanzania teachers.

            The Serengeti trip was more of an adventure than usual this time. There were more than the usual number of animals due to the recent rainfalls and this being the migration season from the north part of the park. But the real adventure started when the car broke down about 40 miles from the park exit. The bad roads had caused the radiator to break loose and start leaking. After it cooled down we had to refill the radiator every ten minutes for the next two hours. We finally made it out the gate at 6:30 pm as darkness fell, 30 minutes past the deadline for closing the park. We went thru over ten gallons of water so we had to stop twice to refill the water jug from a ditch along the road side.  We spent the night at the gate hotel and the hospital driver and mechanic came the next day to exchange vehicles so we could drive home (2 hrs) while they made repairs.

            A few days ago Maryknoll sent a driver and vehicle to move us three and our luggage plus a visiting priest, Larry Radice, back to Nairobi to catch our flights home. The driver was 3 hours late arriving at the border so we got in pretty late after a 9 hour ride.  Another volunteer nurse, Rosemary Drew, arrives from Maryland on Nov 9 but we will all be gone by then. I depart tonight and am really looking forward to seeing the family. Therese and I had a couple days to kill so we spent one of them biking and hiking in a small national park near just north of Nairobi called Hell’s Gate. It is the only park that allows you to get out of your vehicle in all East Africa, I am told.

  

ESCORTING FR. CONARD TO NAIROBI

I arrived back in East Africa on April 5 and have been in Kowak village in Tanzania since then. I escorted our Maryknoll pastor, Fr Conard, to Nairobi on May 31^st so he could return to the Maryknoll Fathers headquarters and home to Green Bay. He will celebrate his 60th year of priesthood at the end of June in New York and then again with family in mid-July in Green Bay. We expect to see him back in Kowak by Aug 5^th. He will have a third celebration here on August 11 at his parish where he has lived the last 38 years. He is the last of his 50+ ordination classmates to still work overseas. 12 are still alive, I believe. 

             I want to thank my friends at our Tuesday Mystics prayer group in Kansas City for their prayers and generous support of my ministry and the Maryknoll ministry at Kowak hospital. They have given me over $500 for mosquito nets for newborn babies and have given Fr Conard and the Kowak Hospital over $1,000 for needs there. We were blessed to finally find and employ a young doctor on March 1, Dr Lazaro Mwikwabe; he joins our older Dr Ernest in treating the local patients in our area. We are especially blessed that he is from a village in our area and we hope to keep him here for many years. He is 30 yrs old and was just married in February to a lovely young lady, Devota, who is also from our area (Tarime). She just got her BA degree in Human Resources a few years ago.  Our new doctor is being trained by Dr Ernest in surgery and he has already done 45 surgeries in his first three months. We are averaging two major surgeries per day and about half of those are C sections. We average another 4 minor surgeries per day so the doctors keep very busy. We also have a large number of x rays and ultra sounds. Dr Ernest does all the ultra sounds. Sr Linet does the x rays.

            The Queen of the Holy Rosary parish in Mission, KS gave me 300 more rosaries to distribute among the local people and I have been doing that as well as distributing nets to new mothers. I have been concentrating primarily on mothers of new born babies at our hospital where we are averaging two births per day. In addition to the net and rosary I take their photo and give them a copy of it. They are very pleased. So far I have given out 31 nets in the last two weeks. One of my first mothers had triplets which thrilled us all, especially being the first triplets in many years at Kowak. Since she already had 7 children at home I gave her 4 nets. The following week another mother had twins so I gave her two nets. The young girl in this photo is the daughter of this mother of triplets and she is very attractive. You can see the babies usually are born much lighter in complexion.

            Our 170 bed rural hospital was recently awarded a Three Star rating by the national health survey which makes us at least equal to the District Government Hospital in this area. The best hospitals can achieve a Five Star rating.

            In addition to the daily visits to the hospital I have spent a lot of time on the computer entering the financial data generated since I departed in November. I finally issued a 4^th quarter, 1^st quarter and partial 2^nd quarter report for Fr Conard so he could make decisions on what money is available for repairs and construction over the next two months while he is on home leave.  I also prepared a budget for next year since he had to request money from Maryknoll by mid-May. We have about 4 projects totaling $24,000 that was requested.  I have been given two or three smaller projects to work on in addition to the routine repairs in the two months Fr Jim is home. We also hope to purchase a small lorry next year to haul medicines from Mwanza, four hours south. We recently got news that one foundation in Minnesota will give us $10,000 over their normal donation next year.

            One of my least pleasant projects recently was the termination of our grinding mill operator who we have employed the last two years. I had to find a new operator and train him for the last three weeks before terminating Kurwa. Lawrence has good references and a lot of experience so I hope he works out. This is a difficult job mostly due to the temptations with handling money in a very poor area.

            Fr Conard just finished construction of a large church about 18 km from our parish. We had a lovely mass and church blessing last week-end (Corpus Christi Sunday) and I took a video of it for him to take home. I just burned a few DVD’s for him and friends. I am also working on a video of the Kowak Girls Secondary senior class (Form IV). The teachers are doing most of this work and it will also be about an hour long. This DVD will be a gift to my friends, Henry and Jeanne in Salt Lake City, who volunteered at the school here in early 2013 when these girls were freshman and just learning English. Three years makes a big difference and I think they will enjoy seeing them “grown up”.

            I just finished reading a wonderful biography of Pope Francis called “The Great Reformer”. It talks a lot about his love of the poor and his joy of being with the poor of Argentina. It has really helped me understand why I enjoy being here, especially these last two or three years where I have been able to get to know the locals versus the wealthier teachers and secondary students of previous years. The poor really have solidarity and enjoy the very simple things that most of us take for granted. Some of their biggest celebrations are funerals, masses and football games. We have had a lot of all three in recent months.  I wish you could see the joy they had in this blessing of their new church last week-end; such joyful singing and dancing during the gift giving. It was a real mix of young and old but everyone enjoying the “celebration” of the mass. In many ways similar to the joy they express during the local soccer games next to my house. I heard a local recently at one of the almost daily games, who had come home for the weekend. He was telling his friends how lucky they were to get to see these games so frequently for free where he had to pay significantly to see a game in the city of players he hardly knew.

            Speaking of sports, I have really been enjoying the amazing KC Royals games these last ten days on espn gamecast on my smart phone (3:15 am to 6:15 am). The come-from-behind victories remind me so much of the attitude and skills they demonstrated last year in the post season. This year’s rookies have been super, Thank God. We really needed them due to so many injuries of our top players.  I do miss those games with the family drinking beer on the back porch.