This Article was written by Jo Whiting, originally written on July 12.
Bwana Yesu Asifiwe! God is good, all the time; all the time, God is good.
We are already half-way through our stay here in Iringa Town and the time is going quickly. We do miss our family and friends back home, and at the same time we value and appreciate our time working with Bega Kwa Bega here. We thought this week we would talk a a bit about BKB generally and how Holy Trinity got involved with the Saint Paul Area Synod. Then next week we will explain just what it is we do and a bit about our lifestyle here.
As we said in our report in the last Tidings, we are in the southern highlands of Tanzania for eight weeks, working as office coordinators for Bega Kwa Bega (Swahili for “shoulder to shoulder”), a partnership between the St. Paul Area Synod (SPAS) of the ELCA and the Iringa Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania. The partnership is overseen by a full-time BKB executive director at SPAS, Kirsten Levorson, who spends half her time each year in Tanzania, and Pr. Lusungu Msigwa, the full-time international ministry officer at the Iringa Diocese.
Of the three pillars (prayer, presence, and projects) on which the BKB partnership is based, the most important is certainly prayer, and second is presence (through in-person or Zoom visits). But also very important are the projects undertaken by the diocese and each parish in it. Almost $2 million passes through BKB in support of these projects each year. The breadth of these projects is so wide: education (scholarships, schools, a university): health care(a hospital, clinics, medicine, a nursing school); church membership growth (churches, parsonages, motorcycles for pastors); civic improvements (electricity, wells, microfinance). Together, each parish here decides with its US partner congregation which projects it needs or wants to undertake; BKB then facilitates the planning, financing, and overseeing of those projects.
For those of you who have followed HT’s involvement over the years with its partner Isimani, some of this will sound familiar. For others of you, this may explain why we pray for Isimani on Sunday mornings and why a group came here to visit last summer. In the fall, we are planning a series of adult forums that will provide more information on HT’s visit and past and present projects here.
But how did HT’s Isimani ministry, and its involvement with BKB, get started? It all began over 20 years ago when Joe Lugalla, then an athropology professor at UNH and HT member,, approached then Pr. Linn Opderbecke about a possible relationship between HT and Joe’s childhood parish in Isimani, a very poor village where his father had been pastor. Pr. Opderbecke and the HT council were intrigued, and Pr. Opderbecke made an exploratory trip to visit here in 2005. The partnership was quickly established, but the challenges of communication and logistics in those early years (when bank accounts, e.g., were still rarely held by churches or vendors or contractors) were great. Then we learned about BKB, which already had an infrastructure for these services at SPAS, and we wisely asked if we could “join” the partnership. Until he died a couple years ago, Joe continued to be our main contact and advisor with Isimani. Our relationship with BKB, however, has been our way to facilitate our presence and projects here.
So that’s a lot, and certainly enough for this report. More next week, as we report just what we do and how we live here!
Jo and Russ