More Dar details

Hello dear friends and family! Welcome back to my blog!

The last couple of days have been a bit more relaxing, but still filled with settling in and meeting new people. Yesterday, I finally got my bed put together (we bought the mattress at a little shop on the side of the road) and moved into the room that I will be living in for the rest of the year. I also had a chance to meet our housekeeper, Leti. She is about my age and speaks almost no English but Cathleen and I struggled through our phrasebooks trying to say anything meaningful to show her our extreme appreciation for her work. I must admit that I feel quite funny having a housekeeper, but all volunteers here seem to do it. I have been told that the unemployment rate is so high here that having the means and the work to provide a job for someone makes it worth it, but it is VERY hard to sit around while she mops, sweeps, cleans bathrooms, does dishes, and washes windows for 2500 Tanzanian schillings for 4 hours. (that works out to about $2.50). I find myself quite confused as to how my distaste for US companies that go to third world countries and pay such low wages just because it is the going rate for the society does not translate to this situation as well. Please pray that God will lead my roommates and me to make the right decision about how much God desires for us to pay our employees as opposed to how much other employers dictate.

On a less serious note, yesterday also contained some spider-related excitement. The old owner of our house stopped by and showed us this HUGE spider hanging from an upstairs window. And when I say huge, I'm not being one of those sissy girls who thinks that all spiders are huge. This one was close to the size of my palm with its legs and looked particularly unfriendly. Fortunately, our guard Phestos used the mop handle to get it down and Emily promptly squashed it with her shoe. :-)

After the spider incident, we had the joy of hanging out with our neighbors Ken and Joy and playing the game, Settlers of Catan. It's definitely a strategy game that I'm going to need to play a couple more times to understand all the rules and intricacies.

That about covers the day. A couple of topics for prayer include a guard who is a non-Christian (may God provide opportunities for me to reach out to him) and our water which has not been working for the last two days (first, the city shut the water off and second, our tank has mysteriously been draining water rapidly to a place that is thus far unknown). In a climate this hot, it is definitely nice to be able to take showers or flush toilets, so please pray that the Lord might burden the fundi bomba (the plummer in Swahili) to actually show up and for the problem to be solved quickly!