a note from the director. As I walked along the Indian Ocean this morning, Friday July 20th in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, brown paper envelope in hand, I considered the significance of the project before our mission in the coming weeks and months.
In this brown envelope I was carrying Tanzanian shillings, converted from dollars given by you, our EastARM investors. In one week arriving at our East African airport from Chatham, Ontario is a team to help build a house for a pastor and his family in the Rufiji. The shillings in the envelope paid for an order of cement bags and their transport into the Rufiji bush. The pastor, for whom we’re constructing a house, is himself as rare and precious as a pearl of great price.
You see, this pastor is a Rufiji native. Of the Rufiji converts to Christianity I know only a few, and of native Rufiji pastors within this tribe of 400,000 I know only one – through the eyes of a tribe of mohammed followers and satan worshippers this man is the least. He is Rufiji, but he is an outsider. In the eyes of Christ his Saviour, this man is the greatest. This is the man, this Rufiji pastor, for whom East Africa River Mission is building a house.
I reflected this morning, as I carried the envelope of money for construction supplies, how the next weeks and months will forever affect this pastor, his family, and their Rufiji village community. No longer will the pastor’s children get wet when they sleep in their beds under a broken thatched roof during the rainy season. To the pastor and his wife, God is answering their prayers through us to assure them that they are not alone. And to the surrounding village that despises or scorns this family, they are about to witness a flood of support come into this isolated insignificant village that they will not be able to comprehend.
What a privilege we share to be God’s response and visible hand in the once unreached Rufiji. To our mission, the significance of this construction means the opening of a second Rufiji village that we will now be active in.
RG BAKER