Tanzania: A Reflection from Kevin Lovejoy

Dear Parishioners,

I want to share with you my family’s recent trip to visit our daughter Sarah who is serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small, remote village in Tanzania, Africa.  The Lovejoy household, fresh off our 30 hour trek home from Dar Es Salaam through Dubai in the United  Arab Emirates, is still trying to figure out what day it is and whether we should be cooking breakfast or dinner.

It was an amazing two and half week journey to a totally “foreign” environment. The opportunity to meet Sarah’s Peace Corps friends and see the conditions she and her friends are living in and how they are serving the poorest of the poor was truly inspirational.

In this world of global, instant communications, where selfies on Instagram can bring images of the world into the very palms of our hands through our smart phones and iPads, where live tweets provide a glimpse into someone else life in a few characters, we discovered that while these electronic images are informative, they provide but only a virtual experience of reality.  There’s nothing quite like the “real presence” of living in another culture halfway around the globe; feeling the heat and sweat and pulse of the jungle and crowded markets, smelling new odors and spices never experienced before, hearing the lovely Swahili language and shouts in the ports and villages, swatting at flies, sleeping in beds surrounded by mosquito nets, seeing beautiful baobab and acacia trees, wildebeests, graceful giraffes, and cattle drawn plows in small village farms, and wat ching young girls carry buckets of water on their heads for cooking and cleaning.

The highlight had to be singing AND dancing with local parishioners to the rhythmic songs in the Swahili language on Christmas morning.  While Tanzanians are incredibly poor by western standards, they are amazingly happy and generous with the little they have, and blessed uswith gifts of bananas, pineapple, coconuts, and two live chickens!

Seeing, feeling, and breathing a different culture and community awakened in us a realization that this world we live in is so much bigger and broader than the busy, bountiful lives we live here in North Tacoma.  I love the life we lead here in America . . . but after this experience, especially seeing Sarah’s school and meeting her teenage students, I can’t help but ponder what life would have been like if— through the “lottery of birth”— I had been born into a Tanzanian family living in a remote village.

It’s a big, big world out there.  I’m not sure how we’ll feel a few weeks from now, as we settle back into my routine, but for today, I feel far less the “center of the universe” than I did before having this incredible opportunity to travel halfway around the world to visit the beautiful people of Tanzania, and live, albeit if for a short time, the life they live.

Blessings,

Kevin Love Joy & The Lovejoy Family

Pastoral Coordinator at Saint Patrick Catholic Church & School