Sunday, March 22, 2009

Once every three years more than 20,000 college-aged Christians from the United States and Canada who have a particular interest in serving as missionaries gather at Urbana – a conference sponsored by InterVarsity. We were thankful to have been invited to attend in December 2006 and we are looking forward to participating again this year. We want to ask you as our partners in this work to consider when you think about it in the coming months to pray with us about this conference. Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 9:7 that the harvest is great but the workers are few, and then he told them to pray therefore unto the Lord of the Harvest that He might call workers into His harvest field. When I talk with my students about that verse I am honest with them that in some sense I do not know why Jesus told His disciples to do this, because after all, God is surely well aware that the harvest is great, and that the workers are few, and He is certainly not ignorant that workers are needed for His harvest field. And yet I cannot fathom that Jesus would have told His disciples to do something that is meaningless and without effect. Somehow in the way that God has ordered His world and the way that it works, it matters if God’s people pray! And so I am coming to you and asking you to pray. God has opened doors for us here in Tanzania – we now have 16 schools open and another 3 we are building, and the opportunities to place missionary teachers in these schools is full of tremendous potential. We’re looking for people who will be willing to live in these villages, who will be willing to intertwine their lives with the lives of their students, who will give of themselves in service to God and to these communities, and who will in the end get so involved in the lives of their students that they will love them, and they will want to help them when they are sick, they will want to share the gospel with them, they will want to encourage them to dream big dreams and make plans for the future.

I will go and speak anywhere. I’m coming back to the US in April and I am open and willing to speak anywhere at any time – and I will. And there are many of our other former teachers who are out there speaking in churches and at gatherings on campuses. And we have people who have never been here who are showing the DVD of the story of VSI and encouraging people to get involved. And all of that together is having great effect. But there is something wonderfully unique about this huge gathering of Christian young people which will take place December 27-31 of this year. Would you pray with us that God will use our efforts there as we speak and meet with students to call some of them into service here with us? We would be grateful for your help.

In His service,

Steve & Susan Vinton

Monday, March 9, 2009

I think everyone knows that we continually have opportunities for those who want to serve as missionary teachers to come to Tanzania to serve with us. Today, however, I'd like to share with all of you a very special and unique need that we have. Then I'd like to ask you to get involved with us to spread the word so that perhaps one day soon we would have two young people come to do a very special job that would be outside the classroom.


Village Schools Tanzania currently has eleven vehicles - three large trucks used for transporting construction supplies, a bus, and seven passenger vehicles.


In addition to building more schools, we have a number of strategic initiatives in our plans for the next two years - everything from solving the water problems in our schools to getting our schools hooked up to the Internet - and a lot of things in between! One of the strategic initiatives involves the starting of a "school for mechanics". Not to receive students who would come full time to study mechanics, but which would instead have as its purpose to train our current students in the basics of maintaining and fixing vehicles - and to work with them to keep our fleet of vehicles in good shape. That's why we're looking for two young people who would be willing to come serve with our team - to do everything the rest of our team does - to get involved in the lives of our students, to share the gospel with them, and to help their families. The only difference is that rather than teaching our students English or math or whatever, these two individuals would work with our students to teach them how to maintain vehicles and how to fix them.


Why do we believe that doing this is so strategically important?


Well, on one level, the obvious one, we see this as another "door opener" to the establishment of relationships with some of our students who may find it hard to "open up" to their physics teacher, or who don't excel at playing volley ball, or who have no interest in learning computers – but having the opportunity to tinker with a car just might be the thing that clicks with them.


On another level, a more long-term strategic level, we must look to the future. Four years ago we were just starting to build one school in one village. Today we have fifteen schools open, spread out over four different regions of the country, and we have another six schools under construction. No one would have dreamed when we started this in 2005 that in four short years we would already have eleven vehicles. Now that we can see what is happening, we can see that within a few years we're going to need twenty or thirty vehicles. We are not interested in hiring drivers from the city for these vehicles! We want our students to be driving the trucks and the cars. If the work of Village Schools Tanzania is going to continue to expand, those who are our students today need these skills so that they can serve in this work in the years to come. Our students need to have these skills - the skills to be good drivers and good mechanics - just as they have to have the skills for using a computer, for constructing buildings and running programs. It simply isn't enough for example for Godfrey to know how to lead this organization and travel to all of these villages and hold meetings with people. He also has to know how to drive and maintain and, yes, fix the vehicle he drives to do his job! In our schools as we prepare our students to become leaders who will propel VST to doing even greater ministry in the years to come, these future leaders need to acquire these skills now while they are still students.


Therefore, we have a special opportunity.


As I said when I began, everyone knows that we need people to come serve as teachers. Well, now we want people to know that we also need a few people come to teach mechanics. When we asked our students who would like to learn how to use a computer, many hands went up. When we asked our students who would like to learn mechanics and how to fix our vehicles, again many hands went up with equal enthusiasm. No offense to those who, like me, are math teachers, but there's a lot more attraction for these young people to learning computers and mechanics than there ever will be to learning math!


We look to the day when we never have to take our vehicles to a garage in town to be fixed, when such good maintenance is done on our vehicles that we can drive anywhere in the country with a great deal of confidence. If you would share this opportunity in your churches and schools, if you would pray that God would indeed call a couple of young people to come help us, we certainly would appreciate it. It is a very special and unique need - and, hopefully, there are a couple of very special and unique people out there who could help us!

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Our bus couldn’t make its trip to the hospital yesterday. After more than a year of almost extraordinarily faithful service, Huruma (the bus is called here “Compassion”) finally broke something that they couldn’t fix. And although we had people look in Mafinga, Iringa and Mbeya for the spare part, new or used even, we came up empty handed. And we had to simply tell Susan that the part was going to have gotten in Dar es Salaam, that we wouldn’t have it until the weekend, and therefore that the last four days of this week the bus simply would not be able to make its runs to the hospital. We simply would have no way to get all of the people to the hospital who were on the lists for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Word traveled fast though. With hundreds of people depending on that bus to get to the hospital to get their AIDS medicines word evidently made it even to the doctors at Lugoda Hospital that Huruma was out of commission. Wednesday afternoon Susan got a message from the hospital to tell her that they had made the rather extraordinary decision that they would send their doctors to Madisi, they would bring the ARVs on their motorcycles, and they would distribute them to Susan’s friends who were scheduled to get them this week. After all, even though the building of our new Community Treatment Center isn’t finished, work has begun and they already have government permission to distribute ARVs at Madisi.

I think often of those things I used to see in newspapers when I was a kid. On this day in history, such and such a thing happened, this war started, or this momentous event occurred. It’ll never make it into any newspapers anywhere, but for every person who ever prayed that one day Susan’s friends might get their AIDS medicines right here in our village, please know that today, Thursday, Feburary 26, 2009, for the very first time, the medicines came to the people of these villages. Today 31 people didn’t get up at 5am, they didn’t spend two hours in the bus getting to the hospital, they didn’t wait all day at the hospital until the last person got their medicines, and they didn’t ride the bus home late at night. Instead, the got up in the morning, sent their kids off to school, cleaned up a little around the house, made their way from their homes and gathered at our school. And the doctors used Jobu’s office as a makeshift clinic room, gave people their ARVs, watched them all walk home, and then before heading home themselves took a tour of the site where the new Community Treatment Center is being built.

I’m in Mbeya with Godrey so I, like you, can only imagine it all in my mind. Susan’s message on the phone says it all though: “Wonderful day. I am overwhelmed with thankfulness.” February 26th. A wonderful, wonderful, and very historic day

Stomaki, strapped between two bamboo poles on a makeshift stretcher, was placed on the trail near my home. His brothers came to get me and quickly explained that Stomaki collapsed while at his garden the night before and was just now being brought back to the village. Looking down at my friend, I could see and hear that he was most surely dying. This father of five young kids had fought the fight against AIDS and TB of the lymph nodes (a kind of TB that until recently I didn’t even know existed), and now he was dying and there really was nothing I could do to help my friend. We ran to go grab a vehicle and get a driver and we discussed quickly where to take him so early on a Sunday morning. The Luhunga clinic was the closest place where we could hope to get some advice and some interim help. Ten minutes later though, Stomaki was dead, right outside the Luhunga clinic, and our villages now had another five orphans.

Eliza died Sunday as well. Her husband abandoned her for a healthier wife when she got sick, then he took her only daughter, and it was clear that she had simply lost the will to live. She was so far from home, and in spite of the marvelous love and care given to her by her mother-in-law and sister-in-laws, she didn’t want to live anymore. But when that whole household agreed to go and get HIV testing together, she joined them. And she started treatment. And she was doing better. But then the husband came home and it seemed as if the terribly degrading things he hurled at her caused her to simply give up and to allow herself to die. And it was watching Eliza die that we could all see again that while the ARVs certainly need to be given to people, they need hope and love dispensed in equal and even greater doses. Hope. Dispensed with words of encouragement, with practical deeds. Love. His love, which can open our hearts to envelope those in great need. Medicines are important, essential even. Hope and love won’t keep someone with AIDS from dying. But what we are all seeing here is that while the availability of ARVs is of wonderful importance, it is only love and concern that open the doors so that we can get people on the drugs early enough. It is only love and hope and kind deeds that can encourage people to believe that it’s important to take the medicine and to hold on.

And that’s why when we’re dealing with such a huge problem involving so many people in this community we need to cling as a group to each ray of hope. And that’s why it’s a bit of a victory for everyone that Skola starts her journey tomorrow to the AIDS cancer unit in Dar, to get the quickly growing and painful pocks on her legs checked out. The initial diagnosis was Kaposi Sarcoma, a cancer mainly reserved for those with AIDS in Africa. I have seen it out of control in some of my friends, growing on the legs or in the mouth as it strangles the victim. AIDS is cruel. Because of the stigma associated with it, people wait to even be tested until it is too late. Many people may be abandoned during their times of crisis, but the mothers here are willing to do anything to nurse their children back (young and old) to health. Skola’s mother did just that. She showed up one evening at my house in tears. Not only had her 22 year old daughter tested positive for the HIV virus, but her son-in-law had tested negative and basically informed Skola that he’d kill her if she ever showed up at their home again. Mama Skola went to great lengths to retrieve her daughter and bring her home and now she was at my door asking for help. Her daughter was utterly without hope. A certain death if she doesn’t get treatment, a painful death at that, not to mention the imagined and unimagined sneers from those who think that AIDS will never touch them and the disdain of a husband who has just abandoned her. At age 22, this lovely woman was in great need. Not just of medicine, though. Skola’s question, which broke her mother’s heart, was a simple one: “Why live?” Why indeed? To be a tea plucker? To be a house girl? All the medicine in the world can’t answer those kinds of questions. But Skola does have a reason. She has a mother who loves her. She has a six-year old son who needs her. And she has us. We’re going to cheer her on. The big medical books my friends sent me say that once she’s on the ARVs the painful growing pocks should clear up. I do indeed hope so.

What I know now after three years of working with my friends here is that I don’t think anyone in a clinic can predict who will live or die. I know I can’t. I am inspired every day by seeing those living with this virus who seem to push themselves, and somehow compel their bodies back into living. Goodluck is one of those people who I thought wouldn’t make it – I was wrong. A single young man who came home to die. There were holes bored through his skull as well as into his legs. A student told us about him, and we went to find him and to get him “into the system”. As a result of the holes in his skull, one half of his body had withered. We sent him to physical therapy for a few weeks, he started the HIV/AIDS treatment, and then he shocked us by showing up on our doorstop one day asking for a job. How could I say no? And there he is daily, helping Babu (the grandfather who keeps the garden, chickens, goats and cows under control) and as a result Goodluck is getting stronger and stronger. Loneliness and hopelessness add to the numbers of those consumed by the virus. But we are doing our best to dispense His love and hope and fellowship to those hurting.

And rarely have I witnessed a better opportunity to spread love, hope and encouragement than the Lugoda sessions that we host here every few months. This weekend, we are getting prepared for another one with an anticipated 250 participants. On the reports to Lugoda’s donor, they call it “group therapy.” My friends call it ‘the seminar.’ The topics for this meeting are the importance of following the ARV treatment as well as pig raising! What a combination! But more than the teaching, it is the camaraderie that is fostered between the participants that is so vital. Knowing that they aren’t “the only ones” is so important for my friends. And seeing those really skinny sick people from the last time they met are now sort of “fat” is an unbelievable encouragement. It is great fun and I can’t wait.

In spite of the overall change in people’s thinking about testing and treatment for HIV, there still are some pockets of resistant to it. Surprisingly, this twisted thinking that somehow it was wrong to get tested and even more wrong to get treatment used to be quite prevalent in the local churches here. A church-going man was the first to prohibit his wife to go and get tested, and so I often would find myself in weird situations as I would talk to the husband about AIDS at the wife’s request. One lovely woman Mikela tested HIV positive last year, but wouldn’t go back because of her husband’s anger –terribly ironic anger since he was the one who had brought AIDS to the family. Now she is afraid and because she is getting visibly sick she has asked for help. I have been to their home several times, but alas, the husband continues to blame his wife and resists any attempt for her to get help. It feels as though I am trying to pull her into the life boat as her husband is trying to push her under the waves. Mikela has three little children who need their mom to be there. I see this scenario over and over and fortunately my hair with some white streaks, a few smile lines and my foreignness come in handy at times like these. These men are usually too polite (or is it afraid?) to say ‘take a hike’ lady. So I keep talking, until they get tired….With AIDS, it is just a matter of time, the men’s fear will one day spur them to do what they should have done a long time ago – get tested and onto treatment. But often it is too late by then. Tanzania has laws concerning AIDS and we are working to educate ourselves and then our friends. I now see the churches here as well changing their views. The pastors and priests are now encouraging their flocks to get tested. Praise the Lord. Sure helps that the local churches are now filled with my friends. It is pretty amazing!

With our students, we have always encouraged HIV testing. Not that we expect our students to test positive for AIDS, but we encourage this so that they can educate themselves and their families as well as de-mystify the whole testing process. This past year, our short-term missionary teacher Miss Michelle formalized the process with our students. After several Saturday visits to get groups of students tested at Mdabulo and follow-up with what everyone called “post-test parties,” she had the students who went to get tested vote to choose two chair-people to head up the testing and follow. The students chose Msevin and Agatha, who continue to let me know when the “post-test-party” will take place after every new group of students goes to get tested and we show up with local doughnuts and sodas and words of advice to share. It is delightful to hear Msevin and Agatha advising these younger kids. Msevin said it so beautifully this last week, “To have an AIDS-free generation is our responsibility.” My hope is that that yes indeed, AIDS will be brought under control sooner rather than later and that one day AIDS’ terrible sting will only be read about in the history books. Until then, thank you, thank you, thank you for changing the fearful and painful outcome for so many people. Since we have started, we have helped over 1,200 people to get tested. Many of them have since died, and their deaths have pained us, but nearly a thousand of them are still alive, and continuing with treatment, and so many of them say over and over again that it had to be God’s hand that graciously spared them. Bless you. And thank you. I have no clue how any of this would have been possible without the help of so many of you. I can never thank you enough for what you have done for my friends here.

In His Service,

Susan