Newsblog

Happy blessed joy-filled New Years’ greetings!  We guessed you wouldn’t have had time to read another newsie newsletter over Christmas, so we’ve saved sending one out until now, blog style for those who're asking what one looks like.



Christmas here was HOT!....and yours there?  We hope it was lovely, however you define lovely.

We had lots of LOUD thunderstorms and lovely, REFRESHING rain, puddles at the front door and in the back garden, below ..... wellies and brolly?  nah, too good to miss (can't believe I am saying that!) and only one big black scorpion flushed out, praise the Lorrrd!  I reckon Heaven will be like the fragrance after the rain :o) oh and the abundance of fresh fruit and fabulous array of colours, magnificent variety of exquisite bird song/colour!....counterbalances the sadness, poverty, disease, mozzies, flies and unmentionables...





 

Our temperatures plummeted from 40+degrees to 20+...but still it didn't "feel" at all Christmas-ie.  On reflection, our favourite celebration of Jesus' birth was back in 1994 spent with Oli and Asher in Lapland, somewhere I had always wanted to go to as a child.  Mum usually said it was a long way north from loved ones over there so couldn’t we spend it with family a bit further south instead....who’d have thought the two of us would be living there, in Sweden, until this time’ish last year!



 

 Favourite Christmas - a decade ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Well what a year we’ve had.... you too?!.... our previous December saw us returning from 28 months living near Gothenburg, connecting with lovely family, exploring Swedish language/roots and serving with YWAM, to then embark on a new adventure, this time with MAF, some 45 and 30 years after first hearing about it and here we are, almost celebrating our first anniversary in Africa, in some glorious heat. "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam".

 

After serving with 32 different nationalities with YWAM Sweden we believe it helped orientate us to manage the international staff community here as we facilitated 11 different nationalities move to 7 different countries, a few returned to their home countries, most to new nations, resulting in just us remaining here on the compound, amongst the Tanzanian community we’ve grown to appreciate.  Also this year we were enormously chuffed to have had Amanda then Simon come over, alllll the way from the UK to visit us and Safina Street Kids.  Not forgetting of course memorable overland drives on dodgy roads, through a game park and MAF 'safari' flights to isolated communities to see first hand how vital the work really and truly is.

 

 

 

 

 

We very much enjoyed having Asher come over here to recuperate with us back in March-May,  until he realised he was in love and moved back to the UK to be with Louise and little Lucas and has continued on with teacher training, based in Essex.

 

 

 

Oli made my day when he and Lizzy came to Zanzibar to celebrate my 50^th in August.  He’s currently based in Stafford and as long as the RAF don’t send him across t’globe again he hopes for a return visit for Jez’s birthday. We suspect we might be on our way to Papua New Guinea to look at the marvellous work MAF do  there, after attending the international managers conference in Bangkok after Easter!

 

November took us to South Sudan, to meet up with the fabulous team and witnessed their vital role in helping to re-build this new, needy nation....we thought we might serve there with them, but not at this time it would seem.  Is life in a relationship with the Lord ever anything but a rollercoaster of a journey, never a wasted moment, sometimes heart-stopping, often faith-stretching, risky, with seasons of plodding and others’ sprinting, meeting remarkable folk along the way, encountering all sorts of ‘colourful’ life-enriching experiences, enabling us to thrive here.         Certainly Dodoma has been a mixture of all of these as we sought to do our best in fulfilling MAF’s remit to carry out the restructure and redirect its service here in Tanzania which we’ll endeavour to continue to do once based up in Arusha; we expect to be there before the end of the month.

 

God willing we hope to return to the UK for the month of July: we miss too many people to be away foreverrrrr (dr, dentist, etc. too!)   P'haps you've

 seen and heard much of our journey already with our weekly blog so we won’t go on, tho' this blog probably has more words and less pictures than usual!  Here’s our link in case you missed it:

http://jez-carina-simpson.blogspot.com/2015/01/newsblog.html

 

Receiving their Christmas gift, minus bling wrapping!

We'll say bye bye for now, sending love and Africaaaaaan greetings for a happy, healthy New Year.

Go with God.

Jez and Carina xx