It was like your child getting their first A on a report card, their first hit in baseball or maybe your best friend winning that first competition. The sense of some great thing had been accomplished with the promise of further yet unknown wonders to come. That was the feeling we had as the first joint Bible Fellowship Church, Africa Inland Church and TIMO team arrived in mid July and began their orientation and language learning course. It all started some years ago with prayers, surveys, teaching, partnerships being formed and God calling some of His own to be sent by the local church. Some committed to go others gave sacrificially and many did the hard work of prayer. The Lord of the Harvest is there, among the Ndengereko people of Tanzania working His plan to bring this team of seven folks to the small village of Ruaruke along with the message He gave them to proclaim.
We spent three days in a simple orientation course and then six days studying LAMP (Language Acquisition Made Practical) in the neighboring village of Ikwiriri. The team spent those six days of LAMP studying phrases of the local language and then walking throughout the village practicing what they learned. It was a thrill to not only see the team members get excited, but to watch the faces of the local people brighten and their lives open up to these strangers trying to pronounce the words they had just recently learned.
The team leader has been living among the people for seven months in great anticipation of the team coming and joining him in being a part of the hard work of learning. After the ten days of orientation and LAMP it was off to Ruaruke to see their homes of the next three years for the very first time! The mental pictures that the team must have had became clear to us as we showed them their simple mud plastered, tin roofed houses and they exclaimed “ this is great, so much better than we imagined! ”. They spent a day getting moved in and then off to their homestays to live with local people in their homes for another week before moving into their own houses for the duration of their three year TIMO experience.