Church and Internet

Today I went to Emanueli’s church, the same church I went to last week, which I didn’t talk about in the blog. We are going to be doing a focus group with church members though, so it might be interesting to learn how church here works. Everyone has to bring their own hymnal and bible. There are 3 pastors and 1 new visiting pastor every week. Before the service, everyone gets their offering envelopes from a table area outside. The women all dress up and wear kitenges, the traditional Tanzanian clothing, and even younger boys wear oversized suits if they have one. During the service, we got up four times to walk to the front of the church to give offerings. The pastor was cracking everyone up during the sermon and I really wished I knew Swahili. Last week there was an adult choir that was very engaging. This week, the children’s choir sang, which was just as entertaining.

I noticed this week that all of the women sat on the left side and the men sat on the right side (with the exception of me sitting with Emanueli). We sit close to the front and always come early, so I never noticed until I looked behind me this week during the service. Emanueli said he doesn’t know why that this church does it every week, but it’s just specific to this church.

Last week, there was an auction during the service to raise money for the church. They auctioned off 1 item: a goat, which went for 23,000 TSH (About 20 USD). This week, there was an auction, but it took over half an hour while they auctioned off bags of fruit (a bunch of bananas here, 5 oranges there), soap, milk, and other donations that people had brought. During the auction, the choir would sometimes break into a song type chant about whatever was being auctioned off to encourage people to bid.

After church, Emanueli, Irene, and I met the Sakina Scholars at an internet café and taught them how to use internet and email. We signed them all up for gmail accounts. It was really fun! It was kind of crazy with all 18 of us in the internet café at once and other customers trying to use computers. It was really awesome though because the kids who had been there the longest started helping those that had just arrived. It was neat to see them working together and helping each other out. Then they started emailing each other just for fun. Some great teamwork. I wanted to get some pictures of them learning to use the computer, so I gave the camera to some of the scholars who were waiting and they helped me document the occasion. They were so excited!! We are going to go back to practice in a few weeks.

vocab word of the day:
Fundi – tailor