19 September 2009. We arrived back in Mwanza on Thursday to a very warm welcome. It is good to be back.
We are quickly settling into the same, comfortable house, and are expecting to resume basically the same kind of work we did before. But already we have discovered some changes. The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (“CRWRC”) development staff has moved back to the states, and for the time being we are in possession of and responsible for the CRWRC car. It’s parked right outside our front door. Someday we’ll have to screw up our courage and take it out for a drive – they drive on the “wrong” side of the road here! Also new is that the two dogs next door, Bubba and Lucky, just puppies when we left in May, are now old enough to run guard duty in the compound at night. And we are experiencing a little bit of the dry season for the first time. Things are quite brown and some (but not all) of the trees have dropped all their leaves.
Even though it’s still the dry season, it rained very hard last night. In the middle of the storm we were awakened by a sound we had never before heard on the compound. WEE-OOOH! WEE-OOOH! WEE-OOOH! It sounded like a car alarm. Could it be our CRWRC car? In just a few seconds it stopped. Was someone trying to break into the vehicle right outside our door? We got up to investigate, but in the dark silence we could see nothing amiss. So back to bed we went. Just as we were drifting back to sleep, again we were startled – WEE-OOH! WEE-OOH! WEE-OOH! Up again to investigate, more certain that it was our car, and someone was messing with it. Fearful of what we might see, we peered again out the screened windows, our flashlights sending out diffuse beams into the rainy night. In the dim light I thought I glimpsed a dark figure moving in the shadows behind the car. Could it be? There it was again! It was Lucky, one of the guard dogs. And just then Margaret caught sight of Bubba, the other guard dog. As Margaret watched, the dogs crouched down low and slinked under the vehicle, setting off the alarm yet again. Lucky and Bubba had found a fine place to get out of the rain, but it was keeping the whole neighborhood awake. Every time Margaret would reset the alarm, the guard dogs would trigger it again. Finally Margaret decided that the only way to keep the alarm quiet was to disable the sound – but that seemed OK, at least for the night. With the guard dogs lying in ambush under the car, nobody else was going to come close.
