The Tanzania Issue

A Rock of Remembrance

1995. Waikato, New Zealand.

Seven years after finishing my agriculture degree at Massey University, I finally admitted something I’d known my whole life.

I wasn’t a dairy farmer. Not really.

I’d grown up on a dairy farm. I knew cows, calving, dry matter feed-budgeting, spring silage and summer hay, tractor work, winter break-fencing, and the peculiar joy of finishing milking when most people were still in bed. For most of those years I’d worked with my Dad. Probably the major reason I’d stayed as long as I did.

But it was starting to feel fake.

My closest church mates were farmers. They were properly into it. Talking cows, land, production, prices, breeding, grass growth, machinery. All normal stuff if that’s your world.

Except it wasn’t mine. Not deep down.

I knew what I didn’t want to do, but not what I did. Which is a tricky place to be because it’s easier to keep doing the wrong thing. At least it’s familiar. It pays. You know the routine. Nobody asks too many awkward questions.

Trying to figure out what you actually want can be expensive. Risky too. It may mean retraining, starting over, or feeling like you should explain why you’re walking away from something that looks perfectly sensible from the outside.

So for a while I’d persisted. But ultimately I knew I had to commit boots and all or get out. The passing of my beloved grandfather in February had meant I finally felt free to leave the area - I guess I intuited that changing things up might require moving away and wasn’t ready for that while he was still alive.

Committing hard out to dairy farming as my future meant buying a herd although I couldn’t see Dad agreeing to sell his for at least another decade. Buying a different herd and farming somewhere else didn’t grab me at all. The part I did love was working with Dad. Farming itself, not so much.

I was in business with him, not just on wages. A pretty good wicket making roughly twice what a worker on wages would, though I had more responsibilities and if I wanted time off I had to organize someone to cover me and pay them.

Walking away from that wasn’t nothing. Knowing that so many men aspiring to be farmers would envy the familial advantage I’d been born with.

Dad wasn’t thrilled. but he didn’t try bribing me with better conditions or talking me out of it. We’d always been close so he knew well enough when I wasn’t joking. That meant a lot.

I told him early enough that he’d have a couple months to find someone else before the new season began on June 1st. It also gave me time to find another line of work before I was jobless.

Back then, there was no internet job hunt. No LinkedIn or Seek. Nope. You waited for the Wednesday and Saturday newspapers and went through the situations vacant pages with a pen.

That’s what I did.

Applied for a few agricultural industry related jobs. Got shortlisted and interviewed for a couple. Didn’t get them. At the time I was quietly relieved, I doubt I’d have lasted long in either as I could already sense weird office politics vibes. If I’d handled the new environment they were still close enough to the world I was trying to leave that I’d probably have ended up feeling like the same imposter wearing a slightly different hat.

Then one Wednesday evening I saw it. Advertised by Volunteer Service Abroad New Zealand.

Training fish farmers in Tanzania.

Not coastal fish farming. Pond farming of Tilapia. Teaching local peasant farmers how to construct their own ponds, grow and sell fish for cash income to pay school fees, and/or feed their children much needed protein.

It was near Usa River, about twenty kilometres east of Arusha.

When my eyes hit the word Tanzania, a lightbulb flashed in my mind.

From the age of ten through twelve, Tanzania was the country I most wanted to visit in the whole world. Not because it sounded exotic. No, I’d read enough biographies and adventure books to do with East Africa and was properly captured by it.

The Serengeti. Man-eaters of Tsavo, Elsa the lioness. Jungle Doctor stories. Willard Price African Adventure series books.

Maps of East Africa. Animals, mountains, bush, danger and distance.

Tanzania sat deep inside my boyhood imagination, especially after Idi Amin invaded and they promptly kicked his butt thus ensuring the end of his diabolical regime. Then high school came along and did what high school does to many dreamers. It crushed a lot of that out of me. By the time I came out the other end, I’d more or less forgotten who I was in that way.

Now here it was again.

Tanzania. In the Waikato Times of all places!

I held a relevant qualification. An applied agricultural degree and the practical skills of my farming background meant I should handle the living conditions of rural Tanzania at least as well as most applicants. That oughta help enough to have a crack.

Going to Africa isn’t quite the same as applying for a job in Hamilton, so before enquiring further, I thought we should probably talk it through with someone older and wiser.

I was married, so this wasn’t just my adventure to chase.

There was a couple we knew and respected. Jack and his wife Val. Good people I’d known all my life. He’d trained as a cartoonist, drawing for newspapers in the UK before ending up farming in New Zealand; which was what he’d always wanted to do. That always interested me about him. He understood something about vocation. About wanting a different sort of life from the one set in front of him even if I’d probably have done the exact opposite.

I rang to ask if we could come out for a chat. They said yes, so on the Saturday, we drove the hour out to their farm.

Once inside, we were invited into their cozy lounge. Beside one chair was a small table stacked with a few National Geographics. Jack had collected those iconic yellow-bordered magazines for decades. Looking down I noticed the issue sitting on top.

A 1971 full feature story on Tanzania. Hmm Lord, that’s kinda interesting!

We told them about the opportunity. We didn’t know a lot, but enough to explain the basics. Tanzania. VSA. Arusha. Development work.

They were positive straight away. I’d always been interested in that sort of thing as a kid, so the whole idea seemed to make sense to them.

Then they surprised us, “We know someone you should talk to.”

Turns out they’d recently met an old bloke through their local church who had spent a couple years working in Tanzania. Would we mind if they rang him and asked if we could all go round?

Would we mind? Not likely.

They phoned. He said come over.

His name was Jock. He’d gone over with an Anglican diaconal project. He’d been an accountant and they needed someone to help with bookkeeping on a project in the Mara Region, on the eastern side of Lake Victoria just below the border with Kenya.

He’d spent two years there in his early eighties. That got my attention.

He didn’t make it sound easy. He spoke about confusion, corruption, strange decisions, the sort of things that can drive a Western mind half mad if it expects everything to happen in straight lines. There were risks too. Malaria etc.

But his conclusion was simple. He wouldn’t have missed it for the world and he had returned with a few quality momentos to prove it.

If we had even a slight interest in things Africa, we’d be crazy not to go.

This was what I needed to hear. Not because I thought an old man’s enthusiasm guaranteed everything would be fine. It didn’t. But there was something deeply encouraging about sitting in the home of a man who had gone to Tanzania in his eighties and come back saying, in effect, “Yes. Go. Don’t be daft. Live your life, take the chance.”

I’d been praying through my whole question of quitting dairy farming for months. Now here was God leading us to the right people, who just happened to have met the right person, who just happened to have done the sort of thing we were considering, in the very country that had jumped out of the situations vacant column at me.

I sent in the application.

We drove down to Wellington for the VSA interview. They didn’t give me the fish farming job. An older couple got it instead. Funny thing is, they only lasted six months once they got there.

But VSA bookmarked me for another position in Tanzania coming up later in the year. Far better one, as it turned out. It depended on whether the bloke already there decided to extend his contract. If he did, the job would disappear for another twelve months. If not, they strongly encouraged us to apply, and it sounded very much like it would be ours to refuse.

So I talked to Dad, and we worked out that I’d stay on milking for wages while we waited. If it came to pass I’d be leaving the farm after Christmas which would make it a lot easier for him finding a replacement.

The position came open in September. We got it.

Not Usa River near tourist town Arusha. Somewhere much better, though I didn’t yet know why.

Two hundred kilometers South South West. About four and a half hours’ drive from Arusha. No electricity. No telephone. No sealed roads. Proper rural Africa.

The real thing like the Fiat truck above; stuck on the main road to Dareda Kati just before the track leading off to my home.

The sort of place my boyhood heart would have chosen if it had known to ask.

By late October it was tied up. End of January 1996, we arrived in Tanzania. I was twenty-nine.

Less than a year earlier I’d been standing in a life I knew I couldn’t keep living, with no clear idea where I was meant to go next. I only knew something had to change.

I pulled the plug and right there, at almost the exact moment I finally admitted the truth and took the risk, Tanzania opened.

Not randomly either. At least I don’t believe so.

The timing. The advert. The lightbulb moment. The 1971 National Geographic. Old Jock. Missing the first job but being held for the second. Ending up out in the sticks where the real adventures live.

Getting the later position worked out better logistically for both Dad and us too. And, lo and behold, it also meant perfect timing for attending the wedding in Seattle of my longtime best friend Kyle. We were the only non-family guests from New Zealand and Kyle and family seemed to really appreciate our presence. Funny how that works eh?

Even funnier was that, according to VSA, flying to East Africa via the USA was never cheaper than via Asia so we would have to cough up the extra expense. Except that when it came time for VSA to book our flights that was no longer true! We ended up not having to pay a single cent extra to get to my new work in Tanzania despite attending my best friends wedding on the way there. God is the ultimate planner!

All why this is one of my Rocks of Remembrance.

God did not give me a grand map. He did not explain why my heart had been tugged toward Tanzania as a boy. He did not tell me all that would happen there, good and hard. He did not warn me how much the place would shape me, break me, feed me, test me, and become part of me.

He just waited until I finally stopped pretending I could build a whole life around what I knew I wasn’t.

Then He opened the door. And not to something random.

To the country I had most wanted to see when I was still young enough to know what delighted me. That still moves me.

Because He knew. He knew the boy with the maps and the animal stories.

He knew the young man stuck in a life that didn’t fit.

He knew I’d stay far longer than three years. He knew I’d never feel homesick there, not even through the crazy stuff.

God stitched it together before I knew what the pieces were.

I just knew something had to change.

He knew where I was going.

Tanzania.