John and Asmara Anyan
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Snapshots

March 18, 2017 by John and Asmara Anyan

Today, as we were riding in a little 3-wheeled “bajaj” taxi toward a local outdoor market, winding our way through the traffic jam, with an overfilled bus on our left and vendors selling anything from cashew nuts to windshield wipers on the right, the thought of how surreal it is that we live in Africa settled in my mind.

2 months here have allowed us to glimpse just the veeeery tip of the iceberg in regards to what it means to live here, speak here, function here, thrive here. To share that tip of the iceberg with you, here are some glimpses of life in Tanzania to document some milestones…

We finished the 1st Phase of our Language Program! That means we completed the first 100 hours of Swahili study and have crammed around 800 vocabulary words into our brains. If you think it was a conventional, open-your-grammar-book-and-study class, just take a look at the picture to see what a “normal” day in class looked like:

Identifying the names of all those objects alongside our classmates and our teacher

 

The boys dipped their feet into the ocean or the first time ever. I remember being in awe at the vastness of the ocean as a child. And although part of me grieves the fact that we can’t just go on a nature walk outside or have some grass and trees right in front of our door for the boys to play in, we DO live right by the Indian Ocean. And there’s quite a lot of God’s beautiful creation to be found there.

Elias truly was born to swim. That kid LOVED the water and was quite fearless.
Judah, on the other hand, preferred watching from a safe distance….
…and finding treasures.

 

We traveled to Morogoro. Earlier in March, we then boarded a bus with all the other families doing language study with us and drove 6 hours to a place called Morogoro. There, we attended a workshop detailing the ins and outs of the language program we are using, while enjoying the cooler temperatures, refreshing winds and rains, and beautiful mountains.

The warriors in front of the mountains
Elias enjoyed watching everybody go down the giant waterslide…
…and getting splashed…
…and splashed some more. He did end up going down the slide with John! Crazy boy.

 

There were plenty of bugs to keep those boys occupied.Giant centipede alarm. Or millipede? Oh, whatever. Just don’t touch it.
Another treasure he found… I’m really not sure what that is.
A butterfly decided to land on Elias’ hand.
The boys had so much fun with the group of kids who were with us.

On to Month 3 in Africa, Phase 2 in language learning, and another week of countless life lessons to be learned!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Ethnos360, New Tribes Mission

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John and Asmara Anyan

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