Ruth

This time of the year it is easy to start really missing family and friends. So I am going to work on honoring some of my new friendships to help me get through this season.

In the past I introduced this special lady to you on my blog. Ruth helps us around the house 4 days a week. She cooks us African dishes for lunch, sweeps and mops away all of this farm dust, gets our clothes washed and hung up on the line, makes food for our dogs (we don't have the stuff in a bag here), makes bread and chapati's (tortillas) and mandazi's (donuts), takes our trash to the compost area, and the best part is she helps us with our Swahili!

She is a singe mom with 2 boys, 10 and 14 years old. She is very busy with her church; sings in the choir, cleans the building, and cooks for any sharehe's (parties). She loves to laugh, and loves to listen to music while she works, and in a culture where dogs are just working animals, she cares for and loves our dogs dearly. She is from Barundi and her father, a pastor, brought the family to Tanzania when she was little. So they were missionaries too. She has 2 brothers living close who help her financially while her parents live in the southern part of the country so she does not get to see them often.

Having house help is new to me, and a bit hard to do. But it is a good job for women in this culture. The unemployment in Tanzania is very high. And without this job she would not have money to feed her kids or pay school fees or to rent her one room where they live. So this is one of those new ways of living that we are getting used to.

When she prays for us at meals, is interested in our family, corrects our Swahili, sings while she mops the floor with her hands, laughs when Ron teases me, and is extremely grateful when ever we give her things we do not use or are even broken we realize what a blessing she is to us.