Our First Visitor

We enjoyed our first visitor from the US this past week, Mike Flegal, from Atlanta, GA and son of our dear and longtime friends Teresa and Doug Flegal.  Mike works for Delta Airlines and was working in Paris and thought he’d do a quick stop over before he went on Safari with some friends to Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. He was a great sport and came along willingly as we went about our work.  It was so fun to have him here!  

Dinner at Mamboz with Elders Huskinson and Dlepu and Mike

Pam and Mike standing in the Indian Ocean.

Music class at Mbezi Beach - thanks for the picture, Mike!

We did get to take a quick trip up to Bagamoyo, a beach town up the coast and one of the oldest towns in Tanzania.  It was the main terminus for the East African slave trade going east to India and north to Arabia.  For decades during the 1800’s many thousands of slaves, captured in the interior, reached Bagamoyo after a long march to the coast, chained to one another, in long lines. Our visit to the Bagamoyo Catholic Museum  was informative and sobering.  Bagamoyo means “lay down your heart” and our hearts certainly ached learning the atrocities that were done here. There were many influential abolitionists most of whom were multinational missionaries that you have never heard of, who were influential in stopping the slave trade in Babomoyo.   Two of the most famous are England’s William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, and Dr. David Livingston, a medical missionary of the Anglican “London Missionary Society”.

Inside the Bagamoyo Catholic Museum

 Mike and Agnes our friend and Swahili translator.