Rain, Rain and More Rain

Dear Friends and Family

Here in Dar we have been having a fair amount of rain over the past month or so and some of this has caused a lot of flooding in areas. The back roads here have been getting worse with all the rain, we have to drive through a fair amount of water to get to our house, but at the house we have been fine. More on the rains later.

It has been a busy few weeks since we last wrote in many areas. The children are back in school with their last term at HOPAC and they have been doing well. Edith also continues to help at the school particularly with the swimming. Edith has also been busy at home starting to pack things for the move and to pass on things we will not be taking with us.

We had the Tanzanian Auditors in so that has now been done and Paul has also now filed the January and February accounts for this year. Paul had a trip to Dodoma on the 8th and during this week or so in addition to working on the March figures  he was involved in several meetings with the new programme manager and others to work of how things may look in the coming weeks with all the changes. Paul hopes to complete the March figures which he hopes to complete this week. He was also preparing figures for different possibilities for options for the future of MAF in Tanzania. Paul was due to travel back by road with Stewart Ayling on the 16th but due to the rain in Dar and the flooding, a number of bridges were having restrictions on crossing, normally in one direction at a time. This was adding a number of extra hours onto the journey so Stewart did not come up, so Paul ended up having to fly back down with one of the commercial operators.

I our last blog we mentioned about waiting for a few items for Edith's visa, this did not come before Paul went to Dodoma but had arrived when he returned. Unfortunately the bank did not send six months of statements as requested there actually was less than a months. The bank then sent statement to our Ashford address and Paul's father scanned them and dropped them into drop box for us to print. We could not really wait for another month for these to be sent to Tanzania, so we hope that the immigration people will accept these scans instead. We have now filed on line the application for the visa and made the payment, we now have an appointment at 9.30am on Tuesday to file all the other papers and for them to send the visa to the immigration people. Please pray that we will find favour with the authorities and that Edith will be issued with a Settlement visa fairly quickly.

Please find following a couple of photos from the air of one main river that supplies water to Dar you will see how flooded it is. Also I have added two photos of a river here in Dar which about three hours before this picture was a fast flowing stream but then with an hour or so of rain you will see how fast this changed.

God Bless you all and much love form us all

Paul, Edith, John-Luke and Gabriella