Cool, colorful crawler

Check out this backyard creature...

Watch and listen to the kids' reactions.



Jenna called it a "callapidder."

Our favorite line: "Uh-oh! It's coming toward me!!!"

Take a ride in the "living saloon"

Yep, that's right.  The Gerths have a car!!!  Well, actually it's a van...or rather, a bus.

We thank God for how he provided this car for us.  Now we can drive to church, work, school, town and many other places.  And thank you to all of our supporters who gave sacrificially so that we could buy this car.  We appreciate you!  We hope to bless others the way we have been blessed.

And yes, it really does say "Living Saloon."  The car was imported from Japan so maybe saloon means something different in the Japanese automobile industry?

The make and model of our van is the same as the local public transportation here in Musoma.  They call it a daladala.  Maybe we should decorate our van the way Tanzanians decorate their daladalas...

and if you arrive safely at your destination, you usually want to say...

Bible time with Kara

We're so thankful that our beautiful Kara is loving the gospel and hiding God's Word in her heart.

Diaper bag hearts

Kara: "This dirty diaper bag is like our hearts: pretty on the outside but stinky and dirty on the inside.  Through Jesus, God can clean us from the stinkiness and make our hearts beautiful on the inside.  Jesus washes our hearts with his blood so we are clean from the dirtiness of sin."

King Saul

Kara: "This picture is about Saul and David.  David and his men were running away from Saul and they hid in this cave.  Then Saul and his men came along to that same cave.  Saul had to go to the bathroom so he went inside the cave.  While Saul was going to the bathroom, David came up and cut a little piece of Saul's robe.

Why was Saul going to the bathroom in the cave?  Why couldn't he just go back to his house?  Well, they probably just had holes in the ground like here in Tanzania so that would be the same as the cave."

Here's a worksheet from Kara's Bible curriculum

And finally, this is Kara's screenplay adapted from the Book of Jonah...

we love our Mama of the house

Here's a tiny tribute to our favorite "Mama of the house" as they say here in Tanzania...

Thank you for making curtains!

Thank you for buying our food!

Thanks for the fun birthday treats!



Thank you for cooking healthy meals!

Thank you for homeschooling us!

Thanks for washing our clothes!

You throw the best parties!

Thank you for teaching us and showing us how to study the Bible!

We love you. We appreciate all your hard work. Thanks for showing us how much God loves us.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!!

Water's back!!

Thank you for praying! We have water again.  After 64 hours of hauling buckets and using bottled water, we can now turn on a faucet again.  We are thankful for every drop.  God sustained us by his grace and gave us the strength to keep going.  This was our first experience without water and we learned a lot so hopefully next time we will be more prepared. 

Today, as we wrote this post, the water was off again for 8 hours.  Welcome to Musoma!

48 hours with NO water!

Well, everyday brings a new challenge...now we have no water.  We heard that a water main busted in our area.  48 hours ago we got the last drop out of our indoor faucets.  Since then we discovered an outdoor faucet with a little trickle of water.  So now we walk outside with our 5 gallon buckets and wait for the trickle and carry the water back inside the house.  We use the water in these buckets for hand washing, showering, flushing toilets, washing dishes, washing fruits and vegetables, cleaning, cooking and filtering for drinking.  It's hard work!  But we're thankful that we found that little trickle near our house.  All of our neighbors have to walk to the lake and fill up their buckets with nasty lake water. (we may resort to that tomorrow...) 

>Please pray that God would miraculously fix the water main and our water would be restored.
>Thank God for our dear friends who took some of our laundry to wash at their houses.
>Please pray for grace and strength, especially for Jeannette, as she still has to care for our home but with the added complication of no water.
>Thank God for the opportunity to experience maybe a shadow of what some of our Tanzanian friends experience every day.  It helps us understand and relate more effectively.

when the ants go marching, you run!

Here's one of Tanzania's great terrors:  siafu.  Even the Tanzanians themselves hate these things.

They travel in massive swarms.
Check out these videos...


They have huge pincers and when they chomp onto you they don't let go.


We tell the kids, "always watch the ground when you walk.  You do NOT want to step into one of these swarms."

This small hunting party was right in front of our banda in Iringa...