Church and heading off the Mountian

11-08-2015
Since we went to bed early last night, of course I woke up early - about 6am.  It seemed to be a good time to catch up on my knitting.  Breakfast was at 8am: breads, jam, watermelon and coffee.
We left for church at 9:30.  As we walked in, there was a man playing an electric keyboard and there were lots of people (I made a point of counting during the offering and I counted 311 men, women, and children).  Church started "promptly" (we were told) at 10am.  At about 10:10, the choirs entered, followed by the pastors and the bishops of both the Southwest Diocese and their sister South Carolina synod.  Today is ordination day of two new pastors from the area.

The front of the church - the Bishops are all dressed up for this official ceremony.

The bishops were all decked out in their holy robes and big hats - Bishop Yoos looked like the Pope.  It was kind of cool to see, as I'd never seen a Lutheran bishop in official dress before.
Many pastors from the villages around the synod were there.  I think there were 23 - 22 men and one woman pastor.
The church service consisted of several choirs singing various songs - all very beautiful.  The electric keyboard assisted on at least one song (it had a bit of a Caribbean sound) but most choirs sang with no accompaniment.  Sometimes random people would join the choirs singing and dancing - some would move toward the choir, and some would sing and dance from their own seats.
Bishop Yoos did the sermon.  Oh yeah -- of course at the beginning of the service, we all had to get up and introduce ourselves.  Everything in English was translated to Swahili.  Then it was time to ordain the two new pastors.  Each of the 21 other pastors had to say their own prayer, and there were pages of something that also had to be said.  All was in Swahili, so I listened for a while, but mostly looked around to all the people that were there.  We hadn't done the offering yet, so I was probably trying to count how many people were there, because I'm no good at guessing.
At one point, the local bishop said, "Ok, now we start on the second ordination," to which everyone laughed.  I believed him and the fact that we were in for an additional 21 pastor's prayers, pages of ordination stuff, and what probably amounted to another hour of straight Swahili, so I started a letter to my mom.  (I had been writing notes on my experience the whole time anyway, so nobody could tell I had thrown in the towel on this service.)  :)

The two new pastors.  Each were given one of these tools.

It turned out the bishop had been joking, and the service only lasted another 45 minutes or so (three and a half hours in total).  We sang a song, and it was about time to go.  We had to rush out of there too, as we had a long trip ahead of us to get down that mountain and back to Iringa.  Bo was hoping to not have to drive in the dark, and I don't blame him.
We took dinner on the go (the goat was being prepared for Bishop Yoos and his party for supper, so it was for them to enjoy later).  We headed down the bumpy mountain and around the more than 61 switchbacks and took in the gorgeous scenery we'd missed out on in the dark Friday night, and headed "home."

Adam at the JD dealership just outside of Iringa

We had reservations for supper at Kisolanza, which is an old farmstead and very cool place with wonderful food.  I'm sure the place has signs on the road, but what Adam and I noticed was that at the turnoff was a John Deere dealer, so we begged Bo to stop.  Juli humored us by taking our photo with some tractors.  We Fausch's love our tractors!
We got back to Iringa very late - the gate was locked at the Lutheran Center and I thought we were going to have to sleep in the street.  Bo, with his magic Swahili, managed to rouse the guard and get him awake enough to let us in.  Bedtime was way past 11pm tonight!