10 reasons why you sould go on a mission trip

Rosie: Sweetest girl ever, likes to be spun around, has the most beautiful smile as you can see!

These were the best three months of my life. I want to start with that. Secondly, Tanzania is beautiful. It's landscape is rugged, stony and very green. We were plunged into the most rural depths where people lived in huts made of mud and the roads were little more than paths carved out of the dust. I know it's cliche, but you get to the point in life where you just don't care, as soon as I saw Africa I fell in love with it. Honestly, driving from the airport through Mwanza, my heart was singing. It was so utterly different to anything I'd ever experienced before. We stayed in a wonderful lodge that had been built especially for missionaries. Every day we would commute to the villages in our broken old trucks carrying tools and then hunkering down to work with cement and bricks and wood and all that. I could list off everything we did, and we did a lot. But having been back in England for a while now, I begin to realise that people often lose interest when I babble on and on. So I think I'll just keep it nice and short.


An alert Impala during safari in the Serengeti.

Gaby and Juma, the sweetest little five year old you'll ever meet. Likes jumping onto you and being picked up.

Chloe and little Felix, the smallest boy in the orphanage.



10 reasons why you should go on a mission trip to Tanzania:

1) You meet incredible life-long friends who become your friends quickly because you do physical work together

2) You are serving God by helping others everyday, it is the most productive you will ever feel

3)You are experiencing poverty first hand and realising that this is the same world you live in and something needs to be done. And you are doing it.

4)You will experience a culture so friendly and generous and happy that you won't ever want to go back to the individualistic England

5)The experience you gain will be invaluable - taking the lead, teaching, doing health runs etc

6)It's sunny every single day!!!

7)You form relationships with the people out there through church, joining the choir, invited for chai and chipatis, and the children are just brilliant! You seem to get to know them even though you can barely speak to one another

8) You learn lots of Swahili without even trying!

9) The memories will last forever

10) There is something about it that I can't put my finger on...something that you need to go there to experience, but that something is amazing.

I gestured for them to smile and they copied me!

Ben and Tom R playing football with the 'lads' in the evening sun after a hard days work.

Abbie and Chloe.

We stayed up for the sunrise.

Andy skipping with the girls ;)

Julianna and Esther.

Abbie giving Mkami a shoulder ride

A casual lioness siting on the side of the road that slowly padded away through the sevanna with us gaping at her

Chloe tickling Alexi!