Service is Beauty: Tanzania 2013

My wonderful wife Susan has a great way of looking at service that I have since adopted. We can’t serve everyone, there is simply too much need and we would drown. But if we serve a bit at 4 different levels, (1) our family and friends, (2) our community, (3) our country, and (4) our world; then the world, and all of us, will be better. Our trips to Tanzania are part of our service to the world. We also have served, and will continue to serve in the other 3 areas. Service is a blessing. We gain much more than we give by serving and learning from others, I know I have.

Susan first went to Tanzania in 2001 to begin a collaboration with the Sisters at St. Agnes in Chipole, Tanzania, and with St. Martin’s University. She fell in love with the people of Tanzania, and particulary with the sisters, the students, and the orphans at St. Agnes in Chipole. She promised to come back again, later, with SMU students. That promise was to be fulfilled in 2014!

This trip, in 2013, was to set up the visit the following year with SMU students, and to explore how I could help by teaching positive psychology and the importance of compassion for 4 weeks on a Fulbright specialist grant at St. Augustine University in Songea (30 miles from the sisters in Chipole) and with the Seminary at Peramiho .

I had been a professor for several of the sisters from Tanzania while they were completing their Education degrees at Saint Martin’s University between 2008-2012. They impressed me deeply with their wonderful humanity, hard work, and deep faith. I promised them I would come to Tanzania to help in any way I could. For me, this was a completion of that promise, and a “giving back” for all the gifts I have been so blessed to have received in my lifetime.