The account of Bishop John Burt, Martha and Sarah Burt’s trip to Tanzania in 1974 has been fascinating to me. Martha describes a worship service in St. Michaels in Korogwe as “magnificent, tumultuous. . . maybe 1000 people, sitting on mats on the floor, crowding aisles.” Frequently she remarks on the singing, “and how they sing. . . no need for an organ here!”

About the people she writes that, “everyone has a friendly smile and a ready ‘jambo’ on their lips.” The Burt’s daughter Sarah took a tape recorder. Wouldn’t that be a treat to find the recordings that she made – Tanzanian lullabies and other music?

The Lay Training Center was opened despite a downpour. The diocese of Ohio helped pay for two thirds of its construction. In Mukuzi a reception was prepared by the Mother’s Union, each woman in a yellow head scarf. They danced to drum music. Martha writes, “Suddenly they pulled me into it and I became the first European woman ever to dance in their village! They even dropped coins in my hand the more I shook my hips!” Martha also shared a spiritual experience she had while staying in Magila at the Convent of the Community of the Sacred Passion, an order founded out of a desire for British atonement for complicity in the slave trade. Martha confesses that she was nearly exhausted, “I had a beautiful dream: a very real experience of a kind of ‘angel’ coming to tell me ‘she’ would sit behind me. in my deep sleep, I had the sensation of something sitting behind my head on my pillow. And I was enveloped in complete peace.”

We are blessed in the Diocese of Ohio to have been served by the Burt’s and to have their account from their visit to Tanzania in 1974.

Daniel July 27, 2011