Elizabeth Colonna, a member of Church of the Good Samaritan, Knoxville, has passionately maintained our relationship with the Anglican Diocese of Kondoa. There Bishop Given Gaula and Mother Lilian Gaula, lead a growing flock of anglicans in Tanzania. After the most recent pilgrimage in May of this year, Elizabeth has worked on an update to share with the diocese about their time in Tanzania.
Pastor Ingrid Schalk prepares to baptize a child.
The 2025 Kondoa Pilgrimage began with two nights in Arusha, a larger city near Kilimanjaro. Our time there was spent acclimating to the time change and to life in Tanzania. We shopped the Maasai market to support the women there and brought back many items to sell. The proceeds will go back to support the schools in Kondoa. We were able to visit the African Cultural Heritage Center and Shanga, which is a school for deaf, blind, and phisically challenged persons run by the Lutheran church. It is a boarding school where they learn chef and baking skills, welding, and other job skills. They also make prosthetics for the residents as needed.
We then spent our first Sunday at the cathedral in Kondoa where Pastor Ingrid Schalk, spiritual director of the pilgrimage, was able to help administer communion. We then drove two hours to Dodoma where she preached at the Lutheran cathedral (click here for her reflection and photos), sited next to the Anglican cathedral, during an ecumenical service featuring multiple choirs.
A Tanzanian girl brings a piece of sugar cane for the offertory at service.
During visits to four villages, Ingrid was able to baptize 237 people in Dabia, Changamka, Wisuzaje, and Zenzengwala, with 125 baptisms taking place in Dabia alone. As we visited the villages, we were honored with food, crosses, bowls, and katanga fabrics. Offertories at the services featured anything from a few Tanzanian shillings to a goat to sugar cane.
We toured St. Peter St. Paul Primary School and took donations of first aid kits and school supplies for the children. Afterwards, we toured the secondary school at Chemba that is hopefully going to open in August for “pre-form” session before the school year begins in January. The science labs, library, and several more classrooms are built—new government regulations.
We blessed not only people but animals as well: cows, goats, donkeys and chickens in four Maasai bomas.
We were able to worship in several new buildings made by the villagers from mud bricks that they bake in makeshift kilns. Once the building is complete, Baba Askofu finds money to put on the roof for the new parish. Our favorite was church held under a huge fabulous Acacia tree. As Margaret stated, it was “nature’s cathedral”; they had built benches out of stick in a circle around the tree trunk.
Pilgrims were able to stop by the Women’s Empowerment Project workshop.
We were also able to visit the Women’s Empowerment Program, an upcoming missional focus for the Diocese of East Tennessee’s Episcopal Church Women.
Weddings were also a feature of our trip. We attended a wedding “kitchen shower” held for a couple getting married who attend the bible college in Kondoa. We also saw a wedding in one of the villages; the groom was Muslim and was baptized as a Christian. He then married a woman in the church.
Our trip also featured outings and recreation with a hike to the Kolo cave paintings—a world heritage site of importance in Kondoa. We ended the pilgrimage with a safari to both the Ngorongora crater and the Serengeti—the later being the first time the Serengeti was visited on one of our pilgrimages. It was amazing! We will be repeating that on future trips. We were able to see the “BIG 5”: the lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and African buffalo. We also got to see thousands of Wildebeest and Zebra migrating. All of this plus birds and other animals made it an amazing trip.
As Baba says in his invitation, “People come to Tanzania to see the animals; I want people to come be with my people and then go see the animals”. We hope these photos and stories inspire you to continue deepening your relationship with and support of the people of Kondoa and the ministry of the Anglican and Lutheran communities in the cities and villages.
Elizabeth Colonna captures a lion on top of a rock outcrop during the safari portion of the trip.