For the past 5 summers, each time for a couple of weeks, parishioners from our diocese have traveled to Tanzania with Father Milton Kiocha (Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Grove City) to work projects at Mrawi Primary school. The school is on the outskirts of the city of Moshi, Tanzania, below Mount Kilimanjaro. Sister Zephrina of the Diocesan Missions Office asked me for a glimpse of this year’s trip to Tanzania.
This year, the trip was from August 3rd through August 18th. Our group included Steve Maddox, Andy Johns and his son, Ben from Our Lady of Perpetual Help; Mary Joseph and Mary-Sibyly Kress, from Canton and Cleveland, respectively; as well as Bob Lagnese and me from Our Lady Queen of the Apostles in Chillicothe and Waverly. Each day, we celebrated Mass with Fr. Milton at our modest hotel before heading off to the school. Our Sundays also included Mass at two of the local parishes. We were joined by our interpreter, driver, engineer, and all-around problem solver, Prosper Assenga. During the trip, four members of our group went on a 5-day safari in the Serengeti in western Tanzania.
We arrived during the week of the local celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Fr. Milton’s ordination. His Anniversary Mass and the celebration which followed, were celebrated at Sacred Heart Parish in Moshi.
Parishioners in Chillicothe and Grove City have been very generous with their financial support of the projects which Fr. Milton has managed at the school. Over the past several years, the improvements at the school have included:
- A playground/soccer field (with new grass) and purchased playground equipment
- Most of the campus has been paved with concrete.
- A former storage area was turned into a new Principal’s office.
- Plumbing, countertops and lighting in the kitchen and a new teacher’s restroom.
- New concrete floors, windows, and LED lighting for the classrooms and offices.
- A large “social hall” has been completed for the students to meet and eat their lunches, which includes living space for a student teacher.
- A small addition built onto the school – to hold supplies for the school and to train students how to use sowing machines.
- An outdoor basketball court, (built in 2025).
This year, our group arrived at the school for the first time, when the school was having an “athletics day”. However, the students paused long enough for us to distribute hundreds of rosaries, toothbrushes and pencils to the students. Ben, the athlete in our group, also coached basketball.
We also brought along donated vestments (chasubles and stoles), donated by the diocesan Misson Office and Bishop Ready High School. These were donated to a local pastor.
While work on the social hall continued, our group’s goal for the trip was to build desks for the students to replace old wooden desks, many of which were more than 60 years old.
Last winter, Steve Maddox and Bob Lagnese developed the design of the new desks, consisting of a simple tubular steel frame and with wooden seats and tops. Fr. Milton arranged to have the new desk frames fabricated in advance by a local contractor; they were waiting for us to arrive and start work. The plan was to paint the frames, and predrill them for the screws for the seats and desk tops. Then the wooden seats and desk tops would be attached.
Local lumber was also purchased in advance. The lumber needed to be cut to size, sanded, spray sealed, then attached to the frames and then varnished. Of course, there was no shortage of students who watched the goings on, and wanted to help.
As there was never a shortage of interested students who wanted to help, some of the students – (with supervision!) – helped build a few of their own desks. When the desks were fully assembled, they all received two coats of varnish (below).
The constant presence of the students reminded us that although we were focused on the task at hand, there were always opportunities to have a little fun with the kids. These were always simple opportunities, like clowning around with painters’ gloves and the hundreds of balloons we inflated for the children on our last day at the school. Through all of our experiences at the school, it was easy to see that we weren’t simply building desks. We were building friendships and connections with teachers and hundreds of little brothers and sisters in Christ, in addition to the hundreds of parishioners we met at different parishes on Sunday. All of these are the kinds of relationships which transcend differences in language, differences between cultures and distances between homelands.
