Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you
I met him in Tanzania when I was there with an international team working with the Lutheran church on a project for training preachers. On Sundays we were sent out to different churches around the region, which meant each of us needed a translator. He was mine. I remember feeling a connection with him almost immediately, though I could not have said why. At some point he told me that he too was a preacher. Self-taught, he said. He travelled to remote villages and preached in public places. He had trained as an accountant, but glaucoma had ended that work. Now he made a basic living growing soybeans.
He told me that he would listen to preachers and then go and tell others what he had heard. I liked that. The simplicity of it. The seriousness of it. He asked me which version of the Bible I preached from. When I told him, he said that one day he would like to buy a copy of that version. So I gave him mine. At the time it felt like the natural thing to do.
But a year or so later he sent me an email asking if I could help his son through medical school. I remember not knowing what to think. Was this a genuine request? These things are not always easy to tell from a distance. But there was something about him that had stayed with me. Something steady. I couldn’t help much, but I could help a little, and I asked to see transcripts at the end of each semester. His son finished his degree with good results and now works as a doctor in Tanzania.
Later I helped his daughter as well. She went on to do a master’s degree in computer engineering. I am still in touch with the family now, mostly through her. I was invited to graduations and weddings. I could not go, but the invitations mattered. They told me that what began as a simple relationship one Sunday morning had become something else.
The original project did not last. Funding dried up after the global financial crisis and the formal work came to an end. That happens. Projects begin with plans and budgets and clear goals, and sometimes they stop just as abruptly. But this one small part of it kept going. That is what has stayed with me. Not only that I met a good man. Not only that I was able to help his children. It is that a random encounter can quietly become part of the structure of your life. You think you are there for one reason. You find out later there was another.
The Afterword 
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