Here’s an excerpt from the September 2009 Newsletter of Jean Wahlstrom and Marvin Kananen, ELCA missionaries serving in Tanzania.  Jean is the Mentor of Christian Education at the Maasai Girls Lutheran Secondary School and Marv works with English teachers in the Arusha diocese.–Sue Edison-Swift

We thought we’d take the mystic approach to the water situation (also a very African approach), the problem might go away. Their solution is to not mention it and hope the problem would vanish. Well, that partially worked. The problem didn’t go away but the water did. For the entire month of August not one drop of water passed through our pipes. Instead we fill our car with empty buckets, we go elsewhere to find water and fill the buckets, then we get home and empty the car and, too soon, empty the buckets. Sigh. The Deputy Head of School directly approached Marvin and said, “Do not get involved with the water.” Apparently it’s OK to get involved with the electricity because that’s only physics, but water is political. It is MOST POLITICAL. That explains why our neighbors have water (some of it from our old water line) on all four sides and we do not.
–Jean Wahlstrom and Marvin Kananen, Tanzania