Bomalang'ombe an Anomaly

Today’s Blog Contributed by Russ Myers, VP of Development for Cheetah


There are about nine thousand villages throughout Tanzania. The village of Bomalangonbe (Boma) sits in the mountains in the south central part of the country. There are about 13,000 people that reside in this area and all but one is a farmer.

They farm potatoes on the sides of the mountains where many seemed to be too steep to walk down but there are terraced rows of crops that are being worked. There is a road, if you want to call it that, connecting Boma to the town of Iringa. Iringa is a city of about 120,000 people, the largest in this area of the country.

The road between Boma and Iringa is a difficult road to drive. It passes through some beautiful country and a variety of climates as you try to maintain your sanity over the bumps of the road. There are some 38 separate climates in the world and there are 34 different climates represented in Tanzania. You pass through several on the way to Boma. There are eucalyptus trees that are a hundred feet tall and then there are pine trees and when you turn back you are in desert conditions and have cactus next to the road.

On this day there are eight of us traveling to Boma from Iringa: the driver, five visitors, the district pastor and a pastor for interpreting. The five visitors include Ray Menard, Russ Myers, Dr. Mark Ereth, Dr. Chris Marrs and Randy Haglund. We are traveling in an eight passenger Toyota Land-Cruiser which is really for five people comfortably. They claim a back seat for three but don’t believe a word of it. Today I am riding in the back seat with two other men. Your feet are at your bottom and your knees are against the seat in front of you. You feel every rock in the road for a while until your rear end is numb. You hold on to the hand rail to keep yourself from hitting the roof of the vehicle on every bump. Soon the small bumps don’t matter and you stop complaining because you know the trip is only two and one half hours long.

When you arrive you realize it was worth the trip. The first thing you notice is street lights. That’s right street lights in a village. For that matter there are few street lights in the largest city of Dar es Salaam. There is electricity to run the lights and electricity for the village. There is a cell phone tower next to the church. Cell phone coverage in within Tanzania is incredible with the latest technology of bandwidth available. The calls coming into the country are something else all together but in country you have better coverage than Verizon claims. Sorry, back to the electricity: so why does Boma have this electricity when other villages and towns struggle without it?

There is this six kilometer road off of the main road that I described earlier. This road takes meaning of rough to a new level. Once you get to the end of the road that winds around mountains and then takes many hair-pen switchbacks you arrive at the anomaly. There is a hydro-electric plant on a dammed up mountain stream. This small lake sits several hundred feet above the generating plant. The views of the lake are incredibly beautiful. The stream of water that is flowing out of the overflow of the lake as it comes down past the plant is breath-taking. The stream runs down where two mountains meet so the vistas of both make one realize that only God can make things this beautiful.

The Boma village is an anomaly sitting on top of the mountains in south central Tanzania with street lights and electricity enough for all of the residents.

Oh yes, the trip back was three and one-half hours with the side trip to the hydro-electric plant. I am okay and the blood has returned to circulating in my bottom.





(Pictured: Russ looking happy as he gets out of a bumpy airplane ride...everything seems to be a bit bumpy!)