Twenty-two members of First Lutheran Church in Newton traveled to Tanzania in July this year intending to build an eye clinic for International Health Partners, a medical mission in Tanzania.

Our church, along with another in Kansas, in April had sent a shipping container with materials to build the clinic.

Five members of our mission team flew from Des Moines on July 7 and our group of 17 followed on July 8, flying via Detroit and Amsterdam to reach Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania.

After an overnight stay in Arusha, we all flew to Mwanza, where International Health Partners took us to the project site in Nyakato. Travel assistance for our team came from money given for mission work and other money raised specifically for our project.

Mwanza is known as "Rock City." Immense granite outcroppings on the steep dirt hillsides provide a striking backdrop to makeshift housing covering those hills. The city had no streets, sidewalks, utilities or sanitation.

We paid approximately $20 per person per day for lodging and meals at the Maua Hostel. Our accommodations were charming and adequate, somewhat akin to nice summer camps. Food was tasty and healthful, incorporating mangos, papayas, plantains and tilapia along with more familiar bananas, pineapple, tomatoes, rice, potatoes, beef and chicken.

With our group was Marie Quanbeck, who had grown up in Tanzania as the child of Norwegian missionaries. She knew Swahili and we practiced Swahili greetings on our way to our work site.

Along a path through the Nyakato Health Clinic compound we "high-fived" uniformed schoolchildren on their way to and from school. We marveled at how the local women carried vegetables, meat-stuffed turnovers called sambosas, bananas, peanuts and even rocks for making concrete in containers balanced perfectly on their heads, walking with their hands at their sides.

We ran into a snag when our shipped container didn't arrive as we had expected. But a volunteer crew from a church in Walnut Creek, Calif., earlier had begun construction of a birthing center. Since its container arrived only a few days before they had to leave, plenty of construction tasks remained for our group.

Because of a dockworkers' strike, our container never arrived while we were in Africa. It finally arrived intact in September.

Specifically designed to withstand earth tremors, the birthing center was a formidable structure to erect, given that we had no power cranes, lifts or even ladders that were long enough.

We framed interior walls and applied metal lath to all the walls so concrete could be applied as a finish material, which also would provide termite protection.

We worked steadily on the birthing center for two weeks, and visited attractions on Sundays. The Bujora Cultural Center and Sukuma Museum have exceptional displays of local culture and history. Dancers in one performance we saw moved to drumbeats, culminating in a dramatic snake dance featuring two daunting pythons.

On another outing, we took a boat ride to an island wildlife park on Lake Victoria. Dining on the shore of Lake Victoria was memorable, although we resisted dipping a toe in the water lest we contract schistosomiasis from the ever-present parasitic liver fluke.

When it was time to return to the airport for the flight home, we took a land route through the Serengeti and Ngorongoro wildlife conservation areas. Safari accommodations and food were very good.

We saw the African "Big Five": lions, leopards, a black rhino, Cape buffalo and African elephants. We also saw giraffes, zebras, Thompson's gazelles, orangutans, crocodiles, hyenas and monkeys. Flamingos, storks, vultures and pelicans were so large they cast big shadows flying overhead. Our guides were very knowledgeable and fabulous drivers, especially on the treacherous grades into and out of the Ngorongoro crater.

Tanzania is not a country where you rent a car at the airport and rely on a guidebook, but we feel we had the experience of a lifetime. We witnessed harrowing aspects of life in Tanzania: swift justice as an apparent thief was chased down and beaten in the streets of Mwanza and persistent street youth who followed us to our restaurant tables in Arusha. We also bargained with vendors at local markets in Nyakato and worshipped at a chapel and a cathedral where services were followed by an auction to convert in-kind offerings of chickens, milk, eggs and laundry detergent to shillings.

Even though we didn't get the eye clinic built, we considered our mission trip successful. We would love to go again.