Merry Morogoro Christmas - Part 1 - Congregation of the Resurrection 2026

The last week before Christmas brought many changes to our formation house. The ten aspirants left for a month vacation to visit their families and secure the documents that they need to prepare for their application for Novitiate. Our brother candidate, Fulgence, left to visit his family for Christmas before beginning his first year of studies at the Komunge Catechetical Training Center, in the Diocese of Musoma. Fr. Yohana left for Dar es Salaam to assist a classmate with his parish Christmas celebrations. Likewise, Fr. Daniel left to help Fr. Phillip with the Christmas celebrations in Butiama. He took our two fourth-year seminarians, Vitalis and Emmanuel, who will assist in the parishes in Butiama and Buhemba.

Before the aspirants departed, they built a stable for our Christmas nativity in the chapel. It turned out to be much more elaborate than I imagined!

I kept teasing them that the stable looks like it has a second floor and maybe a swimming pool in the back. But seriously, they worked very hard on this and you will see the final results later!

With the departures, I remained with the rest of the seminarians and Br. Michael. Lameck Juma, who is studying at Jordan University, joined us, so we have a total of 16 people here in Morogoro.

One of the wonderful customs that is celebrated in Tanzania is a person’s name’s day. This is the day of the saint from which this person obtained their name. We have three people in our community named “Emmanuel”: fourth-year theologian Emmanuel Ntula and aspirant Emmanuel Sanyanga, who live in Morogoro, and novice Emmanuel Faraja, who is in Buhemba. We wanted to celebrate their name’s day of December 25 before they left. As usual, we had a nice celebration, including ice cream and songs and dancing.

Linus was the chief architect of the stable. He wanted to see what it would look like before he left for his vacation.

School finished on Thursday, December 20. We have a few weeks before classes will resume on January 6. It gives us some time to rest and to prepare for Christmas, including a day of recollection at Jordan University on Saturday, December 22.

But it also gives us some time to do some “spring” cleaning to improve the condition of the formation house. One of the big challenges is to clean all the windows and screens in our buildings. We formed different teams and did a great job in the residences, the chapel, and dining room and kitchen.

It is amazing how things look now…you can see things outside now! Just kidding, but they really did need a good cleaning, and the seminarians were up to the task.