The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) has received major support from the Government of Canada, allowing it to extend its maternal and...

It’s early in the morning, but the lounge at Mtwara airport is already filling up when the 10 members of the PWRDF’s delegation to the diocese of Masasi file through security.

The Rev. Linus Buriani is not the sort of person who draws a lot of attention to himself.

The Rev. Geoffrey Monjesa had been so close to retiring.

On Njia Panda Road in Dar es Salaam, our car lurches slowly from pothole to pothole, sloughing dirty water into the open gutters, trying to find purchase in the rutted mud of the road.

For the past five years, the work of Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF), the Anglican Church of Canada’s relief and development agency, has focused on the health of mothers and newborns in southern Tanzania’s diocese of Masasi.

As the drowsy heat of afternoon descends, traffic on the footpath leading out of the village slows to a trickle.

The diocese of Masasi’s Bishop James Almasi stands beneath the spreading branches of a large tree at the centre of the village, and pauses as the people seated before him acknowledge his greeting with the traditional response: “Alaikum Salaam” (And to you, peace).

Early in the morning of May 15, two large white Range Rovers pull up to the gates of the Mtandi Clinic, a well-kept compound on the outskirts of the southern Tanzanian city of Masasi.

It’s barely 9:30 a.m., but already the walkway between the Anglican Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew and the bishop’s residence is a furnace, and the dozens of choristers who line it are sweating in their gowns.