Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Wow, Memorial day is tomorrow and to be perfectly honest until I started seeing all the Facebook posts I had not realized it was here.  This is probably one of the more significant "holidays" to me other than Easter and Christmas.  More so than Independence Day or even Veteran's day and the ever growing list of governmental holidays.  So how did it get so close without me realizing it.  Basically it is a lesser known USA holiday to the rest of the world.  When overseas most folks recognize our Independence Day as something big to us and would say something when they saw us on the streets.  I wonder how all the Germans, Australians and British feel about Tanzanians wishing them a Happy Independence Day on July 4th.  Folks here don't seem to distinguish to well between where Muzungu's come from.  If you are white you are going to have someone try and speak English to you.  Of course that is fair since the real definition of Muzun...

Had a second visitor from the USA this weekend.  Rob Schadt with www.pommernvillagechoir.org and www.soul-lit.com (spiritual poetry) came for a quick visit (arrived Saturday and left Monday morning).  This was interesting for me because William is stateside for his daughter's graduation from Wofford, so this was the first visit I was responsible for.  Fortunately almost everything went as planned.  He got in about 11:30 AM on Saturday to Singida and took him to his hotel.  They of course had not cleaned the room yet even though I had a reservation.  So we went over to the KBH for lunch and took a little walk to see the lake.  KBH lunch was normal-only about one item on the menu they actually had and it did not look much like a hamburger at all actually nothing like a hamburger.  After that took back to the hotel then a trip into town to see Singida in all its glory.  That took about four or five minutes. Dinner that night was at his hotel...

I am going to cover two parts of this out of context because I want to bring in the positive items first then we will deal with the less fun activities.  The first good activity for me is that my blood sugar was really low this morning-low enough I treated myself to a chocolate bar today.  The second is my cough finally started to go away on Saturday and is finally gone completely now.   I want to say a big congratulations to the MUMC youth being confirmed as church members, Barnabas and I are really proud of you.   Also best wishes to Travis as he preaches his first sermon at LIVE Worship this Sunday, remember to relax and breath. Now to the rest of the story (my apologies to the late great Paul Harvey).  I am going to tell this part in chronological order in hopes not to miss anything.  Let me also say this is not a big sympathy call but simply doing what I normally do in this blog-telling the story of life here and what folks deal with on a regular bas...

It has been some happening weeks here in Tanzania since my return or more importantly the return of my laptop from Nairobi.  After getting a week behind in my work with the repair of my laptop and then the trials and tribulations in getting it back in my hands, I had to spend a large amount of time working to prepare for visitors from the States and several issues we had to deal with on the site.  So I am a little late again getting to the blog and when this happens I normally sit at my computer with conflicting ideas and topics to cover and never really sure what should be talked about first.  So I am doing a little bit of a combo here. Let's start with the video I prepared for the FDM USA banquet which can be seen on youtube: To answer the number one question I am hearing about this video-yes I have lost some weight while I have been here.  Walking everywhere tends to help with that and I have been very good about my sugar as I cannot get medicine here so I w...