Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

I want to thank everyone for the birthday wishes via facebook.  I especially want to thank T. Welborn and my parents for the very cute cards sent via post.  A lot of folks asked what I did for my birthday.  Well I spent the majority of my birthday gearing up for a next stage in our current big project, though one of my Peace Corp Volunteer friends took me out to breakfast and we got in a couple of games of cribbage, which she won (she is on a roll right now).  Since many of the folks I know back home do a birthday month celebration, I thought I would combine these two weeks and discuss the things I was doing to celebrate my birthday this time.  As many of you remember last year was a big number of importance, but this year it is just a regular number with no mathematical significance.  So to preface any discussion of the thing I have been doing these last couple of weeks I need to first discuss the weather.  Technically we are in w...

So lately I have been painting the main latrine {called a choo here (one friend likes to point out that choo rhymes with go)} for the site.  While many of our buildings are in need of paint this one was starting to show damage due to the poor quality of the paint so it was top of the list to complete. Prior to painting thought comes the cleaning and the fixing part of the job.  Cleaning is a big thing here.  I believe I have mentioned in the past the constant sweeping of the dirt areas around the buildings and all of the buildings are swept out every day.  All the medical buildings and the nurses’ house are mopped as well every day.  However walls are not such a big deal when it comes to the cleaning schedule. In fact I am not sure I have seen anyone scrub down a wall yet. So for the first day of the project I scrubbed the walls of the building, both inside and out.  This is to remove anything that would prevent the paint from adhering to the old c...