Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Christmas is coming!  What a wonderful time of year where we all act our best and try to be a bit nicer.  It is also a great time of year to think about your favorite charities as part of your gift giving.  The idea of alternative gift giving is not new.  Families have been practicing for as long as I have been around and most likely before.  I think Heifer International was one of the first to formalize the idea into a cataloge.   Some churches even do special alternative Christmas gift events so you can find the charity you want to support.   It is a wonderful idea to give money to help others as a way to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.  Like we actually get the overall idea of what his time on earth was about.  I want to encourage everyone to consider doing at least one alternative Christmas gift this year.  Even if that donation is not to the ministry I work with.  There are a lot of them. Here are some good ones you may want to consider: Heifer International:

Last week was a trip to the big city for a quick weekend to pay deposits for the 2017 mission team and to visit the Christmas Fair.  It is a fun event that makes one think of similar events back home.  It was much needed as I have been preparing end of year reports and that is a strange mix of getting a lot of useless data and fighting to get useful data. I put up an offer for those wanting to go to the fair.  Several PCVs wanted to go along, which is why I will be working hard not to mention the name of the big city since they don't have permission to go there and also the reason for it being such a short trip as some needed to get back to schools since they are teachers.  I ended up with a truck full.  The trip there was uneventful but the trip back was full of people puking and a lot of stops by police to only be waived on.   The fair features various crafts, professionals and other groups on display often selling something.  There are food vendors from local restaurants.

This week had a couple special moments to it.  First it rained on monday.  If you want to know what I mean by rain there is a video below.  The noise you hear so loudly is the rain hitting the roof of my "house". The second is a visit by long time friend and engineering colleague, Frank DeVita, PE.  He and his brother-in-law have been working on starting a ministry in Kiruani.  You can learn abou their minisitry at  http://b2buministries.org /  They have a clean water bored well and are currently building a primary school in addition to the various mission teams that come over to work and preach around that area.   Frank and his contractor, Abraham, visited mid week and I met them in Singida then drove them out to our site where the three of us discussed various building techniques and ideas we have for getting rid of bats.  I was happy when they told me they could not even smell the bats in our medical buildings which is a major improvement over when I first got here.

What oh what should I write about this week.  I know what I don't want to write about because I have spent so much time trying to explain the election system, media, why people are rioting and why it is wrong that I am exhausted from the conversation.   Yesterday was Veterans day.  It was a different one for me this year.  It was first very hard to be proud of my service as I read messages on facebook after the election that were from all sides of the election and filled with hate.  A great quote from G.K. Chesterton sums up why that is so important:  "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." This year's celebration has also been different because I have been contacted by voices I have not heard from in many years.  Most of the people I served with and all my closest brothers have died.  So when I heard from some of the support staff from my days in service I was shocked but loved catching

Today I want to bring back an issue we have discussed in different ways in the past.  Most notable was a discussion of the electricity usage for the country vs the state of SC during the constant blackouts during last year's hydroelectric plant shut down. So this time let's talk about the specific use of a household in SC.  According to  http://www.electricitylocal.com/states/south-carolina/  the average residential home in SC uses 37.3 kiloWatthours per day.  For those that struggle with the metric system, that is 37300 Watt hours per day. With the contributions by the mission team in September, we have now installed solar powered generated electricity to all of our buildings .  Each major building and several smaller ones have their own power generating stations (not substations) totaling 475 Watts of production.  After taking in efficiency and number of direct sunlight hours I calculate that is 3.6 kiloWatt  hours per day.  So our entire site generates less than 10% of

I once again find myself struggling with a blog topic that I has all my research completed and enough pictures to keep my wonderful audience returning.  I have a couple of items I need to put on record before we move on to the topic today.   First up:  I will be making my yearly stateside trip arriving Dec 12 and departing the afternoon of Sunday Jan 15.  I will be available to do talks either about my life and work here or about Full Dimension Ministry (or some combination of those two).  Please contact me at steveintanzania@gmail.com  and I will put you in contact with the person helping to schedule talks.   Mark your calendars that I will be doing a dinner talk at Mauldin United Methodist Thursday December 15th that will be a fundraiser for the team coming over in June 2017.  As the ability to register for the dinner becomes available I will pass it along. The last item is that if you were following the wish list items I posted several months ago, that list has been updated to

This last week I got a chance to visit a site where USAID and various charities had put in a solar water pump system in a community.  The system was put in roughly two years ago and quit working several months ago.  I was going to see if I could find out what was wrong with the system.  My expectations on the system were that it would be a fairly simple system with a solar system set up to power a standard pump drawing water from one of the hand dug wells this community has an abundance of.   What I found when I got there was anything but.  It was an expensive, very advanced system that used four solar panels generating over 100 watts each to an electrical box that was connected to a computer chip controlling a sleeve pump that was inside a bored well.  The well was bored to 65 meters.  Feeling inadequate to fix this was an understatement. I did test the things I could and found it was in the control of the pump where the problem was.  All of the solar system worked fine and

Welcome back to Conversations with Barnabas Bear. A couple of items up front, the conversation is fictional (hopefully that was obvious) but are pulled from some of my conversations and observations during my time here in Tanzania.  The main purpose of these is to help everyone get to know the people in Tanzania a little bit better while having a little bit of fun.  I would love some feedback on these so I know if I should continue and if so what types of conversations Barnabas needs to be having.  The stories are told from Barnaba’s point of view and because of that they are in English though I try to reflect some of the problems with the English translation. Meet Zawati which means "Gift".  She is a student at our pre-school and I wanted to talk to her about the experience of having a team over doing children's ministry. B:  "Jambo Zawati" Z:  "Shikamoo"  (I greet you as an elder) B:  "Marahaba" (respectful response to Shikam

Today the first mission team to visit while I have been serving here as a full time missionary boarded the plane home.  From their comments they all had a wonderful time, saw and participated in some amazing things.  Many expressed interest in coming back or staying connected with the ministry in the future.  I hope to recap some of the great things they participated in during this blog since my work with them has kept me from keeping in touch with the folks back home. Saturday: So I had gotten into town Friday afternoon and had some things to take care of before the first team members arrived starting with getting the truck aligned which has been difficult in Singida.  It took several tries to get it aligned and each time we had to take it on a test drive to see if it was any better.  Problem was that we were in the middle of "rush hour" on a road under construction.  Needless to say my nerves were pretty shot by the time we needed to go get the first two team member