Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

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