Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

This last week was an interesting mix of items.  I spent a lot of my week trying to get the site ready for my absence while I head home to the States awaiting my work/residence permit renewal process to be completed.  But every time I started working on a project, one of the staff would bring something over and ask me to work on it.  Most of the items were personal and not things belonging to the site.  Most notable of those came from one of our nurses, Emmanuel.  He wanted to build a window for his house out of the scrap wood I keep on site (never throw it away unless it is bad).  I found it funny how he knew the piece of wood on top and bottom needed to be long enough to exceed the opening.  This way they can put masonry grout between the bricks and the wood along the edges.  What was funny was he had no idea how to figure out how long they should be.  Understand this is someone who has done high school, the two extra years of high school and nurses college (probably a year or two e

Thanks to the generosity of many of my readers and groups at MUMC I have been able to purchase a nice selection of power tools to make work easier here at our site.  As I started to acquire these tools I knew I needed to think about good ways to store the tools and their accessories so I would not lose anything especially since the grass cutter constantly moves things around. Another big reason I want them in toolboxes is that the critters all do their business and it ends up all over my tools as you will see in some of the later photos. I considered three types of tool box/bags/containers:  metal boxes available everywhere in Singida, 3 gallon or 5 gallon plastic buckets also available everywhere in town, or canvas tool bags which are only available in Arusha.  So I purchased one of each.  The canvas bag was one I had been given in the states, the 3 gallon plastic bucket cost roughly $1.5 and the metal box which is the smallest version they have cost $7.5 roughly. I know from t

It is rainy season here in the valley.  It will continue until sometime in April.  When I first got back this year, everyone was talking about it being a drought.  Granted they had not had the normal rains in about a month it appeared.  But since I have been back they have gotten some great rains.  Some were a little hard but most were the great moderate rains that lasted several hours that do very little soil erosion damage but soak the ground. Yet I still get discussions about it being a drought year.  At first I thought this was something similar to the jokes about Farmers in general that they are never happy with the rain.  There is either too much or too little.  Having grown up on a farm-more animals than crops but still in the community-I get the basic problem.  Too much rain can destroy crops just as easily as too little. Now when we have droughts, one of my Reverend friends likes to say "if you pray for rain you should carry an umbrella"  meaning if you have fa