Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Last week, I talked about the Christmas gifts as a single blog because I felt it deserved it's on spotlight.  Today I want to finish up our school year and the final testing. When I went around talking during my trip home in June, I told folks we had a goal of increasing the academic performance through our school.  Typically a passing grade for a government school would be 21% and even at that level only a handful pass.  Our goals were 100% passing with a passing grade of 60%.  With the exception of the child I have mentioned with a learning disability and one of the kids who joined our school in the last month, all of our kids passed with a grade over 60.  The school average was 85.76. Our reading and writing scores maintained their previous increases that showed up after starting the "Reading with Barnabas" program.  We had several kids continue to show great progress in their grades.  In fact two of the students that joined us in the second term, that have been sh

Sometimes my time here is the the absolute best thing I have ever gotten to do in my life.  This week definitely was that way.  I have been mentioning the Christmas shoebox alternative proposed by a church in the USA.  Well this was the week we gave the bags to the kids. The project started as an alternative to the Christmas shoeboxes filled in the USA and then distributed around the world.  Doug (head of B2BU Ministries, Inc) was concerned because the cost of shipping those boxes was rising every year and wanted to research an alternative.  He had me call in to discuss the potential of doing something specific with our school.  From the first phone call I was excited because this is something really fun in my opinion.  So Pastor Stephano and I went into town one day to start researching prices.  After a full day of looking around we had a pretty good plan to buy school bags and fill them up with gifts for the kids for around $10.50 per child.  By the end of my researching and