Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Being the week of Thanksgiving I felt it was a good time to give thanks to many of those who help me and the school this year.  The difficult part of that for me is that I only know who supports me or someone who gives to the overall ministry because they went through me to do so.  There are so many folks supporting the overall ministry of Tumaini School that I would hurt someones feelings because I was unaware of their contribution and therefore forgot to mention them.   So I hope you can simply take my heartfelt thanks for what you do.  If you prayed for the school, our kids, the teachers or me, then thank you.  If you donated money to help support the school, students, me or a special project we were fundraising for, then thank you.  If you have made a video for our Virtual Mission Trip and "Reading With Barnabas", then thank you.  If you organize, help at, or participate  in one of the fundraisers for the school then thank you.  If you come to hear me talk or help m

  We continue with the advanced pace at the school heading to the end of the school year.  This week we had our normal events like "Reading with Barnabas" and classes, but we added in our Math Competition which I have been working on for the last two months and a sort of surprise school parent committee meeting (I will explain later) Let's start with the big event for me, the math competition.   I tried to model this on the MathCounts competition the Professional Engineering groups have for middle school kids.   However I had to modify for the school level of our students (obviously) and somewhat for cultural understandings.   We started the morning off much the same as the spelling bee.   The Standard I and Pre-Unity Classes were given a written test so I could get the 10 best performing students.   We had a large group tie for 6th place and for 10th place so I actually just had the top 9 students for the afternoon competition.   We held the afternoon competition du

It seems every week I have a lot of items to go over in this blog.  The first is about the spelling competition I have been preparing for the last two months has finally happened and I have to say it was a big success.  I wish I had not been in charge so I could have taken video of the kids and especially the teachers during the competition.   Gladness Stephano won the competition but she got challenged by Teresia and Grace for Standard I (First Grade) and also Meri and Nice from Pre-Unity (K-6?).  I have been downloading vocabulary lists for first grade students in the states and pulled my list of words from that.  We started with a written test in Standard I and Pre-Unity with 25 words I would call out and give in a sentence.  Some of the items I also drew on the board to help them recognize what I was asking them to spell.  I had originally not planned to include the Pre-Unity group but the Head Teacher asked me to.  For the most part they had no clue what was going on, but Bara