Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

I thought you might like to hear some of the stories from my travel home during the middle of a global pandemic.  Some of you may have seen some of the photos on my facebook feed, but I have some more that did not make that feed.  I am also going to talk about what I am doing now that I am at home and in self imposed quarantine before I go to stay at my folks home.  I am also going to ask for your help to decide what I should be doing on the blog during what will be an extended break. Let's start with what was happening in Tanzania before I left.  The government had encouraged people not to gather in large groups and given some basic guidance along those lines.  They closed all school and  universities.  They required everyone coming in to Tanzania to go into a 14 day quarantine at a place the government set up.  This meant expensive type hotels that many of the Tanzanians returning after being overseas could not afford.  The government howev...

I thought it was time to bring back this segment of the blog now that I have been able to develop some background on many of our kids.  So I thought I would introduce you to one of the students at our school.  Seth is a young Maasai boy living near our school who most everyone who has visited our site has come into contact with.  Before I get into Barnabas' introduction of Seth, I wanted to brag a little again on the students and school in general.   We took the end of August tests during the first week of September because the school is closing for two weeks.   The school overall increased their average score by two points to 83.   It is also worth noting the Girls ruled this month with all three girls in standard 1 placing in the top three.   Pre-Unity also had girls in all of the top three spots this month.   Baby class had a girl in the top position followed by two of the boys.   So big congratulations to the girls at the schoo...

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.  These stories are told from Barnabas' point of view. We are headed back home.  It has been a weird year with the multiple trips home, having one ministry end and a new one startup.  It has been even more hectic than normal with Steve (I understand it confuses some when I call him dad) getting hit by the motorcycle in Arusha then coming back to work on the solar of the headmaster house only to have to make a last minute trip back to town to get a part for the inverter.  He was really busy wiring the house, doing final inspections on buildings under construction and saying goodbye to everyone. ...

To view almost all the photos I took you can go to  Steve's photo album The team arrived Saturday, June 17 at the Kilimanjaro International Airport which is about 1 hour away from Arusha where they would be staying their first night in Tanzania.  Normally we use the safari vehicles to pick everyone up at the airport, but this time our safari company (called Cheeky Monkey) used what is called a coasta.  A coasta is a medium sized bus which was perfect for everyone to get a comfortable seat and the luggage.  It took a rather long time for the team to get through immigration.  About an hour and a half but this is normal in Tanzania.  Also, normal in Tanzania is to have every bagged checked at the customs stop and when you bring in items for VBS they want to tax it.  This year it was the bears they wanted to tax.  It took me about half an hour to convince them they did not need to tax the bears and get them loaded up on the coasta.  ...