Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

This last month has been busy, exciting, sometimes overwhelming and once again a beautiful reminder of the blessings I have in my life not only from the perspective of what is available to me in the states but also the love of those who support and believe in me. Let me start with some of the reverse culture shock then I will talk more about the wonderful things that happened during my trip home. I have been well prepared for the life I led in Tanzania because I believe myself to be very adaptable.  One of the best things to come out of my military training is the ability to accept conditions as what they are and deal with them.  With that said there were some definite changes in how I saw life when I came home to visit for the holidays and renew my visa.  First-at no time have I ever set in my parents house and asked for a blanket to cover me unless I was deathly sick but time and again after living in Tanzania temperatures I asked for a blanket when not active and I...

Let's play the age game.  I am guessing most of my readers are old enough to remember a show from the late 70's to early 80's called Fantasy Island that aired on ABC.  The concept was simple, the wealthy (normally though some story lines indicated you paid according to your means) paid to have their fantasy fulfilled on this wonderful little island run by the mysterious Mr. Roarke but was typically associated with his sidekick who would run and yell "De Plane, De Plane" when a new group of passengers were arriving.   When I first started coming to Tanzania in 2001, they were starting a major road project across the country.  At the time very little of it was done-let's say 3%.  In 2006 there was progress but still a long way from completion.  Each year after that more of it was done until I arrived in January and was happy to find that all the major roads were completed which means I travel from Arusha to Singida on mostly paved roads (proper road s...

My favorite Sunset photo of week. It is unfortunate but I have to say my second visit to the hospital in a month is not a record.  I wish it was but let's be honest I led a life that leads to hospital visits.  Never thought I would be doing it in the mission field though.  My apologies up front if this one rambles or has a lot of errors, they gave me some good pain meds last night to make me sleep. For those that don't do Facebook, I had some really good news Tuesday-my rib went back into place.  I wrapped it up and was feeling good for the first time in two weeks.  Normally you don't do anything to risk popping one back out for a week after you get it back in.  Unfortunately, a meeting with contractors who had done some repair work on the site last year had been set up by the USA board.  Since I was going to have to explain the problems with the work they had done, I was headed out again.  Wednesday afternoon, after spending a day looking fo...

I am going to cover two parts of this out of context because I want to bring in the positive items first then we will deal with the less fun activities.  The first good activity for me is that my blood sugar was really low this morning-low enough I treated myself to a chocolate bar today.  The second is my cough finally started to go away on Saturday and is finally gone completely now.   I want to say a big congratulations to the MUMC youth being confirmed as church members, Barnabas and I are really proud of you.   Also best wishes to Travis as he preaches his first sermon at LIVE Worship this Sunday, remember to relax and breath. Now to the rest of the story (my apologies to the late great Paul Harvey).  I am going to tell this part in chronological order in hopes not to miss anything.  Let me also say this is not a big sympathy call but simply doing what I normally do in this blog-telling the story of life here and what folks deal with on a regular bas...

It has been some happening weeks here in Tanzania since my return or more importantly the return of my laptop from Nairobi.  After getting a week behind in my work with the repair of my laptop and then the trials and tribulations in getting it back in my hands, I had to spend a large amount of time working to prepare for visitors from the States and several issues we had to deal with on the site.  So I am a little late again getting to the blog and when this happens I normally sit at my computer with conflicting ideas and topics to cover and never really sure what should be talked about first.  So I am doing a little bit of a combo here. Let's start with the video I prepared for the FDM USA banquet which can be seen on youtube: To answer the number one question I am hearing about this video-yes I have lost some weight while I have been here.  Walking everywhere tends to help with that and I have been very good about my sugar as I cannot get medicine here so I w...

Just finished a month of activity trying to get a post office box in Singida-well almost finished.  This is a pretty good example concerning some of the difficulties in doing business here.  So I wanted to get a post office box here in town.  The first thing I checked was if I could use the Hotel's post office box to receive packages or mail but it turns out they don't have a mailing address or post office box.  I guess I should note there is no home mail delivery here. So I enlisted William's help to get the box because many times my visa does not entitle me to do things of that nature (like I cannot cash a check at a bank using my visa).  Between traveling attempts were made to get the forms for the post office box and get a price.  Every time the person in charge of the boxes was not in the office and no one had the forms to give us.  They all offered prices but every time we got a different price like 11,800 TSH, 28,000 TSH, 32,000...

Ok this was a blog I was holding off on as long as possible hoping that God would answer my prayers in an overwhelming positive (for me) fashion.  But apparently He really wants me to work to learn this-Kiswahili.  I have spent hours every day working through my grammar books and dictionaries.  I have created flash cards and rewritten words I feel will be important to me to the point I have filled up two notebooks.  This is all after my time with a tutor for several weeks. Let’s start with the history of the language.  Kiswahili is what is referred to as a Bantu language meaning that it was formed by combining several languages into a new language typically for specific types of work or trade.  In this case the Spice trade which ran through Zanzibar during pre-colonialism started the creation of Kiswahili along the coastal region of Tanzania and Kenya and was first influenced heavily by Arabic languages.  During the colonial period, Germany took c...

Before I get started on this week's blog entry, let me thank everyone who helped make the first Barnabas Bear Newsletter a huge success.  I am hearing stories of a Chick-Fil-A in New York that printed the newsletter at their cost and gave it to customers purchasing a kid's meal.  Another story from California is a church kindergarten that sent printed copies home with all the kids.  Thanks to all the folks who sent encouraging words concerning the newsletter.  We will continue to do them and I will look at doing them more frequently if we continue to get such great feedback.  Those events happened because you, my friends, shared the newsletter with others and shared it with others, but it started with you. Now to this week's blog.  Yes Communication and Banking do go hand in hand here in Tanzania.  You see while there are real banks here, they charge for everything.  The reason is that unlike more developed countries, where people get loans for ...