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...

So temperatures here continue to be in the 90s with high humidity though we have not had any rain this week.  As I mentioned before I am forgoing the refrigerator so I can have power for the fan at night.  Yes I understand the physics of a fan blowing hot air around but moving hot air is better than static hot air, at least mentally. So what does one do when it is this hot all the time, because it is this hot for most of the year.  Well let me preface this by saying I am not normal and leave it at that. First up is I bake bread in the house.  I purchased an camping oven because it folds up, fits in the luggage and can be used to bake items as well as recycle plastic (another blog).  Unlike ovens in one's house it is not insulated to keep the heat internal so it heats up the house a good bit.  However I am having trouble keeping the bread from molding and I am making some in the house.  So far I have only done the no yeast style bread and one...

Hello everyone and welcome to 2020.  Something weird about saying that.  I almost feel like I am back in the 1980s and that is a commercial for a home computer from Tandy at Radio Shack.  Regardless of my old person issues, we are here in 2020.  I wanted to take a moment and reflect on 2019 at the school then get into what we working towards in 2020. For a short version of our 2019 year in review you can check out the following video: For those that want a more detail look back at 2019 keep reading: Let's start with some of the things we are still doing that we have mentioned in previous year updates: We continue to have morning devotions using Best Loved Bible Stories books purchased in Arusha.  The big change is that students from Standard I and II now read the stories to the pre-school students every morning. Every Friday we have a Bible Class.   Thursdays we have student presentations (they refer to it as debate) where ...

We have finished our Mid-First Semester Testing and officially closed the school for their normal two week break.  There was some good and bad for the whole of the last two weeks.  First let me apologize for no blog last week as the internet was insufficient to post pictures with the blog.   We had our first set of tests printed by our new printer on site.  Though it took a bit of doing to make that happen since it took 4 black ink print cartridges to print 600+ sheets for our tests.  The printer was not expensive and the ink is fairly cheap and now I understand why.  Though we have found a place to refill the ink cartridges in Moshi so I just have to tell the HP warning about using refilled cartridges to go away every time I use the printer now. The previous week our "Reading with Barnabas" story was one of the Storyline Online stories featuring Caitl in Wachs reading the story.  Don't worry I had to look her up too.  While s...