Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

These last couple of weeks have been full of adventures for myself, Barnabas Bear and my family visiting from the states.  I met up with them in Istanbul, Turkey for a couple of days before we flew over to Nairobi, Kenya then drove to Arusha taking in a Safari along the way.  In Arusha, we picked up the truck I use and I drove to Singida, then out to our site in the Iramba Valley before journeying through Dodoma, Morogoro and Dar Es Salaam to Ferry over and visit Zanzibar for a couple of days.  This wall all about two weeks in length.  And like most Hendrix vacations there was no sleeping past 7 AM so we could fit as much into every day as possible. In Istanbul we had my parents, oldest brother and two friends from Germany. We spent a good chunk of our first day walking to visit some of the mosques which have beautiful architecture and tile work as well as one of the more historical church to mosque buildings in the area. We also visited the cisterns under the city...

Got the opportunity to particpate in the Girl's Conference put on by some of the Peace Corp volunteers.  They did a four day event in Singida, housing and feeding the girls from I think 6 different secondary schools in rural areas for a total of about 30 girls with the purpose to empower them.  They had science talks and experiments, items on health and safety, careers and to express themselves artistically.   I participated in Saturday when they did their science talks and experiments.  As part of the section they had them break into groups to draw everday things in their life that have some type of scientific element and to then present their drawing and talk about what it has to do with science to the whole group.   The other part was to do break into teams where they had to work with girls from the other schools to compete in three competitions.  The first was pretty neat.  They  were to make boats from a sheet of alumi...

I got back in Singida around noon on Thursday local time and meant to get right on a blog entry that afternoon.  But have you ever stared at a blank  page with so much to say at one moment and no clue how to condense it all down to one writing or where to start.  That has been me these last two days.  After being restricted to town by the doctor for two weeks after just getting back to the village from the same injury, I was running out of stuff to talk about but now I still look at this page with unease to come up with some way of getting it all out.  So here is what I am going to do.  A list of all the things that have made this past week (maybe week and half) good and I will limit discussion on the major topics in hopes I will cover them in the coming blogs.  So here goes: Getting back on the road again and not having to get wrapped all the time from the rib injury.  Seeing the crochet work done by those I was teaching to do it. ( www.they...

My first short term mission trip to the Yulansoni valley was in 2001.  A lot of things are still the same in the Singida and Yulansoni area, but a lot are different. I thought I would spend a blog exploring some of those items and some of the things that surprised me that are the same. The first item to discuss are the three items most treated at our hospital.  In 2001 and 2006 the items were dysentery, malaria, worms.  Today after the event of new roads and a lot more exposure to the rest of the world the items are dysentery , malaria and sexually transmitted diseases.  I also understand pregnancies out of marriage and teenage pregnancies have increased in the Singida and rural areas in the last 4 years. Women's clothing has vastly changed.  It was rare even as late as 2010 to see women wearing pants in town or a tight skirt or a skirt above their knees.  In fact normally they would wrap one of the printed clothes to cover themselves if...

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...