Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

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 ...

Last week I told you about finishing up the spelling competition with our students.   This last week we started the math competition with the Baby and Middle Class which mainly consisted of counting shapes on the television screen in a timed PowerPoint presentation.   I have three more weeks of math competitions (a week for each of the remaining classes) and then I will give you a full report on how that went.   This week we finished our end of month testing for October.   Top Students (Left to right--Baby Class, Middle Class, Pre-Unity Class, Standard 2 and Standard 1) While many of the names are the same, they sometimes happen in a different order.   As is normal, when we near the end of the year it seems to be all about the girls in Standard 1 and Standard 2 classes.   Gladness, Teresia and Grace (the only girls in our Standard 2 class because it is our smallest class) took the top three spots.   For those that have been following Obed’s r...

The last four weeks we have been putting on Spelling Competitions at the school.   Every Thursday during the normal “debate” time, which is never an actual debate but instead a time when students have to speak at the front of the class to recite something they have learned, we have been going class by class with the competition.     Ester is the letter champion for the Baby class As you can imagine, the Baby and Middle preschool classes was not so much about spelling as inclusion with the rest of the school.   We had them come up to blackboard and write letters.   After we went through the alphabet, we gave them simple words they see regularly like “cow” but allow their teacher to coach them through the process.   In the end their level of competition is more about who can follow instructions in a timely fashion than the actual ability to spell.   Eugene is the letters champion for the Middle preschool class The first real lev...

This is the third installment talking about the Mauldin UMC mission trip to Tumaini Evangelistic Pre & Primary School in Kiruani, Tanzania.   This installment I want to talk about some of the bigger changes we planned for this mission trip from some at my previous site. First the biggest change in location is the tribe we deal with.   My new area is mainly a Maasai Tribe area and the majority of people our team comes into contact with at the site are Maasai.   So, I thought a prepared presentation on their culture would be a good thing.   We had Lucas who donated the land to the school and is one of the most respected Maasai men in the area along with our Headmaster Fredy talk about Maasai culture and then take them on a tour of traditional Maasai homes from the days they were nomadic.   They also talked about why the feel the school is important to the future of their tribe.   I was not sure what I was going to get as Fredy continued to a...