Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

While I will be the first to say testing is not always the best method of determining how someone is doing in school, I also recognize that it is difficult to change a culture that only understands testing.  Testing is a time consuming process that takes up a half a week of classroom time every month. I still enjoy recognizing the students that do well with testing.  I console those that missed getting a prize by a mere point or less.  I wish I knew a better way, but until we can scan the brain to see what people have learned I guess it is testing. The girls continue to rule in our highest grade, Standard 3.  Though there was a slight change in order.  Teresia (far left) was 1st place this month.  Gladness in the middle was second and Grace was third.  The boys just cannot hold ground in the top three it seems.  That is their teach Twaha with them. In Standard 2, Nice (left)  took back 1st place from Dorice (middle) who kept the pre...

Morning Parade with Kilimanjaro peaking out between the building and the tree. I would like to apologize for missing the last two weeks.  It was due to a combination of factors.  My computer once again succumbed to the heat, dust and travel conditions of living in remote areas that are difficult to travel to and from on a weekly basis.  I am using a computer that is based on Windows 8 so everything is different.  Now add the fact that the school needs the end of year student report in a completely different set up from the previous letters.  So different in fact that I had to reprogram all the database functions to create the data they wanted.  They delivered their end of year tests to me four days late and still expected me to produce them by Monday despite the fact no one was willing to come in on a Saturday to review them (they actually tried to tell me it was against the law in Tanzania for teacher to work on Saturday).   Add to all...

This week is a little bit of an odds and end discussion as I get ready to come home while applying for a work permit again.  Last year got my visa schedule out of sync with everything else meaning it is up Thursday.  This trip will be a little more extended for several reasons.  The first being that I am applying for a work permit with the new ministry and will need to allow a couple of months for that process.  Another reason being that I have not had a chance to speak to many groups about the new ministry since I joined it and I need to not only bring everyone up to date but will be looking for some new groups to speak to.  The last reason is that school is closed in June so no real reason to rush back with nothing going on at the school. The most important of those reasons is one of the odds and end I want to talk about this week.  Speaking Opportunities.  I need to fill up my two months at home with as many as possible.  I not only want to...

One thing about changing locations in Tanzania, much like it would be living in a different  part of the USA, is the different weather patterns.  At my previous location, rainy season started late November or early December and lasted until sometime in April.  Quite often during rainy season you would actually have cool nights along with nights in September. In my new area the rainy season is much shorter.  In fact other than the one big rain we got last November I was beginning to wonder if there was going to be a rainy season.  Most data on rainfall for the region shows they get less than half my previous location.  So while Doug and Frank visited from the USA at the end of February and beginning of March, the rainy season here started, exactly on the first day of the month they said rainy season started, March 1st.   That leads to a pretty funny story about the goats and the house we were staying out while they were here.  Every night ...

My pardons to Was (Not Was) on the use of their song phrase but I really wanted a song title to talk about walking here.  There were many to choose from Ronettes' Walking In The Rain; Katrina and the Wave's Walking On Sunshine; Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line to the Bangles Walk Like an Egyptian and about fifty others.  I choose this one because it was fun and a little cheesy.  Look it up on Youtube for a laugh. I have written blogs in the past about walking and will most likely do it again in the future.  Why?  Because I walk a lot here.  To quote Hippocrates, "Walking is Man's best medicine."  Not sure how true that it is but I have dropped many a pound due to the walking regimen that is the way things are here.   I embrace the walking lifestyle most of the time.  There are times when it tires me out.  Some days you just don't want to walk into town but if you want some food you have to.  Even at my previous site, when I ha...

This week had a couple special moments to it.  First it rained on monday.  If you want to know what I mean by rain there is a video below.  The noise you hear so loudly is the rain hitting the roof of my "house". The second is a visit by long time friend and engineering colleague, Frank DeVita, PE.  He and his brother-in-law have been working on starting a ministry in Kiruani.  You can learn abou their minisitry at  http://b2buministries.org /  They have a clean water bored well and are currently building a primary school in addition to the various mission teams that come over to work and preach around that area.   Frank and his contractor, Abraham, visited mid week and I met them in Singida then drove them out to our site where the three of us discussed various building techniques and ideas we have for getting rid of bats.  I was happy when they told me they could not even smell the bats in our medical buildings which is a major i...

This last week is best described as just one of those weeks.  I apologize in advance for some graphic wording and for this probably sounding like a complainer of blog but it is just one of those weeks-no real complaints they just happen. This was especially tough as I have this idea about a chair I want to make for the house that I had to put off the last couple of weeks for other site related projects.  This was the week I was going to work on it and this blog entry was supposed to be another Tiny House Tanzania.  Then this happened: Then it happened again and again and again.  Since all my work is done outside it killed my project on the chair. The first thing happened upon walking into the house and smelling an all too familiar smell-dead.  Something had died and I am glad it did not take me long to find it.  One of the mole/mice looking creatures had tried to get at my sink which I had forgotten to dump before leaving the previous week and they dr...