Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Six years really does not seem like a long time.  When I first planned to come to Africa with my first mission group I intended to spend six years there.  I thought that would give enough time to get the ministry back up and running and have everybody working on the same page.  We know what God says about our plans and it turned out to be true.  After 3.5 years I switched ministries to the school I am now involved with.  In January it will have been six years since I started this journey as a full time missionary in Tanzania.  And NO I am not  planning on stopping now.  This school feels like one of the most important opportunities I have to do God's work so I have no intentions of coming back home to stay.  Only God really knows how long I will be here, but I hope it is through the completion of the school in 5 more years. We officially closed the school December 6th for the end of the school year in Tanzania.  The school will reopen ...

As you are aware, I like to brag about how our students are doing.   Unfortunately, due to some of the laws of the host nation I cannot truly explain why the grades of our students are so much to brag about.   Here they use a different grading scale and when I have tried to raise our standard at my previous site to something more like the rest of the world, I was told they would only ever use the government scale.   At my current site they have adopted our use of the grading scale for most developed countries, though we are required to still report to the government using their grading scale.   In fact, when I post grades for all the standard classes and for highest level of Pre-Unity, I write the Tanzanian grade and then the grade they would get using the grading scale I grew up with (the basic 10 points per grade starting at 60 for passing).   I have been proud that the kids strive to get good grades on my scale to the point I have started providing awards f...

Thank you to everyone who has been concerned for my health and praying.  The affects of the flu are gone except for a nagging sore throat, dry cough that is most likely being exacerbated by the constant cooking fire smoke and dust in the air.  I had a good week at the school. The school year is off to a rocking start.  We have 94 students registered which is 14 more than our goal for a good registration.  We are experiencing some growing pains these first couple of weeks but are getting it all figured out.  This was not helped by the teacher that called in sick quitting this week to get married without giving anyone a heads up.  I am going to save the fun of hiring a new teacher for another week. For "Reading with Barnabas" this week we had one of the youth reading a story for us.  I had to put it off a week to pump up the sound a little bit in my video editor.  My hearing has become horrible during my five years in Tanzania, but when ...

Last week, I talked about the Christmas gifts as a single blog because I felt it deserved it's on spotlight.  Today I want to finish up our school year and the final testing. When I went around talking during my trip home in June, I told folks we had a goal of increasing the academic performance through our school.  Typically a passing grade for a government school would be 21% and even at that level only a handful pass.  Our goals were 100% passing with a passing grade of 60%.  With the exception of the child I have mentioned with a learning disability and one of the kids who joined our school in the last month, all of our kids passed with a grade over 60.  The school average was 85.76. Our reading and writing scores maintained their previous increases that showed up after starting the "Reading with Barnabas" program.  We had several kids continue to show great progress in their grades.  In fact two of the students that joined us in the second ter...