Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

It has been some happening weeks here in Tanzania since my return or more importantly the return of my laptop from Nairobi.  After getting a week behind in my work with the repair of my laptop and then the trials and tribulations in getting it back in my hands, I had to spend a large amount of time working to prepare for visitors from the States and several issues we had to deal with on the site.  So I am a little late again getting to the blog and when this happens I normally sit at my computer with conflicting ideas and topics to cover and never really sure what should be talked about first.  So I am doing a little bit of a combo here. Let's start with the video I prepared for the FDM USA banquet which can be seen on youtube: To answer the number one question I am hearing about this video-yes I have lost some weight while I have been here.  Walking everywhere tends to help with that and I have been very good about my sugar as I cannot get medicine here so I w...

Just finished a month of activity trying to get a post office box in Singida-well almost finished.  This is a pretty good example concerning some of the difficulties in doing business here.  So I wanted to get a post office box here in town.  The first thing I checked was if I could use the Hotel's post office box to receive packages or mail but it turns out they don't have a mailing address or post office box.  I guess I should note there is no home mail delivery here. So I enlisted William's help to get the box because many times my visa does not entitle me to do things of that nature (like I cannot cash a check at a bank using my visa).  Between traveling attempts were made to get the forms for the post office box and get a price.  Every time the person in charge of the boxes was not in the office and no one had the forms to give us.  They all offered prices but every time we got a different price like 11,800 TSH, 28,000 TSH, 32,000...