Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

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 we encountered some strange weather.  After a couple of weeks hitting into the 100s the weather broke Monday afternoon in a strange wind storm that made visibility about 5 feet due to the sand storms.  Overnight it started to rain and by the next morning the temperature had dropped to the 50s where it stayed almost all week.  It was not until yesterday that the sun peaked out and started to show itself from the cloud cover.  Personally I loved the cooler temperatures though morning baths were eye opening and I had to moderate my power consumption since there was almost no sun all week to recharge the solar system.  In fact the highest percentage of power from the panel that I got was 5 all week. During our "Reading with Barnabas" program this week we featured a video from another daughter, Lily, from my high school friend.   She read the group Dr. Suess' Cat In the Hat.   The kids get really excited when they see me walki...

It is rainy season here in the valley.  It will continue until sometime in April.  When I first got back this year, everyone was talking about it being a drought.  Granted they had not had the normal rains in about a month it appeared.  But since I have been back they have gotten some great rains.  Some were a little hard but most were the great moderate rains that lasted several hours that do very little soil erosion damage but soak the ground. Yet I still get discussions about it being a drought year.  At first I thought this was something similar to the jokes about Farmers in general that they are never happy with the rain.  There is either too much or too little.  Having grown up on a farm-more animals than crops but still in the community-I get the basic problem.  Too much rain can destroy crops just as easily as too little. Now when we have droughts, one of my Reverend friends likes to say "if you pray for rain you should carry an...

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...

What oh what should I write about this week.  I know what I don't want to write about because I have spent so much time trying to explain the election system, media, why people are rioting and why it is wrong that I am exhausted from the conversation.   Yesterday was Veterans day.  It was a different one for me this year.  It was first very hard to be proud of my service as I read messages on facebook after the election that were from all sides of the election and filled with hate.  A great quote from G.K. Chesterton sums up why that is so important:  "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." This year's celebration has also been different because I have been contacted by voices I have not heard from in many years.  Most of the people I served with and all my closest brothers have died.  So when I heard from some of the support staff from my days in service I was shock...

I once again find myself struggling with a blog topic that I has all my research completed and enough pictures to keep my wonderful audience returning.  I have a couple of items I need to put on record before we move on to the topic today.   First up:  I will be making my yearly stateside trip arriving Dec 12 and departing the afternoon of Sunday Jan 15.  I will be available to do talks either about my life and work here or about Full Dimension Ministry (or some combination of those two).  Please contact me at steveintanzania@gmail.com  and I will put you in contact with the person helping to schedule talks.   Mark your calendars that I will be doing a dinner talk at Mauldin United Methodist Thursday December 15th that will be a fundraiser for the team coming over in June 2017.  As the ability to register for the dinner becomes available I will pass it along. The last item is that if you were following the wish list items I posted several mo...

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...

Was not sure what to actually title this post as I am probably going to ramble a little bit as I have lots of little things on my mind at the moment and I am too tired to try and sort them out.  So see if you can keep up with the direction changes. Those who know me pretty well know I don't enjoy the months of October and November too much because I rarely get a decent sleep during this time frame.  This starts lightly in late September and normally wraps up around mid December.  However with all the travel and activities of the family vacation here in Tanzania I only had mild issues in September and early October, but it seems to be making up for those days with a vengeance.  Add that to the fact a lot is going on in the country and I am pretty far behind on my self inflicted work schedule (that means I set it and I give myself crap about not keeping up with it).  These problems infest many other areas of my life such as my creativity outlets as I am dra...

Rain I have always loved rain for as long as I can remember.  There were a couple of times in the military where it rained so long and so hard you would think I would have learned to hate it but it only reinforced my love of  rain no matter how much or long I got it.                    Water is the most powerful thing I know of.  Any doubts look at the Grand Canyon and what water can do when given a chance.  Look at the massive structure that had to be built to hold water back at the Hoover Dam.  Here in Tanzania though it is much easier to see how powerful it can be.  For only five months a year do they get rain.  During this period it needs to rain regularly to fill up water cisterns, underground aquifers, help the crops grow.  When you go more than a week in rainy season without rain you get worried.  It affects everything.  Cat...