Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

This last week was an interesting mix of items.  I spent a lot of my week trying to get the site ready for my absence while I head home to the States awaiting my work/residence permit renewal process to be completed.  But every time I started working on a project, one of the staff would bring something over and ask me to work on it.  Most of the items were personal and not things belonging to the site.  Most notable of those came from one of our nurses, Emmanuel.  He wanted to build a window for his house out of the scrap wood I keep on site (never throw it away unless it is bad).  I found it funny how he knew the piece of wood on top and bottom needed to be long enough to exceed the opening.  This way they can put masonry grout between the bricks and the wood along the edges.  What was funny was he had no idea how to figure out how long they should be.  Understand this is someone who has done high school, the two extra years of high school ...

Last week I put out a couple of questions and some beginning of projects so I wanted to follow up.  First the above picture is from a friend's balcony who lives in Kinampanda which is along the ridge line before you drive into the valley where I live.  This is her view overlooking said valley.  I had to visit Kinampanda with work this week so stopped in to see her after I heard she got stung by a bee again and missed a day of teaching.   Next the answers to the questions that frankly I was shocked no one even ventured a guess about.  All my engineering and creative friends and no one guess!  I guess I should offered something more than imaginary or useless points but since they do it on Whose Line is it Anyway I thought I could get away with it. Why does we need to add more water here to get the same workability or mix strength as we would say in South Carolina or even Peru?  The answer has to do with the dryness here but specifically the fact i...

This week I had the chance to help out one of my Peace Corp Volunteer friends who started a woman’s group that is now knitting, doing embroidery and sewing.  The volunteer purchased a used knitting machine in Arusha for them last year and has been learning how to use it herself as well as getting some supplies for it.  She recently asked if I could help by building a table for the knitting machine.  It is a simple table 2 feet by 4 feet and 30 inches high but specifically with a top thickness of less than 1” so the clamps she had for the machine would work since they were small clamps. The first thing I did was look at the clamp she had and specifically the one would not full open because side that screwed in to tighten the clamp would drag along the inside of the clamp itself.  That was a simple fix of grinding down the moving head until the clamp would open almost completely. before filing down after filing down Another item that was needed were so...

One of my favorite YouTube videos other than Jeff Dunham and Achmed the Dead Terrorist is a water charity having Africans read people's problems from what is normally referred to the First World but I typically refer to as the Minority world since those that live in those conditions are in the minority. So I have talked about my trouble sleeping during this time of the year (not a minority world problem a veteran problem) but how I cope with it in town sometimes leads to minority world problems.  For example I have been in town most of this week getting things done before I come home for the holidays.  Only my Virtual Private Network has not been working all week and Netflix knows I am in Africa so they will not let me access their site to watch programs at 2 AM when I finally give up trying to sleep and look for something to do to occupy my time.   On the other hand I have always been pretty good at working through the nights at least until I can't focus my ey...

This blog is actually about a work project on the site to repair the main entrance gates but I don't feel I can adequately cover the topic without discussing the concept of security here in Tanzania to a Tanzanian.  The concept of keeping what is mine is strongly ingrained into most of Africa.  Yes in most of the world people take common sense measures to protect things they own like lock their doors when they leave or lock up their cars. So what I have been struggling with as I worked on rebuilding the gate is the misconception of security here by creating items of show instead of items of real physical security.   The rebuilt gate after being primed and 1st coat of paint Let me start by telling you what was asked for in our gate and then describing to you the reality of the situation.  While determining the project and how to best utilize our resources those from the Tanzanian side of the discussion talked about a strong, secure gate that would prevent bullet...

I want to thank everyone for the birthday wishes via facebook.  I especially want to thank T. Welborn and my parents for the very cute cards sent via post.  A lot of folks asked what I did for my birthday.  Well I spent the majority of my birthday gearing up for a next stage in our current big project, though one of my Peace Corp Volunteer friends took me out to breakfast and we got in a couple of games of cribbage, which she won (she is on a roll right now).  Since many of the folks I know back home do a birthday month celebration, I thought I would combine these two weeks and discuss the things I was doing to celebrate my birthday this time.  As many of you remember last year was a big number of importance, but this year it is just a regular number with no mathematical significance.  So to preface any discussion of the thing I have been doing these last couple of weeks I need to first discuss the weather.  Technically we are in w...