Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Wow, Memorial day is tomorrow and to be perfectly honest until I started seeing all the Facebook posts I had not realized it was here.  This is probably one of the more significant "holidays" to me other than Easter and Christmas.  More so than Independence Day or even Veteran's day and the ever growing list of governmental holidays.  So how did it get so close without me realizing it.  Basically it is a lesser known USA holiday to the rest of the world.  When overseas most folks recognize our Independence Day as something big to us and would say something when they saw us on the streets.  I wonder how all the Germans, Australians and British feel about Tanzanians wishing them a Happy Independence Day on July 4th.  Folks here don't seem to distinguish to well between where Muzungu's come from.  If you are white you are going to have someone try and speak English to you.  Of course that is fair since the real definition of Muzun...

Had a second visitor from the USA this weekend.  Rob Schadt with www.pommernvillagechoir.org and www.soul-lit.com (spiritual poetry) came for a quick visit (arrived Saturday and left Monday morning).  This was interesting for me because William is stateside for his daughter's graduation from Wofford, so this was the first visit I was responsible for.  Fortunately almost everything went as planned.  He got in about 11:30 AM on Saturday to Singida and took him to his hotel.  They of course had not cleaned the room yet even though I had a reservation.  So we went over to the KBH for lunch and took a little walk to see the lake.  KBH lunch was normal-only about one item on the menu they actually had and it did not look much like a hamburger at all actually nothing like a hamburger.  After that took back to the hotel then a trip into town to see Singida in all its glory.  That took about four or five minutes. Dinner that night was at his hotel...

I am going to cover two parts of this out of context because I want to bring in the positive items first then we will deal with the less fun activities.  The first good activity for me is that my blood sugar was really low this morning-low enough I treated myself to a chocolate bar today.  The second is my cough finally started to go away on Saturday and is finally gone completely now.   I want to say a big congratulations to the MUMC youth being confirmed as church members, Barnabas and I are really proud of you.   Also best wishes to Travis as he preaches his first sermon at LIVE Worship this Sunday, remember to relax and breath. Now to the rest of the story (my apologies to the late great Paul Harvey).  I am going to tell this part in chronological order in hopes not to miss anything.  Let me also say this is not a big sympathy call but simply doing what I normally do in this blog-telling the story of life here and what folks deal with on a regular bas...

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...

Before I actually get started this week I am going to deviate-I know I do that a lot- and make a request for assistance. Rev. William Makali and his wife Martha would like to come stateside to see their daughter graduate college.  This is not an FDM USA sponsored trip so he has to raise his money for the tickets.  He currently has raised $1200 and needs $1800 more.  If you can assist, please arrange to give your money or check to William while he is in the USA from May 12 to Jun 10.  Thank you in advance for your generosity.  Just because they are not on an official FDM USA trip they would still love to meet with friends and groups that have supported them in the past, just contact me to see what we can arrange.   One of the fun parts of my life here in Tanzania is the visa process.  You cannot get a residence work permit in the USA, you have to apply for it in Dar Es Salaam which is no where near where I am.  I have found out recently you can h...

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...

Ok this was a blog I was holding off on as long as possible hoping that God would answer my prayers in an overwhelming positive (for me) fashion.  But apparently He really wants me to work to learn this-Kiswahili.  I have spent hours every day working through my grammar books and dictionaries.  I have created flash cards and rewritten words I feel will be important to me to the point I have filled up two notebooks.  This is all after my time with a tutor for several weeks. Let’s start with the history of the language.  Kiswahili is what is referred to as a Bantu language meaning that it was formed by combining several languages into a new language typically for specific types of work or trade.  In this case the Spice trade which ran through Zanzibar during pre-colonialism started the creation of Kiswahili along the coastal region of Tanzania and Kenya and was first influenced heavily by Arabic languages.  During the colonial period, Germany took c...