Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

The Tumaini Evangelistic Pre & Primary School choir This week was once again a full week.  I started the week by typing in the tests the teacher's  prepared for the end of the school year.  To say I was horrified at some of the questions is an understatement.  First understand school is a lot different here than what we are used to.  The questions are all directly from their text books.  They don't create any new materials even in math here.  All the same many of the questions had to be corrected from the book. For example one question was to use 5 words listed at the top to complete sentences.   All the words in the list were parts of the body used to do things except the last one which was carcass. The questions all go along the line of we use our __________ to hear our mother call us, and you would answer ears. So the question you use carcass for goes like this:   We feel smell of carcasses by __________. Where carcas...

Being the week of Thanksgiving I felt it was a good time to give thanks to many of those who help me and the school this year.  The difficult part of that for me is that I only know who supports me or someone who gives to the overall ministry because they went through me to do so.  There are so many folks supporting the overall ministry of Tumaini School that I would hurt someones feelings because I was unaware of their contribution and therefore forgot to mention them.   So I hope you can simply take my heartfelt thanks for what you do.  If you prayed for the school, our kids, the teachers or me, then thank you.  If you donated money to help support the school, students, me or a special project we were fundraising for, then thank you.  If you have made a video for our Virtual Mission Trip and "Reading With Barnabas", then thank you.  If you organize, help at, or participate  in one of the fundraisers for the school then thank you....

  We continue with the advanced pace at the school heading to the end of the school year.  This week we had our normal events like "Reading with Barnabas" and classes, but we added in our Math Competition which I have been working on for the last two months and a sort of surprise school parent committee meeting (I will explain later) Let's start with the big event for me, the math competition.   I tried to model this on the MathCounts competition the Professional Engineering groups have for middle school kids.   However I had to modify for the school level of our students (obviously) and somewhat for cultural understandings.   We started the morning off much the same as the spelling bee.   The Standard I and Pre-Unity Classes were given a written test so I could get the 10 best performing students.   We had a large group tie for 6th place and for 10th place so I actually just had the top 9 students for the afternoon competition.   We held the...