In honor of Kent a new good blogging friend and proud parent/grandparent of a tenant family currently at the campsite, I’m posting this 16+ minute video tour of the Riverside Campsite in Iringa, Tanzania. This is where we attended Swahili language school and I filmed this in early November last year.  You can even [...]

This is video of water from the shower in our banda in Africa.  You’ll see me fill up a bucket in a dim-lit bathroom then carry it outside so you can see it better.                                 

If you’ve ever traveled overseas, especially to a 3rd world country, and spent time close to real life there, the feelings I’m about to describe may be a little familiar.
I went to town this afternoon and on the 15-minute ride there, I had a little time to just ride and think about what I was [...]

I’m enjoying where I am in terms of speaking Swahili. I’ve probably had hundreds of conversations by now, both short and long. I love being able to communicate with people in the language they know best. Rich Reid, a good friend of ours who has served in numerous places overseas, wrote to [...]

What is a rat?
For my final Swahili project, I decided to put together a game of Jeopardy. One of the categories in the first round was Msamiati wa Kiingereza. (English Vocabulary) This meant all of their question responses had to include the word in English… not Swahili.
So, this category was chosen and I [...]

Okay, it finally happened to me.
We were walking back to our banda after chai (tea) break today and Dana noticed her shadow. The sun was directly behind us so you couldn’t tell by the shape of the shadow that she’s pregnant. So, she stopped and turned to the side for a few seconds [...]

One day this past weekend, I heard the village kids playing in the river. There were a bunch of them so I decided to give them some popcorn someone sent to us from the states. (Thanks again, by the way!) So, I walked over to the riverbank and yelled, “Watoto chizi!” (Crazy kids) [...]

How do we drink water?
Good question.  We wondered this quite a bit before coming over here.  We brought our own 5-gallon bucket-style filter as well.  The answer to the question is chupa nyingi za maji (many bottles of water).  Since we have a small fridge in our banda and room to keep a lot, we [...]

The Creation of God
I was sitting at our desk which faces the porch from the inside of the banda.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught some movement in one of the trees outside.  As soon as my eyes focused through the screen on the window, I couldn’t believe what I was looking [...]

If you’ve noticed, our e-mail response times have improved and our blog posts are more frequent.  These are just two of the benefits of having internet access in our banda now.  Yes, out in the middle of nowhere, we have figured out how to access the internet.

I discovered shortly after arriving in Tanzania that Celtel [...]