Every afternoon while Elliot eats his dinner and then Arthur puts him through the bath, I go for a walk, skirting the boundary of the university. It’s not exactly a power walk, but it’s energetic. I normally listen to a podcast while I walk so I’ve got headphones in but […]
Something we’ve been confused about here in Tanzania is why so many Christian women marry Muslims. We asked our student friends, one of whom has a sister who got married to a Muslim. They said it’s not family pressure. Instead, for most girls, it’s seeing the money the Muslim guys […]
Most of the time our learning about Tanzanian culture is built on observation, but every now and then we get a brilliant opportunity to sit someone down and get them to explicitly answer questions we have. Recently we got to talking about family relationships with two student leaders. Since God […]
We recently received a concerned email asking, what’s the deal with this report? Tanzania’s Minister of Home Affairs, Mathias Chikawe, has announced that churches and religious institutions that publicly oppose the country’s new constitution will be deregistered, beginning from 20 April. Tanzanian Christians oppose a bill that would introduce Kadhi […]
Twice in the preceding weeks, Elliot had come home from school talking about people hitting. We hadn’t wanted to alarm him or make a big deal, so we’d made very casual inquiries. Who was doing the hitting? Why? He replied, ‘They were hitting to make the children share.’ Sounds like […]
I wrote on Facebook: I called it an ‘evangelistic conversation’ but I really don’t like the term. ‘Evangelism’ can have negative connotations of conquest and for 200 years Africa has been the plaything of European imperial ambition (let alone the colonisation that came before that). This conversation highlighted that poignantly. […]
Particularly among university students, there is a desire for self-, life-, and nation-improvement. Sometimes that can feel very overwhelming, whether it’s in the pressures of exams or the bigger picture of being one person trying to make a difference in their nation. These proverbs seem particularly relevant. Haba na haba […]
Meet Jesus at uni 