After almost a year living in our new place, we thought maybe we should tie up some admin-y things, like telling our bank what our new address is. We tried to think about what we’d need to bring to do that, e.g. identity documents such as a passport, something to […]
What Bible verse would you choose to share when visiting a family whose child has just died? Perhaps something about God comforting his people? Or something about the hope of the resurrection? (Maybe not.) What about Philippians 4:8? Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is […]
Story 1: Msikwao is a young girl, early high school age who is seen at a river breastfeeding a child. The boy who sees her tells his father who gathers the village elders to interview her. She says she’s looking for her grandfather, and they question her about her past. […]
In the English dictionary, ustawi (ooh-STAH-wee) is prosperity or welfare; mafanikio (ma-fa-nee-KEE-oh) is accomplishment or success. The latter is a very popular topic for teaching in Tanzania. The former does not feature as much, but a long-time missionary suggested it to us as an alternative to mafanikio to distinguish prosperity […]
Kufa kwa wengi ni harusi means ‘For many, (a) death is a wedding,’ where wedding is representative of a big party. When I first heard this proverb, I assumed it was about people who die, that for them death is a happy thing or a release. It’s not that. The […]
I feel like the longer we are here, the more I see how much we have to learn. If we spent our first three years trying to get our heads around prosperity gospel, I have spent the last few years trying to get inside Tanzanian understandings of hierarchy, and it […]
I’ve been thinking recently about language learning. It goes so quickly at the beginning. At the end of our four month course when we first got here, I wrote and gave my first talk in Swahili. A bit over a year later I could go off script during sermons, or […]
