President Magufuli’s reasoning against pregnant girls returning to secondary school was that they would be distracted from their studies by breastfeeding their babies. I found this somewhat surprising, because a friend of mine in Dodoma had told me about how at her workplace, breastfeeding women are given regular breaks to […]
Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has introduced a ban on teenage mothers returning to school. His emphasis has been on the consequences after the fact; he cites their ‘distraction’ from their studies as the reason they are not allowed back. (There has been limited discussion of how these girls got pregnant. […]
Merry Christmas! We celebrate Emmanuel, God with us. We had a sermon on this at church last Sunday, though it wasn’t initially apparent to me that it was a Christmas sermon. The text was Daniel 3:24-25, about the three young Jewish slaves who are thrown into the fire because they refuse […]
This Sunday at church I was struck by how fear/power language permeated everything. (I wrote recently on the fear/power cultural paradigm, and we’ve previously written on it referring to it as animism, and with reference to the prosperity gospel.) In the children’s program… great attention was given to scripture memorisation. Last week’s […]
Have you seen this article doing the rounds? Aside from the assumptions that missions is (a) to unreached people groups and (b) that those unreached peoples are poor, Nik Ripkin raises some super important issues that can be considered beyond the immediate context he is addressing, which is persecuted Christians in […]
Navigating in Tanzania requires an entirely different headspace from what we are used to. Here are some snapshots. In 2013, on our first trip to Dar es Salaam after we arrived in Tanzania, we got lost. Badly. We had a map, but it didn’t help because most of the streets on […]
We knew several Wahindi in Dodoma, but the suburb we’re living in in Dar is chockers full of Wahindi. So, who are they? Here’s some of what we’re learning. Most simply, the Wahindi are Indian background Tanzanians. Many of them were born in Tanzania and their families have been here for […]
