It was the morning of a public holiday and we’d gone out for a family walk to buy some bananas from a local stall. People call out to us all the time so we thought nothing of replying pleasantly to the three drunk guys sitting on the new drain constructions […]
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 […]
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 […]
The topic of the TAFES Dodoma Associates dinner we went to was ‘The Rising Divorce Rate’, and after contributions from several members, the speaker gave his point of view. He largely argued that the reason for divorce is that people have left God’s design for marriage. What followed was an […]
Arthur and I feel like we’re not that good at taking or doing holidays. It’s something we’re still learning. I guess that’s partly settling into being a family on holidays (rather than a couple), partly our personalities, and partly living cross-culturally where you can never switch off entirely. We’ve just […]
Meet Jesus at uni 