On Mondays over the next few weeks for something a bit more lighthearted I’ll be posting some very short anecdotes of cross-cultural moments from the last little while. Here’s the first one. Just before Elliot went on school holidays we were talking about playing soccer and he said, “Girls don’t play […]
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 […]
Jesus will build his church. Not sin or corruption or poor leadership will stop Jesus building it. This was the message brought to us at church on Sunday from Matthew 16. Jesus will be triumphant. His glorious church is not dependent on you because he is the master. He can even do […]
In the last post I suggested that Tanzanians do not necessarily view hierarchy as inherently abusive, in contrast to how I and many westerners think. So if hierarchy is not abusive, what is? How do you define abuse? Here I try to process some of the factors involved in this […]
A well-known egalitarian scholar once told me that the reason Africans read hierarchical gender roles in the Bible is because they don’t have the theological scholarship that we do, so we need to go and educate them. I smiled politely because this guy was significantly older than me, and ironically wasn’t […]
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 […]
Meet Jesus at uni 