On Thursday Arthur and I were married for 15 years. One of the TAFES staff told us this milestone makes us senior people, though most uni-educated Tanzanians get married when they are much older than we were so maybe in our case the seniority does not quite align! He also […]
This weekend we were delighted to join our friends Amani and Esta for their bronze wedding anniversary and thanksgiving. They are such a beautiful couple: he is serious and reserved, she is lively and warm. They run a marriage ministry alongside his work as a pastor and hers as a […]
One of Arthur’s colleagues, Eliud is getting married to former TAFES staff member Dorothea next month and he and Arthur have been talking about marriage, specifically, the Christian ideal of unity in marriage. Eliud and Doro have been thinking very carefully about the cultural views they have inherited and whether […]
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 […]
My language partner and I had a discussion about adultery this week. It came up when we were discussing a fall from grace as a possible reason for a change in one’s circumstances (along with poor business decisions, foolish investments, and so on.) My language partner spoke of women who have […]
In speaking with my friend about the wellbeing of women, we got onto gender roles in marriage. I wanted to push him on the idea that however you configure hierarchy, women are still vulnerable. Everything for them depends on the goodwill of their husband if he is over them in […]
How does change come? I was having a conversation with someone this week who noted that within a generation the expectations around women in Tanzania have changed. The examples he gave were two things that feature a lot in human rights advocacy in Tanzania: girls’ education, and domestic violence. Girls’ […]
