Telling Time in Tanzania!

Just like in the Bible, time in Tanzania (in Swahili) is spoken about differently than it is in English. Not only are we in a different TIME ZONE, but we have to remember how to read our clocks differently too!

Here's Kara to tell you how it works:




Since the sun comes up at 6:00am EVERY SINGLE MORNING here, and goes down at 6:00pm, it makes sense that their day begins and ends on the 6's instead of at midnight! This is actually what they did in Bible times, too.

Mark 15:33 tells us about Jesus' crucifixion...

"When the sixth hour came, darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour."

So, according to Kara's explanation, we add 6 to the 6th hour, and figure out it got dark at 12:00 noon. The time they're talking about is from 12:00-3:00pm.


All this Tanzanian Time Translation makes playing What Time is it Mr. Fox? a bit harder, but in the end it's just one more way to see the world through another person's eyes!

(A big thanks to her parents for letting me borrow their brilliant blog! Here's the original here.)

A Cool Drink of Water

Have you ever wanted a cool drink of water on a hot day?  This happens to us often here in Musoma, but the process of getting a drink is a little different.  If we put a glass under the faucet in the kitchen, there's a good chance the water will come out looking like this:

Unfortunately, it's not just dirt in there, but lots of little creatures that could make us very sick.  So instead, we need to do a bit of work to get it ready for drinking!

First, we get water in a bucket.  (Many Tanzanians would get it from the lake, but we're lucky enough to have water faucets in our house.) 

Next, pour the water into a "sand filter" outside to get out the big bits of dirt.

Then, take the water back indoors.  Pour the water into a special filter that makes the water ok to drink.  Wait for the water to filter down to the bottom.  It'll take a few hours, so be sure to start early!

Next, use the filtered water to fill up clean, empty water bottles.  It's good to have extras around in case the water goes out for a few days!

Finally, if you want your drink to be cold, put it in the fridge for a few hours to cool down.

 Happy Drinking! :)

Go. Bananas. Go, Go Bananas!!!

Living in Tanzania comes with some great big perks!  In our yard, we have trees and plants that give us bananas, lemons, passion fruit, mangoes, avocados, and even pomegranates! 

A few weeks ago one of the clumps of bananas fell from the tree.  The bananas were packed into a box to make them ripen quickly, and we let the box live by the door to our house so we could check on them from time to time. 

Green bananas, right off the tree

All tied up, waiting to ripen

2 weeks later, they were RIPE!

Finally, they were READY!  All. at. once.

My roommate and I realized we had a lot of bananas to use in one week before they all went bad.  (I guess this is why people usually sell some of them at the market!)  We made banana bread and banana pancakes for our breakfasts, banana chocolate chip bars (yum!), and even found a maple-syrup-banana recipe to use on cake or pancakes!  It was DELICIOUS!!! 

We’re excited to find even more creative ways to use bananas when the next bunch drops from our trees… :)