Thanks

Thank you. It has been my goal to get you here to share all of this with you. Now it's my goal to keep you here, to keep this interesting and relevant by not focusing solely on myself. I aim to serve a big God who has big plans, plans I don't yet claim to understand. This blog is about those plans and my role is to share my perspective on them as I take part in them. My plans are to watch and learn and live, and my hope is that He will find me useful.

I'll be keeping this blog because I love to write, and I hope you'll find my writing worth reading. I hope to have some stories worth telling - stories about His plans and His work and His creation and His people.

Africa is a big continent, the second largest in the world after Asia, and I wouldn't begin to claim to understand all of it. One of the things I have read and heard over and over is that Africa is diverse. Africans are united by geography and perhaps little else. It is impossible to equate Mauritanians and Mozambicans, Angolans and Algerians, Namibians and Nigerians. So what I will observe about Tanzania isn't necessarily reflective of the rest of the continent. In fact, Tanzanians are greatly varied among themselves: Most will never see the capital, Dodoma, or the other capital, Dar Es Salaam; most tribes have a language or dialect that isn't spoken by the next nearest tribe.

I have been to Tanzania before, but I am not an expert. So I go again as an amateur with wide eyes and a pen. And, when electricity permits, a laptop. I hope to share with you my perspective with a healthy dose of imagination and discernible truth. And, when electricity permits, photographs. For now, I'm counting the days (53, I think) until I land in Dar Es Salaam to trade in television, fast food, and showers with water pressure for beautiful landscapes under breathtaking night skies, ugali, and impossibly bumpy dirt roads.

Again, thanks for reading.

jim