Welcome to The Yarn's Over

I want to welcome all who are joining my story here at The Yarn's Over.  First this is technically about crochet but really I will include any crafting, re-purposing stories that are fun as well.  This is about the various adventures and misadventures I have trying to be a crocheter in Tanzania while I am serving as a missionary.  As part of this adventure and a recurring story line will be the fact I started a crochet class at the ministry site after some of the school teachers and medical clinic staff saw me making things in the evening and asked I teach them how to do it.

A flyer on the Crochet Class program in Tanzania

Let's start with why I called the blog "The Yarn's Over."  It is a play on words using the common crochet term, yarn over, and the fact that there really is not a word for yarn in Swahili the native language.  There are two words in most Swahili-English dictionaries.  The first uza wa kufumia actually is talking about string but describes it in such a way that most people can guess it is actually yarn (unless you are in a store looking for it and then they just bring you string).  The second word though hadithi is actually defined as telling a story, similar to "He spins a good yarn."  So hopefully my hadithi will not be over soon but hopefully it makes sense now.

So why teach a class on crochet to folks in a country where they don't even have a word for yarn or really crochet for that matter?  They asked and I could not resist.  Also there are a lot of items in the rural area of the medical clinic and pre-school that are not available.  You would have to go to a bigger city like Singida, Tanzania to purchase a dishcloth/wash clothe, sweater, stocking cap and many other items that can easily be made by crochet.  We started small with dishcloth and wash clothes and are now moving to stocking caps.  

Stocking caps are important because the majority of kids have their heads shaved to prevent lice and other issues but this leaves their scalp exposed to a very brutal sun every day. They develop many types of dermatological issues and later in life skin cancer from this exposure.  Simply crocheting a stocking cap can help these children greatly and in the best practices of mission work, we only help them get started and they do the rest.  One of the things that has amazed me is the creativity they have shown for making other items like backpacks and purses.  So a large part of this site will be exploring other ideas they can make and use or sell.

Some of the major issues we face are the lack of materials.  Yarn and needles are only available in the largest cities, such as Arusha which for our ministry site it 1.5 hours to Singida then 6 hours on bus to Arusha.  The needles are even harder to find inside the city than the yarn since the majority of work done is on knitting machines and crochet needles are typically only used to pick the string "up"

The other big issue for me  personally has been the size of the yarn and needles.  A normal needle in the USA is a somewhere between 3.25 and 5.5 mm in size.  In Tanzania the needles range from 1.0 to 1.7 mm in size.  Yarn in the states is typically 10 ply and yarn in Tanzania is a 4 ply and considered to be about fingering weight.   Below is a picture showing the size difference.

In addition to myself, I have my long time rafiki, Barnabas Bear along for the ride.  He is part of Mauldin United Methodist Church's prayer shawl ministry where we made bears for children who were sick or had gone through a traumatic event.  Barnabas, Timothy and Phoebe became our mission bears to spread the word about what our church was doing and have their own Facebook page.  Their link is at the bottom.  To find out more about our missionary adventures and travels, check out our Steve and Barnabas Blog

Barnabas Bear

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