The Barnabas Bear story

The journey of Barnabas Bear from idea to a full time missionary bear in Tanzania started in the summer of 2010.  While recovering from heart surgery, I started to crochet (again if you count the small stint I did as a child with my Grandmother teaching me).  I did this for a couple of reasons:  1) The prayer shawl outreach ministry was one of the few I had not spent time with mainly because they met while I was at work, 2) Good way to hang out with my Mom, 3) I wanted something useful to do other than watch TV while recovering and this was something low stress.

Barnabas Bear

Create Your Badge  
While as part of the group I asked the question one day what they gave to kids who were sick or in hospital.  The answer was prayer shawls.  I thought surely there was something more kid friendly we could do so I went searching for patterns and gave my hand a try at making a stuffed bear.  Let's say he had a lot of character-a lot of character! But one look and one of the ladies named Lynda took off with it and started making some.  She put some of her first ones in our silent auction for kids related ministries.  I bought a handsome brown bear with just a bit of sparkle to him.  He had the hat and backpack with a little Bible that featured a verse from every book of the Bible.  

That Christmas, she gave me one that looked exactly like the one I bought except the sparkle in the yarn.  Some time next year I took a morning off work and went back to crochet group with a wild idea.  I wanted to make the bear a missionary bear to go with me and others on our mission trips and use him to tell the story to children.  Now he needed a name. We all felt Barnabas Bear was the best because of the way it rolled off the tongue but also because Barnabas means "son of encouragement" (Acts 4:36).  

But we did not stop there, or should I say Lynda did not.  We had two mission teams going overseas that year.  One to Peru where we went every year and one I was leading to Tanzania which was the first time for our church.  So a fundraising idea came to mind.  Lynda made over 100 of the bears for us to take on the overseas mission trips to give out to children we were working with.  So we sold "plane tickets" for the bears which allowed the person who bought their ticket to name the bear and fill out a card for the recipient.  It was a major success with every bear being sponsored for his plane ticket.

One of the great things about even teenagers in the countries we go to.  They are not shy about getting a stuffed animal, they love it.  High school kids could be seen playing with their bears.  

From there we created his facebook page, more little bears were made, the bear I had bought that looks just like Barnabas was no longer a "backup" but joined the mission bear team as Timothy.  Not long after that we had Phoebe their first sister.  Bears were given to Fire Departments for using with traumatized kids, local groups, homeless kids and continued to travel overseas.   To date I know over 500 bears have been given away.

Many people enjoyed working with Barnabas and his friends over the years.  One of the really fun things was to create VBS sheets where we took pictures of the bears acting out a Bible story and used verses under each picture.  This way wherever we go we just get a Bible in their language and trade out the verses.  We did a story of Barnabas preaching from the wall (a small concrete wall at my brothers house) like Jesus' sermon on the mount where Barnabas convinced the bears to go with him on mission trips.  My personal favorite was when I tore said wall down for my brother I got kazoos and stood the bears up with the kazoos in their mouths like they were blowing trumpets around the walls of Jericho. Even did a Good Samaritan version.

The great thing about Barnabas is that he breaks down walls for me.  I am a natural introvert and would probably not meet half the people I do without him.  Visiting Machu Picchu in Peru a Japanese couple came up and wanted to take a picture of Barnabas with their stuffed animal that went everywhere with them. 

Lately one of the folks here a South Korean missionary has loved getting Barnabas out and playing with him every time the group got together.  So I made her one.  My bears still have character, not as much as they used to but still not quite symmetrical.  The smile on her face was well worth the small amount of effort to make it.  If you have a missionary friend or maybe someone who works with kids a lot it might be a big help to make them one.

Crochet Class in Nduguti

It has been a couple of interesting weeks in Tanzania.  Due to my computer being stolen, I am pretty far behind getting items posted to my blogs.  Because this particular story will include some of those travel stories that everyone loves I am doing it first.

The founder of Full Dimension Ministries, Rev. William Makali has been doing what we call Teaching Training and Evangelism Classes in two locations of the Iramba Valley.  This is the same valley our medical and school facilities are located. While at one of the sites called Nduguti, a pastor mentioned wanting to start a program that not only gave women a chance to earn extra money but also would help to build community among women of different churches and families.

William suggested the crochet class that I had done at our site and in Singida.  So at the beginning of all our adventures is this class.  We had 11 ladies sign up.  Each was given a crochet needle and two skeins of yarn to work on the projects taught in class as well as to practice at home.  The total cost for these items was 30,000 Tanzanian Shillings or $18 US dollars so not a bad deal.  I printed at my cost some sheets with drawings showing how to complete some basic stitches, how to turn a row, how to make and increase rounds.

I arrived at our site in Yullansoni early that morning after the normal 1.5 hour mini van ride with 20 something other people in the mini van and 1 hour and 15 minute motorcyle taxi ride called a piki piki.  Then William took me to Nduguti on the sites piki piki for an hour and a half over some of the very roughest roads still around in Tanzania, a country full of tough rocky roads.  As always William wanted to have lunch before we started the class.

The first class was about basic stitches like Chain, Single Crochet and Double Crochet, how to work in rows to make squares and rectangular projects.  Our biggest challenge was the difference between turning with single and double crochets and how you skip the first hole on a double crochet.  I had them practice all three stitches on simple dish/wash cloth patterns.  Normally I talk about how a stitch is done while they look at the drawings, then I go to groups of two and have them watch me do it several times, then all three of us do the stitch several times together, then I watch them do a row.  I move around the class doing this until I feel everyone has it.  One thing I find interesting is they all like to wrap the yarn around one of their fingers several times to keep it under control.  I showed them some other techniques for holding needle and yarn but they all liked that one even though they have to stop a lot to re-wrap their finger.

After our first class was over, William and I headed back over the rough roads to our site getting their just as the sun was setting.  A total of almost 6 hours of travel over the dirt and rock roads of Tanzania.

The next class was held that weekend so they would have several days to practice their stitches at home.  This time I got up at 5:30 am to ride a piki piki to the local bus station (a Balbao tree) to catch a bus to Nduguti.  This is one of the larger buses that normally have 40 or 50 seats and typically have close to 80 or 90 passengers.  It finally arrived at 8:30 am and was full so standing room only for the almost 2 hours it took the bus to get there.

We started with only about 9 students but then everyone showed up as the class went on, but several early showers had to leave early so they did not make the photo.  The young man in the front is the child of one the students and he loved Barnabas bear.  Hear is a video of them playing together:

The second class focused on using our stitches from before to do rounds and specifically we worked on newborn hats and we asked they donate those to our medical clinic so we could give them out on a newborn's first checkup after being born.  

We had some difficulty with the concept of closing a round and then chaining three to start a new round of double crochet.  I thought it would be the pattern of increasing the rounds in an even pattern.  But no they kept chaining three and then closing the round.  At first I thought it was how I explained it but after going around an making sure everyone not only saw me do it but I watched them do it correctly I would find they went back to chaining before closing shortly after.

One of the most important concepts I tried to get across is that crochet is something fun to do together in a low stress setting-no deadlines.  I explained how many churches had groups that got together and crocheted together to make items to give away or for sale.

After the class and managing to get Barnabas back from his new friend. I went to get the next bus that would take me to Singida.  The local bus stop was only a 10 minute piki piki ride and then the bus was supposed to arrive at 2 PM for which I was 40 minutes early.  It arrived an hour and half late.  Then the trip that should take an hour actually took 3 hours fortunately I had a seat for this ride as it was very rough again especially when the driver did not know all his gears and was often going so fast he would slide into the concrete barriers before bridges.

Life here is a lot of fun.

Here are some pictures of the class:

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

Create Your Badge