An Interesting Job

Every day Mark and I wake up and ask each other, "What do you think we'll be doing today?" So far, the jobs James has been giving us have been completely random and today was no exception. Let me explain.

There is a student at the school here named Alex. He loves movies, especially ones with Arnold Schwarzenegger in them. About a year ago some volunteers from the U.S. based organization Mama Hope recorded his retelling of the movie "Commando" and put it on the Internet. It has received over 150,000 hits in just four days and has helped the organization raise a lot of money. Check it out here http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/10/tanzanian-boy-re-ena.html. So today we get to work and are told that our job is to go find Alex, show him the video of himself that has been floating around the Internet, and record his reaction so it can be posted as a sequal to the first video. He was very humble and shy when he saw the video so we didn't quite get the reaction we were hoping for. So tomorrow we are going to show the video to his classmates and see what they think. Hopefully we'll get some pretty fun reactions out of some of them. I'll keep everyone updated on whether or not the footage we get tomorrow is actually worthy to be posted as a sequal to the first awesome video.

In other news, we went on a safari over the weekend. Needless to say, it was amazing! Seeing these animals in the wild is a completely indescribable experience. We spent Friday in Tarangire National Park, Saturday in the Ngorongoro Crater, and Sunday at Lake Manyara. We saw everything in the "Big 5" except for a leapord. We did, however, see a cheetah very close up so we're counting that as completing our mission to see the Big 5. The Internet connection here is officially too slow to post any pictures so those are going to have to wait for a few more weeks.

We went to town the other day and bought the rest of the wood to finish the roof for the kitchen at the new school. The orphanage is coming along and now has ceiling boards and electricity in most of the rooms. We've been doing a little bit of teaching, but most of the time we do administrative things such as taking photos of the progress of the buildings to send to organizations that have helped with the funding, helping James with work in town, and recording the height and weight of the students. We've been having fun arriving to work each morning and being surprised at what our work will consist of that day.

It's still hot here, but it has started to rain a little so things are cooling off a bit. We've also been having some fun battles with cockroaches, and even a scorpion (which Mark claims "almost killed" him), in our room. We don't have any big trips planned until we go to Zanzibar the first week of March. I don't anticipate anything too exciting happening in the next couple weeks so don't be alarmed if we disappear for a bit.