What we've been up to.

We were able to start working this week! Before the weekend Brittany and I had a tour of the school and the orphanage and had a talk with our friend James to get rough estimates of the building materials that were still needed so we had to wait for them to arrive. On Monday we spent most of our time at the school, periodically reading and teaching math and English to the older children as we waiting for the class teachers to gather thier students' test results.

Tuesday morning we were back at the Orphanage (which serves as the office for the school and where James also lives) helping to put in the children's test results. Brittany and I tag-teamed this, creating excel and word documents and then entering in the information so it can be posted. We also created some school-parent documents that I assume will be used for returning and new students. Today some of the school materials finally arrived, the ceiling boards for the orphange. We ran a few errands with James and had to make multiple stops to a few different ATM's in order to get our money for the ceiling boards. Thats one thing about Moshi, there are 3 or 4 ATM's-but at any given time they can all be broken, or for one reason or another cannot service your request. We did finally withdraw enough money to pay for the ceiling boards and when it was all said and done we had a huge, fat, stinky wad of shillings rolled up with a hair elastic (a stack of 800,000 shilling is a whooooole lot fatter than a wad of the equivalent amount in U.S. dollars). I mean I felt like a drug dealer pulling that honking thing out, pulling the ghetto fabulous hair band off, and counting the bills on the counter of the hardware store. The rest of the morning was spent paying for the material, entering more information into the computer, and unloading the heavy and awkward ceiling boards into the orphange.

For the rest of week we will be taking pictures with Brittany's camera so that we can create teacher I.D. cards and a newsletter that we will send to a foundation in the States that supports the orphanage.

Just to give you an idea. The orphange houses 47 orphans, and James and his wife and 3 kids live in the same one story building - its probably about the square footage of the main floor of an average size house in the States...with that many kids! In the same area they they have constructed another building that will have more toilets, another water tank (they do not have plumbing and water pressure everywhere) and more space so the rooms are not so crowded. The building is made of cinder blocks and a tin roof, but thats about it. Imagine if you didn't have any drywall in your house and just had the plywood, insulation, and electrical wires exposed and thats what it looks like. So hopefully by the time we are done we will have the ceiling boards up, the walls painted, and one more water tank for the orphange. The school, which we are also hoping we can work on, needs a roof over the kitchen area (where the students are fed lunch) and another water tank so they do not have to walk to fetch water.

On a much less important note but still very exciting - we were able to go on a hike on Mt. Kilimajaro this past weekend. It was amazing. The forest was lush and beautiful and the simple villiage life on the mountain was so neat to watch. We hiked to a waterfall that was 178 meters high. It was quite a sight.

We will try to post some pictures soon. The internet connection is slow.

Oh and one more thing. The stars are amazing here.