Another week!

Hello and sorry to all of our fans for not writing much at all this week! We have gotten so busy hanging out with our rafikis! Monday was the only day this week that we didn’t have anything to do but we all needed a ton of rest from the weekend. The only exciting thing from Monday was that we brought new pencils to school…you couldn’t even believe how excited the kids get over new pencils. The ones we bought have different cartoon characters on them and even better than that-they all have “a rubbah” aka an eraser on the end. This is a huge help because usually during work time they are all constantly calling “teacha a rubbah!” which I just found out this week is what they were saying. It does not sound English at all, I thought the whole time they were saying eraser in Swahili, “Arahaba”….so when Kasey asked the whole class who needed a rubber I thought she was referring to safe sex practices and almost hit her there! Then I learned my lesson, haha. Funny miscommunications happen like that often.
Tuesday we went to work and after that we went straight to town to get pictures of all the kids printed off and to make more copies of activities for them to do during school. It took us 2 and a half hours to make 9 sets of worksheets and print off 30 pictures! Crazy how slow it was but we got it done and we will be making profiles for each kid next week so that they can hang it on the wall! Should be exciting for them-the kids here LOVE taking and looking at pictures. While we were doing this Lara and Sam were finishing up last minute shopping and so we met some of the locals at a restaurant/bar to eat some chips, drink some cider, and watch a world cup game. It was really fun. There were a lot of locals there watching and everyone is excited about it. At school the kids sang some song about it and we did a short little lesson on the world cup. It was cute.
When the game was over we headed to a restaurant called Amans, it was Graemes last night so about 25 of us went here for dinner. The dinner here is traditional African meals that you pre order. It is served family style and it was delicious! They kept telling us to eat it with our hands but Kasey and I opted to use the forks because you just never know if your hands are actually clean here! Unsanitary to eat with hands!
Wednesday was exciting because we had been invited to stay after school to eat lunch with Mama Minja at her house. Her house is on the same property as the school buildings. We ate with her and her husband, Marco. He was such a sweet man. He studied in Canada some years ago and is now retired. We talked for a while to Mama about the kids different life stories and family situations. It was interesting to hear where some of them come from. Their financial situations range from poor to middle class. It was hard to really understand these class differences though because we are used to those classes in American standards, which is completely different than the standards here.
She also told us more about the school, it is only a year old and they built it right outside their house. She already has plans to expand the school to primary and secondary school so that the kids can continue schooling at Bridge. They told us that they only have one son living in their home now and he is getting married in October so they think we should come back and become their adopted American children….dont worry families, we did not take them up on the adoption offer but we did tell them we would stay with them when we come back.
After lunch we went back over to the school buildings because Teacher Eva had offered to braid Kaseys hair rasta style like mine. She promised it would only take 2 hours, but I knew that couldn’t be true because mine took about twice as long! So I settled in to spend a long afternoon at Bridge. While we were there we saw older school kids coming into the classrooms. So we learned that Mama Minja and the teachers stay after to make extra money by doing private tutoring for primary aged students. I sat in the class for a bit. They are all working on different things but the students spoke English very well.
While we were in the room with Kasey getting her hair braided we were able to finally communicate with the porridge girl, Maria, because Mama Minjas grandson, Erik was helping us translate. We had him ask her how old she was, where she is from, and why if she wants to go back to school. She is 18 and he family is from outside of Dar Es Salam. She did not pass her exams in public school and so she is not allowed to continue on unless she can find a way to go to private school. Mama lets her live with her and she is going to try teaching her and catching her up so that hopefully she will be able to go back to school. She gave us a list of books that we could buy her to help her study so we are going to try and get those this weekend. She is a really sweet girl.
Once Kaseys hair was finally finished and she “looked smart” as they all kept saying we walked home with the three teachers. They all live on the way that we walk home to Karanga. When we got back I was exhausted and still not feeling 100% so I stayed in and the other three roomies went to a mansion to watch the Lion King. Sam had been searching for someone who had the movie because she really wanted to watch it while she was in Africa. Finally Eddie found it for her so the local boys we hang out with invited us all to watch it at their friends house which by their description was a mansion!
When we woke up on Thursday we were all stunned to hear that 3 of the volunteers at CCS had gotten in some trouble the night before. They had all decided to go to the corner store to buy beer and then stupidly walk down to the river at dark to drink it. There is a river about a 10-minute walk from our house, but it is highly advised to anyone to not walk at night…anywhere. Well these three decided it would be a good idea anyway. They got to the river and a group of men approached them thinking that they were thieves they shot at them multiple times. I actually heard some of the gun shots but didn’t think that they were actually shots because I have not felt unsafe here once, turns out they were. The 2 girls hid behind a rock and made a run for the house, they made it. Andy apparently hid in the river for 30 minutes and then the men found him, surrounded him with swords and guns and took him to the police station. Crazy stuff, but we are smarter than this so don’t anyone worry about us!
So they announced all of this at breakfast and then we went to school. The most exciting story about school from Thursday was that Ithan was being so sweet and we were cuddling all during play and sing time. He had been sad because someone hit him so I noticed his nose was running, a lot. I was going to try and find a hankercheif but I looked down and he had already found one, my skirt! Oh well, he is too cute to be mad at. After school we rode the one of the school buses with a girl Faith because we were going to visit Solitha who had been home sick, they think she has malaria. Her house was very simple but nice and her mom spoke English very well. It was cool to see where she lived but we felt so bad that she had been feeling so sick. After her hosue we came back to CCS and decided to go river because we had never been and it is safe during the day. Also the guards sent us with 6 of the kids from across the street, including the infamous Brenda! So we walked down to the river, and after seeing where they had to walk: through cornfields on other peoples property; we were not surprised that people would feel threatened by them at night. But the river was awesome, very pretty. It looked like a Disney ride at one part. We will put pictures up soon but the day we went we didn’t take our camera. It was really fun going with the little kids and playing with them.
So after this we went out for dinner for everyone’s last big night. We went to El Rancho again and it was delicious. I am going to have to try Indian food more often. It was fun being out with so many of the girls too, although we don’t like to talk about Lara and Sam leaving…tomorrow! It is too sad.
So now that we are finally caught up I can tell you about today. Hang in there, I know it’s a long post! So today we went to school as usual and after school Teacher Eva had invited us to go home with her. It took an hour for us to actually get to her house. We got on the school bus with about 12 of the kids from our school. We dropped all of them off at their houses and finally we were dropped off…to get on the dala dala. A dala dala is a bus but it is not a big bus, it is the same size as the school bus but it is packed with people. There can be something like 30 people on the bus at the same time, they don’t even close the door and men will hang off the side. It is 250 tsh to ride and it was on our African bucket list so we are glad we got the experience. When we finally arrived in Majanga I was extremely happy to not be riding on crazy bumpy roads or in an overly packed bus anymore. We walked just 5 more minutes to Evas home. They all welcomed us and we just sat in their living room for a while talking. Eva and her husband, John both speak some English but it was amazing when Johns younger brother, Hans, showed up because he is 19 and speaks English almost fluently. So we go a translator! We also got to meet Evas daughter, Joann, she is 2 and a half years old and adorable. We talked to Eva about why she wasn’t in school and it is because of money. Eva makes about 14 us dollars a month and that is working Monday through Friday from 730 to 2. So they just don’t have the funds to send her to a good school. We are going to send her to Bridge and so they were all very excited to hear the news, we just have to figure out all of the logistics now. I am so excited because going to their house was honestly on the top of my favorite things we have done so far. They just kept saying how they felt so happy that we were there visiting them. They bought us sodas and cooked us chips (fries) and some sort of meat (I was so sketched out but I have done very well with this whole polite eating thing, cross your fingers we don’t get sick!). They showed us their wedding pictures they had and played their choirs CD for us, we ended up buying one. The music here is great. It was just such a great feeling to be in their home and being and feeling so welcome there. When we left Joann gave us both a kanga as a present. A kanga is a wrap that you see many women wearing here as skirts. They all have phrases on them and the ones they gave us say “The ones who can do anything”. It was such a great experience and I cant express how excited we are to send Joann to Bridge…and how excited Eva and John are to be able to send their daughter to school!
Well we are missing you all and thank you for your support and love. What we are experiencing is life changing and we wouldn’t be here without you!
Posted with love from Africa! –A and K