UNAANDIKA A!

Well, another week has come and gone! I cannot believe how fast time is flying by here! : ( This last Sunday night I stayed up really late finishing up a sign that I was painting for Green Eden. Most of you know that I like to do time consuming projects in the middle of the night. Anyway, Monday we delivered the sign to Namanga where we did IOL along with award the teachers who attended our training their certificates. The teachers were super cute and really excited to get their certificates…and eat baboon poops! Haha…I am telling you, everybody loves them! We only stayed in Namanga for a few hours for our mini party and then we had to head back to Arusha.

On Tuesday night our team had a goodbye party for the 1^st wavers who would be leaving the next day. We had delicious food, played lots of games, and watched a slideshow. It was pretty fun. I also helped a teammate named Heidi with some posters for her French tourism class she taught this week to a vocational school in town. I had to draw pictures of the front desk/clerk, a receptionist, elevator, housekeeping, room service, hotel rooms, swimming pool, continental breakfast, and a housekeeper so that she could teach them those words in French.

From Tuesday to Friday I went to Kitulezo, as usual, from 8 to 11:30 with Kate, Heather, and Jessie. We started to split up the smaller kids this week and have them practice writing their letters on tracing sheets we made. It seemed to work pretty well and it keeps them pretty entertained. These kids are sooooo cute, I love them so much. But even cute kids can be beasts and every little one of these kids is completely violent! They beat on each other so hard and have a hard time listening to us...especially since we don’t speak Swahili. But they are slowly improving their behavior and we are improving our teaching!

I have two funny little things that happened this week at Kitulezo. First, on Tuesday the kids all decided to play “daladala” and rushed underneath the table in the main room. One of the kids, Vinance (who has total style for a kid), hopped up and started pretending he was the daladala doorman! He would grab other kids and shove them into the van and yell “UsaUsa!” (which is a place near Arusha). Anyway, it was the cutest thing I have ever seen! He was totally good at it!...I think I know what he is going to be when he grows up! Ok the next funny thing that happened is that one of the smallest boys in the class, Meshack, just layed across the desks one day while everyone else was misbehaving and started doing pushups! I should have told him to get down but it was too cute so instead I just told him “Vizuri,” which means good job, and he got down on the floor and did more for me! It was so cute! I could tell he just felt so proud of himself!

On Friday the team had a meeting with Martha from the Albino Peacemakers Group! After everyone was done discussing the chicken coop, eye camp, and documentary project with her, me and Heather met with her separate to discuss our jewelry business. We told her more about our idea and talked about a name and bracelet design and…she liked it! We are so excited to work with her! She is really an inspiring person and I feel lucky that I get to help her and her organization out! One thing she told us during our meeting was “you are the first people who stood by us and told us we can.” Chanel wrote it down for us when she heard it because she thought it was cool. I was glad she did because I remember feeling happy she felt that way about us when I heard her say it. People really do discriminate against Albinos here for basically no good reason and it makes me so mad! And Martha was grateful to us for coming up with an idea that allows them to contribute, instead of just raising money for them and handing it over. Anyway, I cannot wait to continue working on this project for the rest of the summer and even once I get home! : )

Well, after our week of hard work on Saturday we went to the cultural center just outside of Arusha! We had some fun there looking at Tanzanite and looking through the art museum. After the cultural center we went to pick out patterns and be measured for African dresses! : ) You will see pictures of those when they are done!

And that was my week! Here are some pics!...

 me with the finished product!

 our whole IOL group

 me, Emmanuel, Miss Hope, and Damien (the teachers at Green Eden preschool)

 cookies make adults act like children : )

they gave us jifts! jift is just how people here pronounce the english word gift! haha...anyway, they gave us fresh corn and one of our students gave me that elephant necklace : )

 the sign all hung up on the school

 housekeeping!

 continental breakfast...african style! haha

 my last pic with Des  : (  : (  : (

 our last pic with Heather! : (

and Kylie has our last pic with her!

we miss you guys!!!

 two of my students at Kitulezo, Miri and Karen!

 Miri giving teddy a shoulder ride..so stinkin cute!

 we had fun acting out the pictures at the art museum...we are so sophisticated.

me, Heather, Kate, and Tess at the cultural center

 everyone loves Obama here!...even enough to wear him on a conga!

 crossing the river one day i ran into a herd of cows...

 relaxin in the hammock with little Alan!

KA CHINI means SIT DOWN!

 

Jambo again my friends! I had another great week this week here in Tanzania! Me, Kate, and Heather started teaching at Kitulizo this week! It is going to be an ongoing project for the rest of the summer! Jessie was in Loliando this last week doing a health project but she will be joining us in the future. So the kids at Kitulizo are from 3 to 6 years old and they are CRAZY! We love to teach them though because deep down they are little sweet hearts. There is another volunteer that has taught there for around 3 months now, her named is Verity and she is from Australia. This week we helped her teach Monday thru Wednesday and then Thursday and Friday she was sick so we had to teach by ourselves! It was interesting because we don’t know how to control the kids as well as Verity does since we aren’t familiar with classroom Swahili language. I did have our friend translate some words like “be quiet” and “don’t bite” but when I say it in the class the kidsjust stare and continue misbehaving! Haha…it was funny on one of the days a little boy named Widson told Mama Anna, the founder of this orphanage, that Teacher Verity knows Swahili, but the others don’t. I guess that would be why they don’t feel the need to obey us. Anyway, I guess I haven’t explained Kitulizo very well yet. It is an orphanage but while the older kids that live there are at secondary school they hold primary school for free for kids who come from poorer families. So we go and teach from 8:30 to 11:00 every morning. We teach mostly colors, letters, numbers, and simple mathematics to the kids. There are around 20 kids and since they are a range of ages it is hard because their learning is on all different levels. Our plan for the future is to split the class in half. Me and Heather were thinking that once we split the kids we will teach the younger kids two letters per day and have them practice writing them. Most all the kids know the ABC’s but the younger ones have a hard time recognizing which letter is which when they are asked. Also, because the older kids know the answers and shout them out, the younger kids don’t get the special help and attention they need right now. So, I am excited to be teaching at Kitulizo now! The kids are so cute and they seriously make me happy every day!

With all my time I wasn’t at Kitulizo this week I was working on a sign project for Green Eden, the school we did IOL training at last week. Emmanuel, the director of Green Eden, asked me to paint him a sign to put on the road leading up to the school. Everything here is such a process because we are new to Africa and because we don’t speak Swahili. So on Monday we went on a paint, brush, and board hunt. We found paint and brushes fairly quickly in Arusha with the help of a friend we made in a souvenir shop. And we were able to have the sign made from a place right next to Family and Friends we like to call The Wood Place.  Heather and I were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to find all this stuff on our own! : ) So I have started painting the sign and will finish tonight because we are going back to Namanga tomorrow to award our students their certificates and need to also drop off their sign.

We did a lot of other fun stuff this week too! On Monday at dinner at Family and Friends we set up Heather J’s slackline! It is seriously hard but I got better at it the more I practiced! Another thing a lot of us have enjoyed this week is reading Sweet Valley High: Elizabeth’s Secret Diary. This started out as a joke when I started reading the first few pages out loud for a group of us, but now we actually want to know what is going to happen and read from it almost every night! It is seriously a stupid book…but you know how cheesy things tend to hook you. It is comparable to a lifetime movie; predictable yet totally enjoyable. Another fun adventure we had this week we did yesterday…the snake park! It took over an hour to get there on a daladala but it was totally worth it! We saw snakes (obviously), tortoises, crocodiles, some birds, and a baboon! There were crocodiles at every age…little babies and then full size ones! They were so ugly but fun to see. We got to hold a little snake, which was neat but totally nasty!!! I mean, I don’t even like to pet dogs really so touching the snake was almost too much for me. After we were done looking at the animals we walked through a Maasai Museum that was right there in the same area and then we….RODE CAMELS! Now, I have ridden a camel before, when I was in Israel, but this time it was hilarious because it didn’t make sense. Why are there even camels in Tanzania? We don’t know! But it was like a dollar so we did it!

Alright, that is my week this week! Here are some pics!

 heather and the adorable twins at our school named Meshack and Shedrack!

 Adelaida slacklining at Family and Friends!

 more slacklining!

me and Lindsay at the Maasai Museum

 me and Heather in a Maasai hut!

a cute little green snake i know Brailee would love!

full size crocodile!...soooo creepy!

 

baby crocodiles!

 

America's Next Top Model. : )

sick.

snake necklace! bleh!

...Heather looks like she is enjoying herself a little too much!

 

 

 

 CAMELS!

nightly story time!!!

sorry it is late pops...but happy father's day!!! : ) ...nothing is ever on time in tanzania!!! i hope you had a great day! i love you!

just some pictures...

my favorite little students! wheatson and vivvy

best drink in the world. fanta passion...or what we like to call panta. 

DALA DALAS! 

 just read number 8.

our IOL group in Namanga 

Namanga! 

the school HELP built last year, it is named Green Eden. 

me and Baraka, a cute little kid we helped teach at the Green Eden school 

one of the cutest little boys i have ever seen!...he fell asleep doing his lessons! 

the ants go marching... 

our IOL class 

our IOL team...DONE! 

yes, this really did happen.  : )

Hakuna Matata...it means no worries!

JAMBO again! I can't believe it has been another whole week! Time is flying by too fast! This week was a crazy one, but a good one!...and very productive! With what our team has been through in the past few weeks, I have to say Team Tanzania has got to be one of the best teams HELP has this summer! : ) Anyway, two of our friends had to go home this week due to medical conditions and we miss them so much already! Another team member also went home this week. So we lost three teammates this week and our house feels so quiet now! : ( We also lost one of our puppies this week. Poor little pumba had a bloated stomach and was just as sad and sick as can be. So this week has been kind of rough, but it has also been a good week as well!

This week me and some other volunteers went to a school/orphanage called Kitulezu where we will be teaching every morning from now on. I cannot wait! The kids there are so stinkin adorable! I am excited to get to know each of them personally and help them learn english and other subjects!
Some of us also had the opportunity to visit another orphanage called Cradle of Love. This orphanage has two buildings, one for infants ages 0 to 6 months and the other for 6 months to 3 years old. When we went to set up a schedule and tour the place we ended up playing with all the older babies for a while. They just looooove attention! There were around 15 of them so me and the two other volunteers who went had to just sit on the floor and hold as many babies as we could at a time! They were so sweet!

Another big project we did this week was travel to a town called Namanga to do our Inside-Out Learning teacher training! Thursday morning bright and early me, Heather, Jessie, Alexis, Deseret, and Kate manuvered our way through the big city of Arusha to the crazy bus station and caught a bus all on our very own! haha...no but really, this bus station is sooo chaotic! Everytime you step foot near it tons of people surround you asking you where you are going and you have to seriously ignore them or they won't go away! We walk past this bus station a lot and so we always can just tell them we aren't leaving but since we actually needed a ticket it was a lot harder to keep things under control. But it actually didn't take us too long to find the right but and we only had about five guys following us by the end. : ) The ride to Namanga took about an hour and a half and once we got there we walked through the little town with our partner named Emmanuel. Namanga was SO HOTT! It had red dirt and is a super dry place. It is actually winter here in Africa right now so there were green trees there now, but Emmanuel told us everything dries up there during their summer. I would hate to know how hott it gets there in January! Anyway, we spent the morning helping the preschool class in the Green Eden school that HELP International built last summer. Then from like 1:30 to 5:30 we did IOL training with teachers in the area. We had about 15 attend and it went pretty well! We stayed in this really awesome teeny hotel place that night. There were six of us and we only had two rooms!...each room only had one bed! It was an adventure! Oh and we also thought it was funny because there were bathrooms at this place, but they weren't toilets...nor were they outhouses. They were porcelain holes in the ground! Like if you are going to the trouble to make them fancy they might as well be a seat! Anyway, that kind of made me laugh. \On Friday we helped in the preschool again and then taught IOL again from 1 to 5. I enjoyed training the teachers, but I must admit it was really hard. They do speak English but it is really hard for them to follow when it isn't a one on one conversation. I could tell that they were all really excited to have us there though and really enjoyed the activities we taught them. We will be going back next week to check up on their progress and award them certificates! : )

This Saturday me and Heather spent our day off exploring Arusha some more and doing someshopping! Arusha is a seriously fun place if you just walk around and expore! We were on a blonde hair hunt which was really funny, because when we go into the shops and ask for "this color" and point to Heather's head everyone laughs really hard at us! We also met some friendly guys who were super willing to help us find some stuff we needed. One of them was named Alex and claims he is a famous rapper in Arusha! haha...he was wearing some nice sunglasses, converse shoes, nice jeans....and a glow in the dark plastic cross bling! People here are so funny, I love it! Also, these friends we made kept telling Heather she looks like Shakira! haha...and so they called me and Heather Shakira and Brittney Spears. I get that all the time here when people ask me my name. I say Brittnee, then they say "oh yes, like Brittney Spears!"

This morning some of us went to church with our neighbor friend Presca. Apparently it is chilren's day today in Tanzania and everyone really goes all out for it! It is really kind of sweet. So at church they had a special program and kids were all wearing special t-shirts and running around with balloon animal hats and stuff. Man, the kids here are so cute!

Well, I can't think of a super funny story for this week. Our team is so awesome that funny things happen here all the time, there are just too many occurances to keep track of! Also, Arusha is also a very funny place because Africans in general are pretty funny! They like to shock us so they say a lot of funny things. Anyway, hope all is well with everyone!

I forgot my camera cord at the house today so here the link to Heather's blog!...she is posting pics this week! : )

http://a-beautiful-thing-tanzania2012.blogspot.com/

Kwaheri!

in upendi, where the passion fruit grow sweet!

Mambo! Once again I have had a great week here in Tanzania! Our team is making lots of progress on projects which is really exciting. I knew first wave would mostly consist of meetings and organizing projects but I think all of us feel ready to start on something! If I have learned one thing here so far it is that there is no such thing as urgency in Africa! A lot of times it is frustrating because we can only move along with our projects as fast as partners will allow us and there is a ton of coordinating, meeting, planning, and communication that goes into every single project. Also, there is always information lost in translation which brings up other issues and slows down the process even more. Although this is hard and frustrating I really kind of think it is neat that we, as HELP volunteers, get to be a part of the full process. It would definitely be easier to have come as a volunteer with an organization that just sets up all of our projects for us, but this is teaching us so much more about humanitarian work! Anyway, things are coming along and partnerships are starting to fall into place.

This week we met with a partner named Margaret who runs an organization for disabled children here called Step by Step. She is a really amazing person and has such a neat plan for the children that attend her school! She plans to start a center where children can come to school and learn trades that they will then use to earn money for themselves. We also travelled to her school this week and got to help pump water for the garden, plant some trees, and play soccer with some of the kids. Oh my heck the kids there were so cute we all wanted to kidnap them! : )

We were also able to meet with a partner who runs a safe house for women and children called the Shalom Center this week. We talked with them about projects in first aid, women empowerment, maturation courses, and maybe even some business mentoring. On Saturday we had the chance to go visit and we taught a short lesson on hygiene with a group of kids there! It was super fun. I am excited to work with this organization because they seem really organized and know what they are doing. I am finding that that is hard to come by here. Haha…

Besides going to visit both those places this week and preparing our inside-out learning lessons I have one more exciting thing to announce!.....me and Heather wrote up a business proposal for Martha who is the founder of the Albino Peacemaker Group aaaaaaaaaaaaaand SHE LIKED OUR IDEA! I am more excited about this project right now than any other! What our idea is is an online jewelry business! Me and Heather will run the marketing, inventory, sales, accounting, and shipping back in the United States and they will make the jewelry! We felt like this was a good idea for this specific group because their skin is extremely sensitive to the sun and it would allow them to work inside. Because they are discriminated against they usually can only get the worst jobs available here, if they get a job at all, and those are always outside labor jobs. Also, sun screen is hard to come by here and it is really expensive so they really have no way to protect themselves. This is a really serious issue because they can get skin cancer from their sun exposure. Another reason we feel it would be good for the business to be online is that people here have stigmas against albinos and won’t make purchases from them, so they have a really hard time selling goods themselves. But if we handle sales in the states they won’t have to worry about that. Anyway, this project is going to be huge! We have so much to decide and design and it makes me so soso excited! That news basically made my week!

Ok those are my updates on projects for today! I also want to write about our cook’s birthday party we threw for her on Friday! So our cook’s name is Pendo and we all love her so much so on her birthday we took her and her family out to some new Mexican restaurant here. It was delish! After that we came back to our house and ate some gorilla poop cake (a.k.a. no bake cookies) and then had a dance party! We had a lot of fun! She is so sweet and was so excited to celebrate with us.

Funny story of the week this week is that we were in Arusha on Monday and we needed to catch a daladala to get back home. Well, when we mzungus (white people) are walking around town everyone surrounds and hassles us usually because they are trying to sell us something. So when we went to the bus stop where tons of daladalas wait to be filled we got totally surrounded and we were getting grabbed on and pulled because everyone wanted us to choose their daladala. I guess we took too long to decide because at one point a man bent over and picked Heather up and plopped her right in the front seat of an empty daladala! Ha haha! We were laughing sooooo hard, which probably wasn’t the best way to react since they are like two year olds and feed off of attention. Anyway, Chanel our director didn’t want to reward them for their inappropriate behavior, so we chose another daladala and hopped in. Well, I guess the owners of that one were so excited we picked them that they kissed Deseret and Emily on the cheek before they could get in!.....along with urgency, there is also no such thing as personal space here.

Alright, here are some more pics!

this is me, Heather J., Heather, and Emily hard at work in our living room. notice that we only have one light bulb lighting the whole room. ha...Africa makes me laugh. : )

this is our little neighborhood in Suye. the taller mountain is Mt. Meru! it finally decided to show itself!...for the first week we didn't even notice it was there because the clouds usually hide it cause it is so tall!

this is also in our neighborhood! it is sooo pretty! i love our walk from our house to the main road where we catch dala dalas. we always walk down this little dirt path and usually cross through cows, sheep, and goats.

 this little hop over the stream is also included in our walk to the main road from our house. this pic was taken a few weeks ago though and now there is another obstacle...cacti! someone stacked a toooon of it across all the paths crossing the stream! haha...it doesn't stop us though.

 this is our stupid pet spider above our kitchen. it doesn't look big in this pic but IT IS. chanel is enforcing "save the spiders" so we aren't allowed to kill it. she best be careful though cause me and heather are feeling pretty creeped out by it lately...

 

 

these are the puppies we rescued a few weeks ago! their names are rafiki, timon, and pumba! we also have two dogs that are named mufasa and simba. another puppy showed up in our yard last night randomly...and of course we had to keep her! we named her Nae Nae.

this is our favorite restaurant here!

this is the playground at Family & Friends and these are our friends John and Adelaida : )

Jessie, me, and Heather at churchie.

 

this is me using the contraption at the Step by Step school to pump water for the garden. i was leaning over like an idiot to get a better leg workout!

this is my dear friend Kate pumping water..."look! no hands!"

Jeff and Emily watering the garden.

me and Heather playing soccer with some of the kids at Step by Step.

 

me with Pendo and her kids on her birthday at the restaurant we took her to.

 me, Jessie, Heather, Kate, and Kylie at Pendo's party!

Jeff enjoying the poops we made him!

the gang with Pendo!  : )