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!
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