Camping in the middle of nowhere!

Our tent at camp.


The shower with solar bags. They get really hot, but don't hang high enough for the water to fall on my head so I usually just wash with a bucket of cold water! Refreshing, but hard to wash my hair.


The bathroom. Need I say more??


Our kitchen tent. We cook with small coal burners and have an oven made out of bricks and mud. It gets really hot!


The school as it looked when I arrived.


Two of the cutest kids ever: Selena and Veronica (pronounced Vero-neeka).


At the large outdoor market we went to. School kids gathered around to stare at us! In some places they had never seen a white person!


Kids crowding around us at the school we went to teach at. They just want to look and touch us because we are so different. It's really cute!


Kids watching our every move.


71 kids crammed into a tiny class to learn English from us. They start learning English in elementary school, and knew more English than we knew Swahili!

Village kids in Mghumbu looking at us when our land rover stopped.

Dancing and singing for me.

I would puff up my cheeks and make noise as I poked my fingers into each cheek, so whenever the kids saw me they would puff their cheeks up!

Veronica. Adorable.

Some kids and I in front of the school.

Greetings from Singida! A lot has happened since I last posted, so I will try to summarize it all. Last weekend Saturday, 6 of our original group of 15 (including myself) drove out to our camp, which is 1.5 hours from Singida. It is supposedly in the village of Mghumbu, which is a sub-village of Mampando. In Mampando there are 4 buildings...there's nothing in Mghumbu except our camp and a few random mud huts. It's great! Our camp is surrounded by a 9 foot tall fence made out of grass and branches. There is a little shower stall where we hang our solar shower bags (which get very hot, you actually have to mix cold water in), and a bathroom stall that is a hole in the ground. Once I learned how to not pee on myself, it took me a few days before I could go # 2! Cooking for ourselves has been grand, we've been eating like kings on veggies, rice, potatoes and bread. We have a large tent with 12 beds in it, and we've hung all our belongings in baskets from the tent poles as we have a pet rat. The school is already half finished; the walls are up and the roof is framed, so this past week we have been carrying dirt to level out the floors so they can be cemented. It is very slow-going as we can only fit 2 shovels-full of dirt onto one of the five dishes that we carry it in. We were quite shocked when after 2 hours of working on our first day the foreman told us we were finished for the day! Its too hot to work after lunch, and we were waiting for a lot of materials (namely cement and tin for the roof) so apparently he was trying to stretch out the work for us. We have had quite a few interesting afternoon adventures, including hikes to 2 large rocks that we climbed for amazing views. The sunsets here are amazing, and the stars at night are even better. One afternoon we walked to a big outdoor market, and another afternoon I went to a school where 2 guys from my group taught some English. It was crazy there. When they saw 6 wazungu walk up (white people) somebody hit a gong and the classrooms emptied. Hundreds of kids swarmed around us...it might be something like being famous! It was nuts! Over 70 kids crammed into a tiny classroom to learn some English. I love playing with the kids. There are always a bunch of them at the gate to our camp, so I go over and speak broken Swahili to them. I play with them using their little rag balls, or else the frisbees and soccer balls we brought. They sing a little song about Mampando, so I taught them to say Canada instead! The words are "Mampando safi, Mampando poa" which means Mampando is cool, Mampando is fresh! They are so cute when they say Canada, it sounds like 'ka-NA-duh'. The kids are soooooo cute, I love playing with them. Some really young kids are carrying their baby brother or sister around on their backs. They love petting my hair, especially after I took my cornrows out! I'd better post right away as the internet has been out for the last 20 minutes.