Pole!

6/30/09
Boo for being sick in Tanzania! Sorry I haven’t updated recently, but I got sick yesterday and stayed home from my placement today…just a head cold/fever but it still makes me so mad to be sick...don't worry mom both Matt and I are feeling better...no Malaria. Anyways, other than that, the last few days have been good. Saturday night a few of us went out to a mzungu bar called the Watering Hole and had a blast! The bartender is from Germany (Bonnie I totally couldn’t remember the name of the city Ruven is from!) and when we first got there we were the only ones in the bar so he let us play Michael Jackson music (since we were there for the “tribute” they’d had the night before, although we did partake the black/white shot-taking in his memory). Catherine and Lauren and I even got up on the bar since there was no one else there haha :-)

Then Sunday, about 7 of us went on a coffee hike at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We hiked for about 5 hours total and then we got to take part in the making of the regional coffee and try it….it was soooo good, even Matt and Stephen liked it! We also hiked to a giant waterfall. We didn’t get to try the banana beer famous to the region because we ran out of time…which was fine except the reason we ran out of time was because we had to keep waiting for the group from the other CCS house that came too. We learned that we are definitely the athletic house (I forget if I wrote in the first safari journal that a third house was there and it was full of weird hippies who said they weren’t “messing with nature” aka they were DRINKING the water and NOT taking their malaria pills….no wonder they spent the whole weekend in the bathroom). Needless to say, with each other house we meet we grow more and more grateful that we are all here!

Monday, I woke up feeling kid of yucky and spent most of my placement sneezing, but I was still able to help out the classroom. I felt a little better around lunch so I decided to keep my appointment to go back to Mama Sarah’s. Lauren, Catherine and I went to her place and took one of the members to get a haircut….after that we drove into town so we could by some medicine for her group that they’d been out of since last week. That took quite a bit of time so that ended our visit (which was good because I didn’t want to do home visits to sick people if I had a cold myself.

Today, I stayed home from placement and slept from early last night until noon today, waking up on a off since my nose was so stuffed. I feel a lot better now but nowhere near perfect. This afternoon we went to Amani Orphanage (Mom that’s the home for the Street Children group) and the boys and about 4 other volunteers played soccer with the kids. Another four of us watched and chatted with the kids. Our team did pretty well at first but definitely lost in the second half (keep in mind they were playing kids who were like 9-10). They have a really nice facility there and the boys are planning on going back at least one more afternoon this week…I want to also but they are going Thursday for sure and I am already committed to going to Mama Sarah’s which I also want to do….too much to do and too little days left :-( I still can’t believe we leave Saturday! Ok I think that’s caught up on everything….crossing my fingers that I’m all better tomorrow!

Amani,
Valerie